Hey friends,
We're back with a new episode of Fintech OGs Season 4, and this one is for anyone who's been in or adjacent to lending long enough to remember when "borrowing money online" sounded sketchy.
My co-host Lauren Crossett of Spade and I were joined by two founders who've each spent over a decade navigating the lending space from very different angles: Ian Lampl, Co-Founder & CEO of Loan Street, and Mike Taormina, Co-Founder & CEO of Vault. They met at a CommonBond happy hour circa 2013 (held in the apartment Mike and his co-founders were also living in) and have been each other's sounding boards ever since.
We talked about surviving the LendingClub hype cycle, what COVID actually did to a refinancing company, AI skepticism from someone who isn't a crypto maximalist, and why Mike is betting his next company on crypto-backed consumer loans.
🎧 Listen here: [LINK]
🎧 Episode Summary: Lending, Luck & Not Chasing the Hot Thing
[00:00 – 07:30] Intros & How They Met
Ian and Mike introduce themselves and trace their connection back to a CommonBond happy hour held in the office apartment Mike shared with his co-founders. Ian, who came up through TARP at the US Treasury before founding Loan Street in 2013, describes himself as the "nerdy guy at the cool kids' party." Mike walks through his journey from CommonBond (student lending, $5.5B+ originated) to crypto infrastructure (Alluvial/Liquid Collective) to his current venture, Vault, which lets borrowers use digital assets as collateral for everyday consumer loans.
[07:30 – 14:00] Running Against the Grain
Ian reflects on over a decade of being told his thesis was wrong. When he started Loan Street, everyone said credit unions were dinosaurs and Lending Club was the future. Then it was crypto eating everything. Now it's AI. His takeaway: the companies that chase each hot wave often disappear, while the ones doing slower, harder enterprise work tend to endure. He and Mike bond over the experience of having to spend half their pitch decks explaining what they weren't.
[14:00 – 21:00] The Lowest Moments
Ian shares the story of two major deals (a large strategic partner and a flagship credit union) that collapsed on the same day after an entire quarter of work. Both said they'd just build it themselves. That night, at 11pm, a trade association email arrived saying Loan Street had been selected for a best-ideas competition. "It felt like a sign from God." Mike talks about CommonBond's early capital chase, raising $100M, then finding a single pricing tweak that opened the floodgates and what it was like watching zero interest rate policy slowly end the business he'd spent a decade building.
[21:00 – 29:00] What COVID Actually Did to Fintech
COVID shows up twice in this conversation, and for different reasons. For Mike, it was the external shock that no one could have predicted. Federal student loan forbearance made refinancing irrelevant and eventually broke CommonBond's core market. For Ian, the silver lining was that it forced financial institutions to finally embrace cloud and digital-first operations. Five years of digital transformation happened in about 18 months out of necessity.
[29:00 – 37:30] AI: One Believer, One Skeptic
Ian offers a measured take: AI is genuinely useful, his team uses it, and he expects to ship client-facing features powered by it. But he's skeptical of the infinite-improvement narrative, drawing a parallel to Moore's Law, doubling compute required doubling spend, and there's a ceiling on how long that holds. He also flags a critical limitation for enterprise financial software: clients have zero tolerance for probabilistic outcomes on things that simply have to be correct. Mike counters with a hands-on example: he described a complex Excel model to Claude in plain language, and the resulting Python script nailed his seven-year ending balance to the penny at 18 kilobytes. His view — AI is the best chief of staff an early-stage founder has ever had.
[37:30 – End] What's Next
Mike is all-in on Vault's thesis: that lenders have always ignored asset value because pledging traditional assets is too slow. Crypto changes that. A borrower can pledge digital assets to a qualified custodian in minutes and get a better rate on a personal or student loan. Ian closes with a genuine about-face: the guy who started out defending depositories ends on a note about how healthy the fragmentation of the lending ecosystem has become. More types of lenders, more types of capital, more access. He calls it a source of strength for the US economy, and for companies like Loan Street that help lenders manage and diversify capital.
Let's dive in!
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Episode Summary: Disputes, Compliance & the Founder's Emotional Range
