Despite paying fees to delivery aggregators, Domino's EBITDA margins have climbed. This is primarily due to a strategic shift away from lower-margin corporate-owned stores toward the higher-margin franchise royalty model, alongside benefits from supply chain scale and operating leverage.

Railway finances its servers using debt secured against the hardware itself. This is a distinct and more favorable tool than typical venture debt, offering better terms and avoiding the high cost of equity financing for predictable capital outlays.

Corporations are increasingly shifting from asset-heavy to capital-light models, often through complex transactions like sale-leasebacks. This strategic trend creates bespoke financing needs that are better served by the flexible solutions of private credit providers than by rigid public markets.

For two decades, Domino's translated modest top-line growth into impressive earnings-per-share growth through aggressive share buybacks. This highlights how effective capital allocation can be a primary value driver in a mature, cash-generative business, even more so than revenue growth itself.

Domino's has negative $4 billion in shareholder equity. This isn't from unprofitability but from systematically returning more cash to shareholders via debt-funded buybacks than it retains. This financial structure makes traditional metrics like Return on Equity (ROE) useless for analysis.

Rather than continuously raising venture capital, Bespoke used its contracts with government entities as collateral to secure bank loans in Japan. This provides a faster, non-dilutive funding alternative for profitable startups with stable, long-term government revenue, preserving founder equity.

For asset-heavy hard tech companies, debt is most effective not as a bridge to the next equity round, but to finance long-lived assets (e.g., machinery) that are directly tied to contracted revenue. This approach de-risks the loan and supports scalable growth without excessive equity dilution, a sharp contrast to SaaS venture debt norms.

Bending Spoons' CEO Luca Ferrari reveals their IPO was strategically aimed at improving access to debt, not equity. Lenders favor public companies due to their regulatory transparency and clear valuation, making it easier and cheaper to secure the debt that has historically fueled their acquisition-heavy model.

For global expansion, Domino's licenses entire regions to "master franchisees," several of which are public companies. These partners build their own supply chains, turning Domino's international segment into a capital-light, pure-royalty business with exceptionally high (85%) margins.