Prosper Marketplace Inc.

Prosper is an extremely disruptive social enterprise changing the face of personal finance and personal credit by slowly threatening the traditional unsecured loan business dominated monopolistically by large banks and credit card companies. By disintermediating the banks and credit card companies, akin to how Napster, eBay and even Google/Yahoo! disintermediated their respective industries, Prosper is able to offer better interest rates to borrowers. In addition, they are effectively creating a new asset class for individuals' investment portfolios. In other words, you can now invest in 'people bonds' and diversify your overall portfolio even more. From working within the company, I know how professional the team is and can say that this is the future of personal finance! Many of the team-members are former eBayers that rode the rise of that company and now are convinced that this is a bigger opportunity! Nonetheless, the founders are experienced and practical in that they understand that this will take a long time since the model's success is dependent on people like you and me feeling comfortable putting a big chunk of our savings into 'people bonds' instead of savings accounts. The bet is that if you can get higher returns from secure 'people bonds' than savings, money market or CDs, then why not? Trust takes a while to build. Otherwise, the company cares a lot about the American consumer and they want to bring down credit rates for the average american. This might sound obscure but from a social impact perspective, credit touches most americans in a profound way (as we have seen in the sub-prime crisis epidsode) and drive growth, jobs, consumption and prosperity. It's all about empowering the individual and sticking it to the banks!