88: Lendio CEO Brock Blake - saving the American dream

Lendio is a marketplace that simplifies the process for small businesses to get loans. By Q1 of 2020, they were growing 100% Y-o-Y and had hit their monthly goals 24 consecutive times. When COVID hit, every lender on their platform stopped lending and they went from nearly $100 million in monthly loan volume to 0 overnight.    Rather than pullback, Brock Blake (CEO and co-founder of Lendio) used the opportunity to double down in a big way, hire 250 new people, and re-orient the entire company around PPP loans.    As a result, they helped 100,000+ businesses secure close to $10 billion of loans and saved 1.5 million jobs in 6 weeks. Brock joined Scott Britton and I on Built By Humans to chat about taking big bets, how to keep a team afloat under extreme pressure, and Lendio’s push to add a SaaS business onto their marketplace. Here are some key takeaways:   Never underestimate a group of individuals that rally around a big mission. It is so critical to have clarity of message and vision. If people feel a lack of clarity or transparency, like when there starts to be doubt about where the company is headed and the message…… that is really the most damaging thing that can happen to the company.  The most successful companies have this combination of marketplace + SaaS + data. Moving from a single to a multi-product strategy is tricky. It’s tough to have all this energy and growth in your core business but then also look at a longer-term opportunity and invest in it properly.   Leaders should re-assess their org’s design as revenue scales up from 0 to 1, 1 to 10, and then 10 to 100 million.