This site uses cookies to improve your experience.

We use necessary cookies to make our site work. We would also like to set optional analytics cookies to help us improve our site by anonymously collecting and reporting information on how you use it. For more information on how these cookies work, please see our Cookie policy.

  • Portfolio
  • Team
  • Insights
  • Work With Us
Toggle Menu
  • Portfolio
  • Team
  • Insights
  • Work With Us
  • SoftBank Careers
  • Terms
  • English
© 2024 SB Investment Advisers (UK) Limited
Video

Leveling the financial playing field

Rishi Khosla shares his thoughts on how OakNorth is seeking to unlock capital to help small and medium-sized businesses grow.

Audio Transcript

00:00:05 —

Rishi Khosla

If you look at our background, my business partner and myself, the first business that we started, we used $60,000 to build our business. So we came from pretty modest backgrounds. In 2005, we went to a commercial bank for a line of credit, they spent all of, sort of, four minutes looking at the application and sort of gave us a ‘computer says no’ type response. And we said to ourselves, its just incredible that we couldn’t get a relatively small amount of money from a commercial bank, but yet an institutional player, who spent the time analysing our business, was able to give us more than 100 times the amount of capital.

00:00:42 —

Interviewer

Why is Oaknorth important?

00:00:44 —

Rishi Khosla

When you look at small and medium sized businesses, and you look at those owner-managers, their ability to actually get access to financing to actually grow their businesses, is a major obstacle to them being able to grow. You take the other end of the market, the larger corporates, they get access to extremely cheap money, and therefore those businesses keep on reinforcing themselves and getting bigger.

00:01:11 —

Interviewer

How do small and medium enterprises contribute to society?

00:01:15 —

Rishi Khosla

Look at a high street across 3,4,5 major cities. You’ve got a lot of the same brands in every single high street – right? That, to me, makes a soulless world. If you look at, actually, what a lot of small, medium sized businesses bring, they bring creativity, they bring change. They are also the engines of growth.

00:01:33 —

Rishi Khosla

If you look at our whole approach to lending, it is actually analyse businesses in a much more rigorous manner. I’m going to actually understand how this subsector works, how this business compares against its competitors, then I’m going to put all that together to determine actually how much we can lend to it, so that we don’t end up in a world which is effectively dominated purely by larger corporates.

00:01:54 —

Interviewer

Should Valuation matter to an entrepreneur?

00:01:57 —

Rishi Khosla

Fundamental performance of an organisation should matter to an entrepreneur. Should you chase valuation? Never. My approach is that you build a business as if you’re going to own it for life, so at best, effectively, a valuation is like an external mark to market, rather than something to build the organisation for, or around.

00:02:18 —

Interviewer

What’s Act Two for the business?

00:02:21 —

Rishi Khosla

What’s act two for the overall business? Look, I still think we’re in the incredibly early stages of building this business. If you look at the overall loan-stock of SME lending, we believe that is an underserved market. If we help to expand that by 5, 10%, that’s already an incredibly large impact on financing for small and medium sized business owners across the globe.

00:02:48 —

Interviewer

SoftBank Vision Fund

Photo of Vivek Ramaswamy during Starting At Discovery interview
Video

Starting at discovery

Vivek Ramaswamy describes how Roivant is leveraging the scale of the pharmaceutical industry, and the mentality of a start-up, to help bring new and powerful medicines to market.

Sozo Newsletter Text Logo HorizontalSozo Newsletter Text Logo Vertical

The strength of 450+ leading tech companies—direct to your inbox

Sign up for the Sōzō newsletter for insights from our unparalleled ecosystem of global innovators.
Sign up for our monthly newsletter
Stay up to date with the latest data and insights
  • Portfolio
  • Team
  • Insights
  • Work With Us
  • Portfolio Careers
  • Company
    • Sustainability
    • Presentations
  • Contact
  • Terms
  • |
  • Privacy
  • |
  • Regulatory
  • |
© 2025 SB Investment Advisers (UK) Limited