John Howard, co-founder and CEO of Croissant, shares his entrepreneurial journey from KKR to fintech, discussing the challenges and successes of building.
John Howard, co-founder and CEO of Croissant, shares his entrepreneurial journey from KKR to fintech, discussing the challenges and successes of building a business from scratch. He emphasizes the importance of humility, acknowledging that 80% of decisions lead to failure while only 20% result in success.
my circumstances were such that I kind of had to take it and I'll tell you I'll tell you why. My eight years at KKR, you know, there was that investing role, building the specialty finance fund. I was noticed by senior management and so I moved up from the fund level to the GP level and helped KKR think about how to get bigger and better as a firm in a corporate development capacity. I'd like to go back into a more traditional investing role and I led FinTech and related payments investing out of the big North America buyout fund for my last 18 months at the firm. And it was during that time that the idea for Croissant came knocking as you said. The the general premises that over my eight years at KKR, I was always financial services and FinTech focused. Everything that was tied together by this thread of financial services investing whether that was at the GP level or in the funds. And
something that kind of always scratched at me was that so much of our time and attention as FinTech investors is devoted to how we do more on the liability side of the customer's balance sheet, how we give a little bit more debt a little bit more easily through a new funding mechanic at ROEs that you know make us better off as lenders, but relatively little innovation and investment flows to the asset side of the customer's balance sheet. And it was just kind of tugging on that idea for years that ultimately started to um serve as that like primordial fluid out of which Croissant evolved.