Podcast 06: A Chat with Reflective-Rupee – One of Prosper’s Largest Individual Investors

Before February 2013 Prosper included screen names for investors and third party sites like Prosper-Stats and Lendstats provided information about those investors. Since 2009 the name Reflective-Rupee was always near the top of the list of largest investors. And when I started investing in Prosper in 2010 he was always the #1 largest investor.

I have always wanted to meet the person or organization behind the screen name so I was delighted when late last year the person we have known as Reflective-Rupee reached out to me. After a few back and forth emails he agreed to come on the podcast and go public with his investment strategy for the first time.

In this podcast you will learn all about this large Prosper investor:

  • How and why he decided to enter the p2p lending space.
  • How his initial interest in Prosper led to a kind of obsession.
  • The big difference between Prosper 1.0 and Prosper 2.0.
  • Why he chose Prosper over Lending Club.
  • Why his statistics on Lendstats and Prosper-Stats are wrong.
  • His internal rate of return since he started investing.
  • Why he has moved his focus to the Prosper secondary market.
  • The two pieces of information that make the secondary market attractive.
  • How he is able to achieve large scale for investing on Prosper’s secondary market.
  • The risk to buying a note at a premium on the secondary market.
  • How he invested on the primary market.
  • His actual strategy for investing in the secondary market.

The Man Behind Reflective-Rupee

Brett Byers, age 50, lives in the San Francisco area. He is a professional investor with over a decade of experience leading the venture capital activities of an institutional investment firm, VCFA Group. He formerly served, primarily in the information technology industry, as a senior executive, corporate attorney, and engineer. Brett holds a J.D. from Yale Law School and a B.S. in electrical engineering from Cornell University.

Since retiring from VCFA Group, Brett has focused on his personal investing (both venture capital equity investments and peer-to-peer lending), his family, and saving rainforest, via which he in primarily focused on prevention of the massive releases of CO2 from destruction of rainforest. During the past year, he has personally financed projects to save over 1,000,000 acres of tropical rainforest, and has joined the board of the Rainforest Trust. He encourages others to save acres of rainforest (and prevent emissions of 1000 tons of CO2) by donating the cost of a cup of coffee here:  https://www.rainforesttrust.org/acres-for-50cents/.

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  • Peter Renton

    Peter Renton is the chairman and co-founder of Fintech Nexus, the world’s largest digital media company focused on fintech. Peter has been writing about fintech since 2010 and he is the author and creator of the Fintech One-on-One Podcast, the first and longest-running fintech interview series.