"In the wee hours of April 19, Laplanche was skippering Lending Club 2, his 105-foot maxi-trimaran, on a 635-nautical-mile journey from Newport, Rhode Island, to Bermuda. The goal: to break the speed record for one of ocean sailing’s marquee courses...
It’s also quite a change from Laplanche’s day job running Lending Club, which he founded in 2006 and took public in December in the largest Internet IPO of 2014...
Laplanche grew up in Hyères, a small French town halfway between Marseille and Nice that’s known as a sailing destination. He began the sport when he was 7. By age 12, he began sailing on an Optimist. His parents sent him to a special school where he attended classes three days a week and sailed the other four. By age 15, he began racing, and three years later he won his first national competition. Two years after that, once Laplanche had won a second French national title, he faced a decision: to train for a spot in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona or go to law school.
“I chose law school,” he says with a smile... {ouch, -1}*
Laplanche attended law school in Montpellier and two elite business schools, in Paris and London, before landing a job at the U.S. law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton, in its Paris office, where he specialized in mergers and acquisitions and securities. In the late 1990s, with the dot-com boom in full swing, the firm sent him to New York. Like many others at the time, Laplanche caught the entrepreneurial bug. He founded a software company called TripleHop Technologies, which Oracle acquired in 2005. {quitting law to start a company +4}
Shortly after, Laplanche moved to Silicon Valley to work for Oracle but quit a year later {I worked at Oracle, it was evil +3}, planning to take a sabbatical. Instead, he started Lending Club." {would rather start a company than lie on a beach +5}
Source: Forbes 16jun15
* {my comments}
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