LoanStreet (NY) - Cheated me out of equity compensation. Exploitative, fraudulent dumpster fire. Positive reviews are coerced or fake | Glassdoor
TLDR: Stay far, far away unless you're truly desperate. LoanStreet is a raging dumpster fire and you will get burned like many before. After 15 months of praising my work - and as COVID froze the hiring markets in 2020 - they abruptly fired me and withheld $100k in options that they promised me before I was hired. The annualized turnover rate in the small NYC office during my time there was around 50%. Every two months or so, someone was fired who said they weren’t given any warning and the company would tell the same story that this person was given many warnings and opportunities to respond to feedback. I saw a lot of good workers blindsided, some leaving in tears. I thought it was fishy and eventually it happened to me, despite always having received glowing praise from leadership. Any promises made to you to entice you to sign an offer should be regarded with extreme skepticism. Get everything in writing and reviewed by a good lawyer. After hiring employees with a promise of unlimited PTO, management rolled out a PTO tracking tool that explicitly capped PTO at 15 days per year. Before I joined, Cofounder/COO Christopher Wu told me that the first quarter of my stock options would vest after a year. My offer letter said details on the equity compensation would be provided in a separate equity agreement. I wasn't provided that agreement for nearly a year after my start date, and you can imagine my surprise when I saw that I wouldn't begin to vest until nearly 16 months of employment. After 15 months of work, I was abruptly fired and didn't receive a single option. CEO and Cofounder Ian Lampl refused to discuss the matter. He just pocketed the options he promised me. Based on Lampl's valuation goal for the company, he defrauded me out of over $100k. Because the offer letter omitted the details of the equity compensation, labor lawyers told me I had no case. Keep in mind, LoanStreet is run by lawyers who used to worth at Cravath, a very prestigious and lucrative NYC law firm. I suspect they knew exactly what they were doing when they wrote the offer letter. If it was just a good-faith mistake, they could have done the right thing and granted me the options I earned. They chose not to. Ian Lampl is the lowest type of man: one whose word means nothing. He is a rich con man. His bland, polite, and nerdy demeanor is affected to disarm and distract you while he has his hands down your pockets. Placing my trust in LoanStreet was a costly mistake. If you're reading this, please don’t be fooled by the Series B funding or the impressive pedigrees of the leaders; this place is a fraudulent, exploitative mess and you have a good chance of being fired within a year. CEO Ian Lampl is the ringleader of this racket, but Cofounder/COO Christopher Wu, CTO Larry Adams and the rest of leadership are his spineless sycophants. They either agree with Lampl's despicable abuses of his employees or are too cowardly to stand up for what's right. This group will twist employees’ arms to post positive reviews after they see this one, just like they have in the past, but this review is the real story and just the tip of the iceberg, given LoanStreet's practice of paying fired employees to sign permanent non-disparagement agreements. You deserve to be treated with dignity. Work elsewhere.
To me, LoanStreet stands out for being full of talented team members, with each bringing their own mix of technical/design expertise, lending expertise and sales/relationship management expertise or other specialties. I find the culture to be both mature and collegial and it is refreshing to see a diverse mix of people at different stages in their own respective careers. While there is structure, I’ve also found there is plenty of opportunity to contribute beyond one's mandated role-responsibilities. The Spring 2020 PPP Product Launch is a particularly good example of an undertaking that involved nearly all the talent pools in the company coming together quickly to not only engineer a great product, but also successfully sell the product to lenders and which had a meaningful high-profile impact on the communities LoanStreet's clients (banks and credit unions) serve by preserving the paychecks of thousands of small business employees.
