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// STARTUP COMPARISON

Increase (Argentina) vs LendingClub (2016 crisis)

Increase (Argentina) failed in 2022 due to Founder Chaos. LendingClub (2016 crisis) failed in 2016 due to Founder Chaos. Both failed for the same reason — Founder Chaos.

METRIC🔥 Increase (Argentina)🔥 LendingClub (2016 crisis)
SectorFintechFintech
CountryArgentinaUSA
Founded20152006
Died20222016
Raised$20M$1.3B
Peak$20M raised$9B valuation
Primary CauseFounder ChaosFounder Chaos

// WHY EACH FAILED

🔥 Increase (Argentina)
Founder Chaos
Increase built a payment reconciliation platform for Argentine businesses processing card payments. After raising $20M and growing to 3,000 business customers, a co-founder dispute over strategy and equity split emerged in 2022. The conflict became irreconcilable, leading to the departure of key technical co-founders and a significant loss of product development capacity. The company never recovered its pre-conflict velocity.
// LESSON
Co-founder agreements must specify conflict resolution mechanisms before the conflict exists. By the time a co-founder dispute is irreconcilable, the damage to the team and product is already done.
🔥 LendingClub (2016 crisis)
Founder Chaos
LendingClub CEO Renaud Laplanche resigned in May 2016 after an internal review found that $22M in loans had been sold to an investor with falsified application dates, and that Laplanche had failed to disclose a personal conflict of interest. The stock fell 50% in a single day. LendingClub survived but spent years rebuilding institutional trust.
// LESSON
For marketplace lenders, loan data integrity is the product. Falsifying origination dates is not a compliance technicality — it invalidates every institutional investor's credit risk model and destroys the trust that marketplace lending is built on.

// IN THE SIMULATION

Increase triggers COFOUNDERS_DISPUTE — the simulation models co-founder exits as the second most common cause of Series A-stage company failure after unit economics. When technical co-founders leave, product velocity drops 60%+ and team morale collapses.

LendingClub triggers FINTECH_FOUNDER_DATA_MANIPULATION — the simulation models loan data integrity as a hard constraint for marketplace lenders. When origination data is falsified, every institutional investor's credit model becomes invalid simultaneously.

// EXPLORE FURTHER

Full Increase (Argentina) autopsy →Full LendingClub (2016 crisis) autopsy →More Founder Chaos failures →All Fintech autopsies →