Ramtin Naimi

And this is in mid-2014 when marketplace lending was a popular sector.

think companies like Lending Club and Prosper.

And I thought that sector was going to be the next big thing.

The rate of capital going into it, the rate of growth of those companies.

And I thought that if that sector would reach its full potential, there would need to be a liquid secondary market for it because those loans did have maturity periods.

And those maturity periods scaled anywhere from three years to five years to seven years.

And

Banks trade debt like a liquid asset class all the time.

So why wouldn't the individuals trading on these platforms be able to have the same access to liquidity?

So I wanted to build an exchange that allowed debt investors to have that same level of liquidity.

I self-funded this company with everything I made previously.

And I built out a team and went to the regulatory framework of setting up an exchange.

And then 14 months in, when I had a product that I was actually ready to raise external financing for,

that sector had completely collapsed.

I think Sequoia started writing Prosper down to zero and LendingClub plummeted like 85% from its peak IPO price.

And I had spent my entire net worth building a supplemental product to a collapsed industry.

Pretty much everything I made on my hedge fund, I lost on that company and ended up in debt.

And that was kind of my first reality check in life when I realized, no, no, I'm actually not a genius and I could lose money and maybe I should have just gone to college.

Well, I didn't put myself through all of this.

But thankfully,