PE Firm

“In my own portfolio, I've only seen one soft offer this year. Okay. But it was from a PE firm that was exactly that. A startup at scale that is not growing at astronomic rates, but growing at really good rates that is clearly AI enhanced in the AI category got…”

“If you look at, you know, a lot of what Mark and Madhu and our team is doing in creation, we're buying some of these things from PE firms. We're buying them for not a lot, and we'll arb them into AI transformation, and maybe there's a way to create outfalls.”

“But Stebbins, Driscoll, Lemkin, AI, Consulting is not going to get him there. And that's who PE firms want to do. Bring in these guys. It's not going to work.”

“And so they'll be stories like that. I don't know about Bravo or anybody else, but they'll definitely be PE firms that end up like Forsman Little.”

“The hardest type would be for one PE firm to go buy another PE firm. There is more dis synergies than there's actual synergies and something like that.”

“Well, they'll just change. They'll go from PE firms owning. 10%. 35. Yeah. And they'll, instead of, they can only take a billion dollars of debt out. They'll take, they can take two billion dollars. I mean. Yeah.”

“PE firms are all over us. They want access to cheap AI compute, because every time they get more cheap AI compute, they can bring the, they can change the bottom line of their businesses.”

“Just the inbound that I got with Just so many different people, like PE firms, and then, like, solo founders, as well as, like established, like, actual agencies, like, marketing agencies that wanted to, you know, expand to, like, design services and stuff”

“This is such a small number, it's barely useful, other than anecdotally, but I have two portfolio companies That are kind of in that intersection where, where a tech company and a PE buyer might buy them. Right. And they both got mediocre M&A offers recently. …”

“I'm not seeing the type of just tire kicking that I saw a year ago. I'm not seeing it. I'm not. Maybe other people with broader portfolios will tell you different. That's what worries me. I don't know. We're waiting for P to bail us out. Right. Forget about th…”

“My rough rule of thumb today is 20, 30, zero. So what I mean is to get a PE firm interested in you, you've got to hit Twenty million ARR... Now not a hundred percent growth, 30% or higher... And then zero percent has to be your losses.”

“I used to think that PE firms were like the enemy of the seed stage, and I've changed my mind on that. We've got some PE firms in two vertical SaaS companies that I'm involved in, and their rigor, their financial discipline, and the help they've given to those…”

“When I see that the competitors have all been acquired by private equity companies, I generally think, okay, there's room for innovation here, because I know that the first thing that PE firms are going to do when they acquire a company is, like, zero out R&D,…”

“We are seeing PE firms get more and more involved in technology companies that had profiles that they normally wouldn't go after, and because of the sheer amount of capital that's out there, being willing to pay multiples and valuations that also are unprecede…”

“My concern is that the focus on cost cutting can eat into R&D investment, which can translate into subpar products over time.”

“Some PE firms think that they're operators. And this one was being operated by the PE owners and that's never a good scenario.”