John Howard, co-founder and CEO of Croissant, discusses his journey from KKR to fintech entrepreneurship. Watch the full video — free, no account needed.
John Howard, co-founder and CEO of Croissant, discusses his journey from KKR to fintech entrepreneurship. He shares insights on building a business from scratch and the challenges and successes faced along the way, emphasizing that 80% of decisions are wrong while 20% lead to success.
Yeah, you know, interestingly, Alejandro, my story is not probably that typical for a founder because I I took a somewhat formulaic track out of school. So, I did the standard summer analyst investment banking program while I was at Vanderbilt. The typical thing where people come on campus to recruit and you show up in a suit and tie as a 21-year-old pretending you know what you're talking about. Uh and I landed a a great role in Bank of America Merrill Lynch's leverage finance team, which is between them and JP Morgan always competing for the most active desk on the street for leverage finance transactions. Had a good summer internship program. I got invited back full-time. Was fortunate to come into senior year at Vanderbilt knowing that I had a job on the other side, um which was a lot of fun, made senior year really special. Um One [clears throat] of the things I did during that
senior year that I recommend to a lot of young people who ask me uh is I reached out to all my friends uh who I who I respected academically and said, "Who's the very best professor you took during your time here? Doesn't matter what subject. I want to just take the very best professors for my last two semesters here and make the most of this experience." I ended up taking our history classes and Russian literature classes and a geology course and astronomy uh and really just embrace that last year and kind of have fun with it since I knew I was going off to Bank of America afterwards.