A podcast by students of Stanford University's Business and Design Schools


FEATURED INTERVIEW

Tuesday, March 06, 2007

Chris Larsen, Prosper.com

Chris Larsen is the co-founder and CEO of Prosper.com, an online person-to-person lending marketplace that has excited quite a few in the world of finance, business, and technology, notably the New York Times, SF Chronicle, and Businessweek.





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Chris Larsen is the co-founder and CEO of Prosper.com, an online person-to-person lending marketplace that brings together traditionally inspired dynamics of lending between friends, family, and individuals, with the benefits and rigors of modern-day credit systems.

Prior to Prosper, Chris co-founded and served as Chairman and CEO of E-LOAN, which closed over $27 billion in consumer loans, and was consistently ranked as one of the nation's most trusted consumer brands. E-LOAN took radically pro-consumer actions such as being the first company to provide consumers with access to their credit scores, and played a critical role in the passage of the consumer financial privacy protection laws. Chris led E-LOAN through a successful IPO in 1999, and oversaw the company's acquisition by Puerto Rican bank Popular, Inc. in 2005.

In this podcast, Chris chats with Julio and Min Li about Prosper's innovative vision, its unique challenges as an eBay platform for money (check out Prosper's cool tools for academics and researchers for performing case studies on its model), and the fine balance between the countervailing forces of transparency and privacy in the world of Web 2.0.

Chris holds an M.B.A. degree from Stanford University and a B.S. degree from San Francisco State University, where he was named the 2004 Alumnus of the Year.

- Min Li

4 comments:

FirstChoiceGL said...

With the click of a mouse late Thursday night March 1, 2007, the leader of the Two Millionaires Group on Prosper.com admitted the 5,509th member and created the largest group on Prosper ever! The one remaining challenge at the time was to beat PsychDoc's record number of loans created....

Asked about how his group succeeded in growing so large so rapidly, "TwoMillionaires1" the group leader replied that he did a lot of internet marketing in the beginning to bring new members in, and it grew from there to the point where today word of mouth from contented borrowers brings in probably hundreds of new members each week.

"It didn't hurt either to have a private website that has attracted more than 300,000 hits and 12,000 unique visitors," the group leader added.

As of the date of this report, more than one and a half million dollars has been loaned to members of this popular people-to-people online borrowing and lending group, almost 400 individual loans.

Details are available at:


http://www.2mils.org

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this excellent interview of Chris Larsen.

Web 2.0 is all about putting the power in the hands of people, building Trust, offering Transparency and Privacy... This is a complex and exciting challenge for all the web 2.0 companies!

I have also commented your interview on my blog, Visible-Banking.com.

Again, well done.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the recommendation Min! I've added a link to the interview from the Prosper.com article on my blog.

THE DLK said...

I tryed to connect on your Prosper thing --- and found it (((for -me-personally))) it to be next to worthless...
But --for the record-- I HAVE NO CREDIT -no income- no real assets
-----JUST SCIENCE -BIOLOGICAL LIFE LINE TECHNOLOGICAL UNDERSTANDING- AND AN AUTOBIOGRAPHIC ACCOUNT THAT WILL CHANGE THE WORLD!
::The DLK~
{ http://dlknews.blogspot.com/ }