“He has an opportunity to start Lending Club 2.0, and we are excited to be a part of it,” said
Mr. Buttrick, who previously worked with Mr. Laplanche as a board observer at Lending Club.
John Buttrick, a partner at Union Square Ventures, said in an interview this week
that before making the new investment he had taken a thorough look at the circumstances behind Mr. Laplanche’s resignation from Lending Club and had not found anything that gave him pause about backing Mr. Laplanche again.
The Lending Club board also said that Mr. Laplanche had not properly disclosed personal
investments he had made in an outside fund that purchased Lending Club loans.
Mr. Laplanche, in his first interview since leaving Lending Club, said
that his sudden ouster had been “incredibly frustrating and disappointing” but that he had taken it as an opportunity to confront some of the problems he was unable to fix at Lending Club.
Mr. Laplanche, a French-born entrepreneur, co-founded Lending Club in 2006, creating
not only a new company but also a new model for borrowing money online.
Even before Mr. Laplanche’s departure from Lending Club, there were questions about whether the fast-growing industry could continue to attract the money it needed from investors to finance all of its new loans, a problem
that all such start-ups have because they do not have bank deposits to fund their lending.