Insight Partners

“They probably talk to, like, they probably talk to 30,000 companies a year.”

“So, we raised our Series B back then, led by Insight Partners. That was a forty-seven million round, which is Like, 40% of what we raised in total since inception, even up to this day.”

“About 80% of the investments I've made have returned less than 1.3 X. So it's the 20% that made all the money in my life and made all the impact.”

“One of my companies, Docker has been moving dramatically toward this as they move into AI, which is a consumption based model.”

“Every investment that I've done, which is over a hundred has come from someone close to me and said, Jerry, I need your help to help me think about this thing.”

“When I invested in Twitter in 2009 there was 30 something people, no revenue.”

“We did that investment less than 30 days from the time I met the team and the time we closed, and it turned out to be a watershed investment for the company”

“We had done a bunch of what we call venture buyouts and some were growth buyouts in, and these could have been a hundred million dollar investments of taking control of smaller software companies where we made five, six, sometimes more times our money.”

“To get Benchmark or Sequoia to sell something for a billion dollars probably doesn't get their heart rate up today. So the likelihood that they would do those deals again today, knowing what the world looks like and what the upside could be for these types of …”

“I remember five years ago, one of my companies was going public and the rage on Wall Street was net retention. I was picking a random one. I was already at my 11th grade math. So I'm like, this is one of the least informative numbers I could think of. And yet …”

“There are very few companies with lowish software, low would be eighties, low eighties gross retention that are in the top 20 market cap businesses. You could probably count on three fingers companies with that statistic.”

“Buying cheap and technologies is certainly, there's not a long list of really rich people who've done that, right? As compared to the people who've just bought the dream where there's a very long list of people who've made lots of money on the dream.”

“We will not do a low gross retention business today, unless we really are confident we could change it. We think that metric is really the fundamental driver of all exit values and ultimately large companies.”

“Take whiz, which is obviously one of our favorite stories in life and great team. And they've been able to double or more of their net new bookings each year for six years.”

“The sort of top down approach I think is, is riddled with errors in, in thought. Whereas if you kind of look at what's my selling price, how does it compare? So you kind of want to see that average selling price and then compare it to companies that are target…”

“All my peers would sort of admit that the best bet on the table is the double down bet, right? In blackjack, we all know that, right? You've got an 11 against a five, you double down, like it's the best bet in the house. Not only do they give you the good odds…”

“We took a five million dollar position to a billion dollar position. We never would have seen the billion dollar position without getting the relationship with management With a five million dollar position.”

“We've routinely in some of our biggest exits from Monday and Sino, a bunch have started with under twenty five million dollar bets that have come up to two hundred million dollars over time.”

“Most I'd say the spreadsheets start to look like, you know, two to three X, you could do much lower risk buyouts or venture buyouts or other types of deals with the same return curve with a lot more upside and an ability to control your destiny in a better way…”

“We decided to go right after the undergrad kids, because we realized it's a really hard job, and if you've actually been working at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, you kind of get spoiled. And you don't want to go back to picking up a phone and calling somebody up …”

“I think the human in the loop still matters. That's our belief. You know, entrepreneurs aren't Just gonna react to the first email they get from you, so the fact that you think XYZ company's super hot doesn't mean they're gonna return your phone call.”

“We've probably, in aggregate, 60 plus people, depending on how you count 60 to 80 people that are still heavily engaged.”

“I would say that I think almost all the partners at insight, but one or two at the sort of high investment committee level started off in that program”

“I think we have 16 or 18 funds that were started by Insight alum. I've got 30 plus partners at other firms today that were Insight alums.”

“And we're all comp the same. So we're not exactly trying to, you know, this is one for all, all for one to make the firm successful.”

“Those junior people have a lot of influence at my firm. So they run my schedule for sure.”

“Usually what we're trying to do intentionally is not reject, but postpone because Life changes. People's business get better. And sometimes things are just not right for us then. And the last thing you want to do is, is, is damage a relationship with the found…”

“What I call, we call them venture buyouts, but the unlevered, 30, 40% growers, they're tweeners, right? They're not growing fast enough for a minority investor to get super excited, except at a very big discount. And they're not big enough TAMs for strategics …”

“I said this to my LPs. I think this last annual meeting stage is not a strategy to me. Like you could argue seed investing is a very different Skill set generally. But I'd say it's not like we're incompetent to look at something quite that early. We're not nea…”

“Up until 2017 late stage pre IPO growth was a really Cool market, right? Multiples were expanding, companies were growing really fast, typically longer and faster than you expected. You could actually make four or five times your money on those pre IPO rounds,…”

“Look, I think the buyouts were willing to take, you know, five points lower than everything else. Everything else is blended pretty close to the same. You know, 30% is kind of a gross number that you'd say we target.”

