Today’s episode features Kevin Grossman, Partner at Decathlon Capital Partners - a lender that has quietly built a niche providing non-dilutive term loans to high-growth companies across technology, healthcare services, and branded food and beverage.
Decathlon’s product isn’t leverage for leverage’s sake. It’s an equity replacement: a four-to-five-year term loan meant to bridge a company to a value inflection point it can already see - more ARR, a cash-flow-positive quarter, a wave of new orders — without raising equity a round too early. Kevin explains why that thesis translates across sectors, including the parallel between life sciences startups as “farm teams” for big pharma and emerging food brands as farm teams for the Cokes and General Mills of the world.
We also trace Kevin’s career - asset-based lending, Silicon Valley Bank in 1999, the go-go days at Hercules, and a leveraged-lending stretch at White Oak - and pull out what it taught him about differences between non-bank and bank lenders. And we spend real time on the borrower’s side of the table: why credit investors underwrite the downside, why pitching a lender the equity upside misses the point, why leverage works both ways, and how a fractional CFO can change a company’s odds. We close on where he sees AI actually helping the credit underwriting process, and where it doesn’t.
