SoFi (Social Finance) work culture
Anyone here from SoFi? Any comments on work culture / politics etc after new CEO came in? Is the company doing well financially? Thank you.
Thank you GS guy. I agree the inherent biz model for non-bank lending is a bit shaky but SoFi is diversifying beyond lending. Anyone here from SoFi looking to share perspectives?
It's been over a year since Noto took over and the culture still feels like it needs work.
Definitely made strides in the last year, definitely have a long way to go in some areas. Compared to working at a normal bank you’ll either think things are pure chaos or you’ll finally feel like the chains are off. Lots of work to be done, fairly easy to find areas of ownership in product and do some meaningful work. But we’re still a young company that scaled way too quickly, so there’s some occasional yak shaving when trying to do something.
Any word on the office in Delaware?
It's not really a long term profitable business, they pretty much just try to undercut other lenders by some small amount. They've gotten so much equity funding that the founder has been diluted down to close to nothing already. Just steer clear of consumer finance overall I would say. Look at how Lending club, Ondeck, etc stock are doing, the market is realizing lending companies are inherently not able to extract very much economic profit. It's extremely capital intensive so without a cheap source of funding like banks that take deposits, it's hard to make much money.
Currently working at SoFi, so weight this accordingly. But if any nonbank lender has proved it can scale its SoFi, we have cheap capital and are one of the biggest asset backed securities providers in the country. Plus the goal isn’t to to stay a nonbank lender, that’s why we’ve launched deposit products. We definitely have a lot of work to do. But this is a naive opinion on the company, strategy and frankly consumer lending overall.
I worked at an unnamed SoFi competitor and yes I know SoFi has room to be profitable and grow. However the space is non-differentiated and competitive, so you're not going to get much excess return. Maybe I care too much about money, but I'm not happy to just get a so-so market rate paycheck and poor upside. It doesn't matter if any of these startup lending companies can eventually get banking licenses, the profitability still isn't there even if they can drop funding cost all the way down.