When we started Percent in 2018, the alternative investment space was crowded with platforms offering a poor investor experience. We saw 4-5 year lockups with $25-30K minimums. That's a massive amount of capital tied up with no liquidity and 'yields' that were anything but recurring.

VCs kept dismissing us as "just another marketplace," but we saw something they missed. If you build something exponentially better, customers will find you. We focused on shorter durations, lower minimums, and investments designed for recurring cash flows. The market validated that thesis almost immediately, we just had to be patient enough to prove it.

We called ourselves “another marketplace” so people still think that’s all we do, facing retail investors and democratizing access to alternative investments. But six months into building Percent, we realized we'd stumbled into something bigger. Virtually no technology infrastructure exists in this multi-trillion dollar space. There was no order book management, no asset surveillance tech, no compliance software. It was all spreadsheets and handshakes.

That's when it clicked: if we were having these issues, everyone else must be having these problems too. It took over seven years of building from scratch and operating that marketplace to learn how private credit actually works, build the necessary reputation in this clubby industry, and create real battle-tested technology. Now, with over $2 billion transacted, the world sees who we really are. We're an infrastructure company first and our marketplace is the ultimate synergistic proof of that technology.

Our hardest trade-off was actually the entire company's strategy once we realized infrastructure was what was needed. For essentially our entire life, Percent looked like a badly managed investment bank to VCs. We were running a fully-loaded, expensive team of both Wall Street debt capital markets experts and Silicon Valley engineers, all while doing small deals that generated almost no revenue.

It was a massive short-term momentum killer. But it was our deliberate long-term strategic bet. We knew we couldn't just build software for this industry without being in this industry. You can't fake it. We traded off years of potential "SaaS-like" growth to earn our reputation and truly learn the complexities of private credit. Now, that trade-off is our moat in a private credit market built on clubby relationships and track record. Our software pipeline is hundreds of clients long because they know we've been in the trenches with them, we’ve done deals with them, we’ve supported them.

The data point that changed everything wasn't ours; it was actually the market’s. When we started in 2018, private credit was an obscure, ~$700 billion asset class. It was not sexy. We spent most of our meetings just explaining what it was. Today, it’s been marked up and resized as consulting firms realize just how much private credit actually touches the “real economy” and it’s been estimated by McKinsey to be as large as $34 trillion and projected to grow even more from here.

This explosive growth, even with the resizing, validated our original thesis: investors are desperately searching for yield and diversification and private credit's predictability is the answer. We had a hunch this was a better product but the market's rapid adoption confirmed it. We were skating to where the puck was going, and the puck started moving faster than anyone imagined.

Not AI as that’s already getting way too much attention. In our case, it’s secondaries.

Everyone in private credit sees secondaries as the holy grail, but no one has figured out how to bring it to life because of a fundamental conflict-of-interest problem. You see major players launching their own secondary markets. But if you're not a neutral third party (see NASDAQ or NYSE for equities) why would anyone trust you with their data and transactions? They'll assume you're using the information asymmetry to your advantage.

A viable secondary market requires independence. It needs someone who isn't competing with buyers and sellers, isn't trading against clients, and doesn't have a vested interest in the outcome. We've maintained that independence throughout this journey and it's starting to pay dividends in ways we couldn't have predicted.

Everyone wants it. No one's solved it. And we might be positioned to get there first.

Building in private credit means playing an entirely different game than traditional fintech. through. This is a relationship-driven, reputation-based industry where trust compounds over years, not quarters. VCs often want marketplace metrics to look like SaaS metrics, but that fundamentally misunderstands how institutional capital markets actually work. There is a graveyard of point solutions that have come and gone that were really solutions looking for problems, touting SaaS-like features and business models.

The companies that win in this space will be the ones patient enough to learn the domain deeply, humble enough to build alongside incumbents rather than trying to disrupt them, and sophisticated enough to navigate complex regulatory environments. Speed matters less than precision. Flash matters less than follow-through.