Aidan Rushby is an archetypal entrepreneur. “My mind is restless, I scribble down 20 or more business ideas spontaneously each week,” he says. “When there’s an idea that I keep coming back to, or start exploring in more detail, I know that there’s some potential.” Oh, and he spends any spare time reading IPO prospectuses and annual reports: “I enjoy it,” he laughs. “You can get so many nuggets of knowledge from them.”
A few years ago, Rushby, 38, pored over the business models of Cazoo, Alex Chesterman’s beleaguered online car retailer, and Carvana, the US version that inspired Cazoo. “They addressed a significant market, used cars, but I wasn’t convinced of their profit potential. However, I’d also been interested in the buy-now-pay-later concept popularised by Klarna, and thought there was an opportunity to combine the two.”
