Social lending is getting increasingly mainstream media coverage. As Rate Ladder reported yesterday, peer to peer lending received prominent placement in Forbes Magazine and CNBC over the last few days.

Our CEO, Renaud Laplanche, was interviewed on CNBC’s Power Lunch program earlier this week to explain how social lending is helping people across America lend and borrow money at better rates.

A week earlier, CNBC’s The Big Idea with Donny Deutsch had a segment that highlighted person-to-person lending as a great financing alternative. You can read about that segment on The Big Idea Blog to get their take on social lending, and on Lending Club in particular.

To round up the week, we were pleasantly surprised to find that Lending Club was mentioned in the cover story of last week’s issue of BusinessWeek.

Social lending is rapidly gaining mainstream adoption, and this is excellent news for the Lending Club community.

Better Rates. Together.

We are pleased that we have recently earned the Better Business Bureau’s designation as a Reliable Online Business, certifying that Lending Club meets the BBB’s high standards for ethical online business practices.

We are committed to providing a safe and transparent platform where you can conduct business as borrowers and lenders. As a proud Reliable Business, Lending Club abides by the BBB Code of Online Business Practices and is dedicated to the principles of sound online advertising and selling practices that are exemplified by participants in this distinguished program. These principles include a strong commitment to truthful and accurate communications, full disclosure about Lending Club transactions, stringent privacy and security practices to safeguard personally identifiable information, and excellent customer service.

For more information, we encourage you to read about these principles in greater detail on the BBB website.

Better Business. Together.

This Thanksgiving weekend, we at Lending Club have many blessings to count. Like you, we are thankful for wonderful friends and families, good health, and good prospects for the New Year.

We are privileged to have an active and enthusiastic customer base, including talented lenders who funded $2.6M in loans while making a 12.26% net return (after losses and fees) for themselves, to the benefit of very responsible borrowers who are continuing to build up an outstanding track record of on-time payments. We are grateful for the warm reception we’ve received from the media and especially the blogosphere. Of course, we also appreciate the many Facebook members who embraced us from day one and helped us to get where we are now.

We are particularly thankful for our friends and family members, who haven’t seen much of us over the past six months. Finally, we are grateful for each other. Lending Club has become its own family, and we are so fortunate to have found each other.

From all of us to all of you, we hope you had a very Happy Thanksgiving!

Better Turkey Sandwiches. Together.

This week saw the fourth edition of Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. What is Web 2.0 and why should you care about it? The answer will depend to a certain extent on where you live, where you work, and whether or not you have teenagers and young adults in your midst.

Wikipedia, itself a quintessential Web 2.0 organization, defines it as “a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which aim to facilitate collaboration and sharing between users.” Wikipedia further characterizes Web 2.0 as the utilization of blogs, social bookmarking, podcasts, RSS feeds, social software, web application programming interfaces (APIs), and online web services to improve upon the more static, plain vanilla websites. Not to worry, though – if these terms are foreign to you (other than the notion of a blog, of course), you’re in luck – Wikipedia has great definitions of them all. The simple notion of “Three C’s of the Internet” (Content, Commerce and Community) is so last century.

Some of these concepts have arguably been around for years, but many of them are undergoing a reboot into new and exciting directions. In the past, around the age of “sneaker-net,” many of you used shared network drives and, later, intranets, to distribute and organize information. We at Lending Club rely heavily on our wiki and Google Docs to track and collaborate on projects, and we use Skype to chat among ourselves. Our executives are not only quoted in print but are also featured in podcasts.

Beyond that, Web 2.0 is also shaping business models, including that of Lending Club. In a recent Forbes article , our CEO recalls how Lending Club launched as a widget on Facebook. Like other Web 2.0 companies, most of Lending Club’s “content” (loan listings) is user-generated. And LendingMatch™, the matching engine on Lending Club, works a bit like Amazon’s book recommendation service to point lenders to the best loans matching their interests and preferences. In fact, our CTO Joaquin Delgado is a guest speaker at Recommender System 2007 in Minneapolis this weekend.

But you can also think of Web 2.0 as a mindset or lifestyle of sorts, particularly if you live in high-tech and startup centers such as the Bay Area, the Baltimore-Washington technology corridor, and Austin, Texas. These techie gadgets will permeate almost every aspect of life if you let them. When we celebrated Lending Club’s public launch, pictures of our sailing trip were posted on community photo-sharing sites within a few hours. We updated our friends on Facebook, and we wrote about our adventure here on this blog post to include you, our loyal readers, in the fun.

It’s never too late to get started, but beware: Web 3.0 is coming.

Something amazing happened last weekend: we were very fortunate to be featured in Barron’s only 2 weeks after our public launch beyond Facebook, and as a result saw more lenders signing up over that weekend than in the 2 weeks before! The Barron’s article came shortly after the Reuters piece last week, which also contributed to bringing more lenders.

Positive reviews from reputable newspapers, magazines and press agencies are nice to have. Not only did we all send the articles to our moms, but the funds that have been added by the new lenders since the Barron’s article will also help close many loans, help more borrowers achieve their financial goals and continue building the Lending Club community. Positive press contributes to establishing person-to-person lending as an alternative, more responsible way to borrow money at better rates.

We all worked hard over the last few weeks, so we thought it was time to pause and take the time to celebrate. With Renaud Laplanche and John Donovan both being avid sailors, we could think of no better way to celebrate than to take to the seas (or the Bay in our case) aboard a beautiful catamaran for a sailing adventure with our new friends at Adventure Cat.

We went in and spent several glorious hours touring San Francisco’s wondrous scenery, including Sausalito and Alcatraz Island, with an amazing ride under the Golden Gate Bridge. With San Francisco’s trademark fog and a few friendly sea lions greeting us along our journey, we were treated to a spectacular day of sailing. Only Rex Dixon, our Director of Social Media Content, who lives in St. Louis, and Peter Petras, our VP of Business Development, who was busy closing deals in Boston, were missing.

As “off-site company meetings” go, we certainly have no complaints!

(Click Image to Enlarge)

See more pictures of our sailing adventure.

Better Sailing. Together.