John Howard, co-founder and CEO of Croissant, discusses his journey from private equity to fintech entrepreneurship.
John Howard, co-founder and CEO of Croissant, discusses his journey from private equity to fintech entrepreneurship. He shares insights on the "founder's humility" and the challenges of building a business from scratch.
If you were able to have a chat with that younger John and give that John one piece of advice before launching a business, what would that be and why? >> Two things come to mind. One is that great old sign that you'll see, you know, online that some people have in their office that says, "We didn't do this because it was easy. We did it because we thought it would be easy." That That often comes to mind for me. You know, I definitely, like many founders, left with a bent towards optimism on how quickly we could assemble the big vision. Um and you know, telling my younger self to be patient and roll with all the twists and turns would have been a core piece of advice. The second thing is probably on the humility side. I heard a really great quote that I don't fully agree with, but I think is is kind of a funny provocative framing. I was at a founder dinner in San Francisco a couple
years ago and the keynote speaker said, He was a very successful multi-time founder with multiple unicorn exits and said, "I make 80% wrong decisions." And we all kind of looked around and you know, there's a chuckle in the room and he goes, "No, I'm serious. If you look at any of my companies, what do they take? 10 years to get from nothing to the successful point where I would consider it as having made it? Well, if you look back on that company, you'd say, 'Hey, knowing what I know now, I could have built that thing in 2 years, not 10 years.' Therefore, if it took me an extra 8 years, I make 80% of bad decisions and you know, only 20% good decisions. So, I love that lens. It's not, you know, necessarily true, but it shows you that that humility, that ability to adapt quickly, the just awareness going in that you don't know everything, you're about to learn a whole lot is the other
thing that I would I would encourage young founders to to channel before they go and make the leap.