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Lord of the Wind: Renaud Laplanche Sails Full Speed Ahead for Another Record

This article is more than 8 years old.

This story appears in the June 28, 2015 issue of ForbesLife. Subscribe

Lack of visibility is often the enemy of a CEO. But Renaud Laplanche, the founder and chief executive of Lending Club, embraces the challenge with gusto. 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.

The little moonlight that had helped Laplanche and his international crew of eight navigate following their 1:30 a.m. departure was gone, hidden behind a layer of clouds. All they could see of the chilly Atlantic waters were the crests of the waves just as they were about to slam into Laplanche's state-of-the-art boat, soaking everyone on board with predictable frequency.

"It's very scary when you don't get the moonlight," he says. Under those conditions, the boat's instruments help with overall navigation, but for minute-to-minute decisions sailors rely on experience and their own bodies. "You drive based on the balance of the boat," Laplanche explains. That's not easy, especially when you are literally flying above the water at 40 knots--slightly slower than the top speeds achieved by the much-lighter America's Cup racing boats--with only part of the daggerboard submerged. "The sensations are different at night," he adds. "You feel like you are going even faster. It's really exhilarating."

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. The company, which allows individuals and institutions to make loans to individuals while bypassing banks, has moved swiftly, becoming the leader in the so-called peer-to-peer lending market. By all accounts, Laplanche, who at 44 is soft-spoken and unfailingly polite, has been a deft navigator.

But nothing quite matches his passion for sailing, which he developed at an early age. 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. But looking back, Laplanche has no regrets. It's not hard to see why. The course he charted has certainly had its share of thrills. 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 . Shortly after, Laplanche moved to Silicon Valley to work for Oracle but quit a year later, planning to take a sabbatical. Instead, he started Lending Club. The idea for it came in part from the 18% interest rate on his credit card, which he had used early on to purchase equipment for TripleHop. It felt exorbitant, especially compared with the 1% or so banks were willing to pay for CDs. By cutting out the banks and connecting borrowers directly with lenders, Lending Club could bridge that gap, he thought, and offer far better rates for borrowers and far better returns for lenders. Win-win.

As he expanded Lending Club into a financial technology powerhouse, Laplanche began sailing again, taking his family on trips around the San Francisco Bay. It was mostly for pleasure until 2013, when Lending Club had the opportunity to sponsor a 73-foot trimaran that was racing in the Transpacific Race. First held in 1906, the Los Angeles-to-Honolulu Transpac, as it is often called, is one of the oldest and longest ocean races. Unlike other moguls who simply bankroll racing yachts, Laplanche had sailing chops to offer, so he joined the crew for the race.

The team won , but light winds kept it from beating the course record by about 2 hours and 30 minutes. During the race, Laplanche befriended a fellow crew member, Ryan Breymaier, an experienced ocean sailor who holds the World Sailing Speed record from New York to San Francisco (via Cape Horn).

After the Transpac, the two began plotting their next adventure. Laplanche spotted an opportunity when he heard that a French corporation was in talks to purchase a bigger trimaran from a French bank, but the two sides couldn't agree on price. Laplanche stepped in, offering to make up the difference himself in exchange for the right to use it for a season. While the boat bears the company's name, he bankrolls it personally--though he declines to say how much it costs him.

Lending Club 2 is a technological marvel built for serious speed: 105 feet in length and 73 feet across, with a 134-foot mast that supports a mainsail measuring 828 square meters and weighing 880 pounds. By comparison, the jib weighs about a quarter as much but still requires plenty of human power to deploy and trim. Sensors monitor the tension on the shrouds (the cables that support the mast), while others measure the wind's speed and direction at the top of the mast. A satellite-based Internet connection provides real-time weather data; onboard computers collect and analyze all information and make it available to the crew on a series of electronic displays throughout the boat.

On a recent sail in New York Harbor, the technology seemed like a bit of overkill. But as a few guests mingled onboard, the crew remained focused. Steering Lending Club 2 requires most hands on deck, even in ideal conditions. On the orders of a sailor ("Five, four, three, two, one, go!"), four crew members furiously worked the grinders--two giant winches that control the tension on sheets that deploy the sails. With Breymaier at the helm, the jib rolled in, then back out, as Lending Club 2 changed course. Despite the relatively light winds, within seconds the boat was flying past the Statue of Liberty straight to the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. As it picked up speed, topping 15 knots, then 20 and even 25, Laplanche beamed.

Most of his voyages are not this relaxed. On April 1, while Silicon Valley was consumed--as it is every year--with practical jokes, Laplanche, Breymaier and the crew set off into the English Channel from Cowes, on the Isle of Wight off southern England. They arrived at Dinard in Brittany--after a course of 138 nautical miles--in 5 hours and 15 minutes, setting a new world record.

Three weeks later, the group set off on a new record-breaking quest on the longer and more challenging Newport-to-Bermuda course. Partway through the crossing, as they entered the Gulf Stream, which is about 30 miles wide in that section, the current was flowing in the opposite direction to the waves. As the temperature rose by some 15 degrees in minutes, so did the waves--from about 3 feet to 12 feet.

"It changes everything about the behavior of the boat," Laplanche notes. It didn't take much consultation with Breymaier. The two looked at each other and ordered the crew to trim the mainsail. "It was obvious we had to reduce the velocity," Laplanche recalls. Lending Club 2 may have had to slow down, but not by much--the boat managed to shatter the previous world record, which had been held for the past 15 years by the late adventurer Steve Fossett. Completing the crossing at an average speed of 27 knots in 23 hours, 9 minutes and 52 seconds, Laplanche's crew shaved a staggering 15 hours off the previous fastest time.

Comparisons between what it takes to win at sports and business--grit, leadership, teamwork--are legend and more than a little shopworn. Laplanche says the similarities are real, but they occur mostly off the waters. Winning a race or breaking a record requires innovation, planning, strategy and the use of data to make decisions. He's drawn to those challenges as much as he is to the sense of adventure. When he and Breymaier began sailing Lending Club 2, the first order of business was to modify the boat to make it faster. They ran computer simulations to understand fluid dynamics as they redesigned the foils on the trimaran's floats. The goal was to lift the boat farther off the water at high speeds to minimize friction. And before setting a course, the team analyzed massive amounts of data from weather reports and sensors on buoys to home in on the optimal start time. "In record attempts, you are trying to push into an area where nobody has been before," Laplanche says. "That's the very definition of innovation."

Now Laplanche plans to put the same focus and dedication toward shattering one more record--the one that got away from his team two years ago on the Transpac. This summer, Breymaier and crew will be sailing Lending Club 2 through the Panama Canal to the West Coast, in time for the race's July 18 start. Laplanche is confident he has the fastest boat and will win the race, but whether they break the current record--5 days, 9 hours, 18 minutes and 26 seconds--depends, to a large extent, on the elements.

The effort will surely involve roughing it, which the always dapper Laplanche admits is not his favorite part of the experience. The tiny cabin in Lending Club 2 is a spartan affair, with four hanging bunks, a couple of hot plates to warm up food and a head that's not much more than a bucket in a crawl space deep inside the hull . But Laplanche says comfort is a relative thing. "When you are out during the night with the breeze and the waves crashing down on your face, it's really cold and you are entirely wet," he says. "The inside of the boat feels very warm, and it's an amazing satisfaction to lie down."

Record or not, Laplanche is already thinking about the post-Transpac, after his crew delivers Lending Club 2 to its new owners in Brittany. "We are playing with some ideas for a new boat," he says coyly. To lease? "To build."