Everyone has heard of LendingTree but I don't think many people know the full story of LendingTree and its founder, Doug Lebda, one of the best fintech founders ever.

I've met Doug a couple of times and his story is wild:

In the mid 90's Doug was trying to get a mortgage to buy a home but was frustrated with the lack of transparency.

This was back before everything was online and you were stuck having to physically call banks to uncover the real prices.

So in 1996 he dropped out of business school and started working on the first version of LendingTree, a mortgage comparison site.

His goal was that a shopper would never again have to call a bunch of lenders to get mortgage rates. Instead, just go online and find the best one.

He gave himself a year to figure it out and if it didn't work he would go back to business school.

Little did he know he wasn't the only one wanting transparent mortgage comparisons.

Doug and his co-founder each put in $2,500 and raised another $20k from friends and family. They started as Credit Source USA but as the company gained traction they rebranded to LendingTree a couple of years later.

Doug also moved to Charlotte (where the company HQ is today!)

In Feb 2000, LendingTree went public.. less than a month before the dot com bubble burst.

At the time they had a market cap of $44m.

The stock popped 164% on day 1, but would later fall 75% from all time highs and eventually trade under the initial stock price.

And the next 2 years, from 2000-2002, were rocky. In interviews, Doug talks about how close they were to going under.

Things started to turn around and in 2003 LendingTree was responsible for ~.7% of mortgages originated in the US ($22b).

Doug and team had survived the dot com bubble and later that year, IAC acquired LendingTree for $734m in stock.

In 2008, IAC spun out a handful of companies, Tree being included in that.

Doug came back to LendingTree to take the company independent again as the CEO and $TREE started trading publicly.

The same year as the real estate crash.

Throughout the next 7 years, Tree's stock would mostly stay flat.

In 2012, coming out of the recession, the stock would finally start to climb.

Finally in 2016, the company hit their stride and started to really see some traction. The stock shot up from $43 to $110.

Since then, LendingTree has aggressively scaled into more financial products beyond mortgage - credit cards, student loans, personal loans, and savings accounts.

They have an amazing m&a team which acquires the leading content sites and unifies them all under 1 brand.

LendingTree’s also launched a free credit score tool to compete with Credit Karma, which has now soared past 10m registered users and isn’t talked about that much.

They're one of the most under hyped, powerhouse teams in the industry.

Today, LendingTree is a $25b company, and one of the largest consumer fintech companies in the world.

Doug is still the CEO :)