Lewisburg Native, LendingTree CEO Discusses His Best, Worst Personal Investments

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Lending Tree CEO Dave Lebda (Image via Wall Street Journal)

LendingTree CEO Doug Lebda, who grew up in Lewisburg and graduated from Bucknell, realized early there were better ways to make money than scooping ice cream for minimum wage, writes Chris Kornelis for The Wall Street Journal.

As a teenager, he had several jobs, including mowing lawns and diving for golf balls, but had already set his sights on Wall Street.

“I didn’t know why, but it had an appeal to me,” said Lebda.

He launched LendingTree in 1996, taking it public seven years later. Today, he is CEO of a company worth around $3 billion.

Over the years, he has made both good and bad personal investments. One was investing around $750,000 with his father in a single-family home in North Carolina’s Outer Banks. After turning it into a rental, they sold it for close to $1 million.

“It was right before the crash,” said Lebda. “My dad kind of sniffed it.”

His worst decision was investing $550,000 into a company called Recyclebank, which awarded points to homeowners for recycling picked up at their homes.

“The thing I learned there,” said Lebda, “was the very, very difficult task of scaling a local business.”

Read more about Doug Lebda in The Wall Street Journal by clicking here.

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