Eating the Bank's Lunch w/ Athena Home Loans Co-Founders Nathan Walsh and Michael Starkey [S5.E1]

Welcome to the fifth season of "Scaling Up"! Expect an ecclectic mix of incredible Australian growth stories, told by their founders and CEOs. Some of the episodes are with businesses at the earlier stages of their scaling up journey, as well as a few of Australia’s largest listed businesses. Regardless of scale, or business model, there are some common scaling pain points, and we try again to uncover how these leaders have overcome them. Like our last series, we also have a little mini series, this time lasering in on the role of Chief People Officer and what scaling great cultures looks like. 

To kick off though, we have two episodes featuring two of Australis’s brightest venture backed consumer finance companies. By releasing them side by side, it should be easier for listeners to compare and contrast the lessons in similar business models. 

The first, is Athena Home loans, and our interview with the founders Nathan Walsh and Michael Starkey. 

Founded in 2017 and launched two years later, Athena has already funded over $3.5b of home loans in Australia on the simple premise of allowing for fast, simple, transparent and cost effective digital loans. The home loan market in Australia is massive as you can imagine, and crucially controlled by the four legacy banks. The banks though are having some of their lunch eaten by the non-bank lenders, of which Athena is at the top of the list. 

To enable Athena to scale rapidly in a highly regulated environment, Nathan and Michael from day one realised that talent was the most important element to their, and built a crack team of leaders who could scale from start up, right through the scale up journey.

The conversation covers a heap of ground – from scaling a consumer brand, to finding competitive advantages in their cost of capital on the lending side of the business, as well as some hot topics around remote versus in-office work as we come out of covid-19 restrictions. 

These two are high functioning and thoughtful in everything they do, and this translates into some wonderful insights for founders, management teams and casual listeners alike. 

You can follow TDM (linktr.ee/tdmgrowth) and host Ed Cowan (linktr.ee/eddiecowan) across social channels.

Show notes; 

Founding story (4:00) 

The original vision for Athena (4:30) 

Why the 'talent first' strategy (8:45) 

Overview of the Australian homeloans market (10:40) 

Building bands and scaling acquisition costs (14:00) 

Biggest difficulty on consumer side of the bussiness in terms of scaling business (16:33) 

Processing power and scaling a range of products for consumers - what is Act 2? (19:12) 

Funding model and value proposition for funders (23:25) 

Trying to scale the funding side of the business (26:30) 

Being a culture first business (28:10) 

Concept of a cultural balance sheet (32:50) 

Heading back into the office and working remotely (36:13) 

The importance of the role of the Chief People Officer (40:10) 

Biggest scaling challenge when it comes to culture (43:05) 

What does success look like over the next 5 years and what are the hurdles to overcome to achieve this (45:10)