Mark MacLeodFounder, Limitless.ceo · The Startup CEO Coach | Helping ambitious CEOs & founders scale world-changing companies without sacrificing their health, happiness, purpose, or humanity

Andrew D'Souza from Boardy. This week's guest on The Startup CEO Show

24 Feb 2025 · 1 min

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Excerpt from an interview with Andrew D'Souza (Boardy) about building credit businesses. He emphasizes that credit businesses depend on low cost of capital and access to volume; that hoped-for network effects and moats did not materialize for them; and that once the model was proven competitors entered, lost money, undercut pricing and triggered a race-to-the-bottom, eroding defensibility and value capture.

Chapters

Credit businesses work when you have a low cost of capital and access to a lot of credit. And I think the other thing is we were trying to figure out if we had a network effect business with sort of defensible moats and where those moats accrued to. Right. And I think one of the things, you know, data and underwriting became one brand and sort of go to market became another one. But we didn't really have a network effect business. As soon as we proved the model, you know, we had other competitors coming in, losing money, undercutting us, and became a bit of a race to the bottom. And I think that was a that was a big lesson for us, is like, if capital becomes a commodity, then where does, you know, where does the value accrue? Where's the defensibility?