“Whiz we backed when it had zero revenue, so it's a big price, but you know, we loved everything we saw, including team.”

“Monday, it was an interesting company, but not the most obvious funded company. It was, you know, probably five million in size when we backed it.”

“I think we have some disadvantages on early relative to California. Cause we're not getting all that little, like more subtle stuff. The whisper is so strong here. You gotta lean in. So there's that whisper deal flow and trends that we won't see.”

“We've got 15 people that do nothing but liaise with Fortune 500 companies”

“There's only four things we do, right? We find deals, we win deals, we select deals and we make them work.”

“I wanted to be a software company with an investment arm. That was kind of my pitch. 10 years ago to LPs is like, that's how I thought of myself as people could think of us as we know so much about software. They could outsource a lot of that know-how, and the…”

“I probably am the only one who does what I call concept deals at a big price. Even I'm not doing that right now. Like I don't feel compelled to do that at the moment.”

“That's all that matters is multiples of cashflow and then predictability of that cashflow in a recession. How good do you feel in whatever times in, you know, whatever existential risk, somebody could come into your model and disrupt it.”

“You know, we looked at Uber at a really attractive round. We fought like hell as a partnership over it. And we finally passed, obviously huge mistake, right? Like it was a great outcome.”

“Managed to get Twitter over the line, which, you know, at the time was got out even before musket all took over.”

“Like, how do you give somebody really valuable career advice in what we do? Because the outputs are so long coming and there's so much luck. Let's not kid ourselves. Like there's a lot of luck in what we do. And I, Sort of start with like, well, if I took you …”

“I am never going to get upset with somebody if they took a calculated risk that didn't go well.”

“We probably have 25 agentic AI bets that we think could be really profound in the commercial markets.”

“First of all, we haven't seen any of it in our companies, like the cost of developing software. It's inching down, but it's not collapsing overnight”

“I think at one point, we had a four X on our 99 fund in the public markets that we couldn't sell. We were locked up. And by the time we could get off the lockup, it was down to a one X.”

“Those are the worst hours of ROI that you can possibly get is taking a deal that's gone sideways and trying to fix it.”

“Wiz, which was obviously a, you know, 30, thirty one billion dollar outcome, you know, the GDP of the country. And it returned a third of Insight's fund.”

“Builder.ai, which raised five hundred million, I think it was, across rounds, shuts down false projections. I read about they were projecting 200 and they actually got forty-five million in revenue.”

“From insights perspective, a hundred million dollars in a, I think the last one is twelve billion. It's approximately one percent of the fund.”

“I think Jeff Hoering himself, the founder was involved, who's made scads of money. I think he was a big investor, an early investor in Wiz. I don't think Jeff is going to lose his job for dropping a hundred million dollars when he's returned a couple of billio…”

“They own inside on 43% of Monday when it IPO.”

“Some of our earliest investors were people like Justin Mateen, founder of Tinder, Justin Khan, founder of Twitch Peter Thiel, and then we had our first series A raised led by Insight, and then Lately our Series B was led by A-Star and Kevin Hartz, founder of E…”

“It was a 2.6 billion dollar reported return to them in an eight and a half billion dollar fund, which is like one of the best investments of all time.”

“Insight wrote a twenty million dollar check. ... So we did a thirty million round overall at a hundred and fifty million post. We were pre-product, pre-revenue”

“Even with Sanus, with thirty million raised, about Eight, 10 months into that journey, we were almost questioning, can we even solve this problem? Like I've had a meeting with Insight where where we are like, hey, we'll give it another 90 days. Otherwise, I th…”

“We don't go externally and hire with recruiting firms to poach other partners. That's a similar, that's a strategy that we did take from the insight days where we promote from within.”

“One of the businesses I invested in at Insight was Fanatics. At the time it was called Football Fanatics, and it was three guys in a strip mall in Jacksonville, Florida that had an e-commerce website that had like pretty impressively good growth stats.”

“Where we had raised, you know, a hundred million dollars from Andreessen Horowitz and others during the Zerp era, they raised fifty million dollars from Insight Partners and others during the Zerp era.”

“Andreessen have hundreds. They're actually very deep across every segment of hiring, across every segment of B to B customer acquisition. They are a machine. Insight is the same. We have Insight who've done our companies, and it is a machine that they roll in.…”