Jeff Horing
Co-Founder and Managing Director, Insight Partners. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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In 1995, Horing co-founded Insight Partners, building it into one of the world's largest software- and internet-focused investment firms. He is known for systematic software deal sourcing and has led investments in companies including Monday.com, Wix, Wiz, and Alteryx.
1shows
1appearances
54statements
3resolved
1supported
2contradicted
33%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Jeff Horing said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Horing: Deploying mega-funds into late-stage growth is structurally much harder
“Pushing it to late stage growth, I thought was a much harder strategy, both for companies to consume that capital valuations that you needed to pay to get into those deals, to justify that capital”
Horing: Net retention is one of the least informative software metrics
“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 …”
Horing: Value investing in tech rarely builds massive wealth
“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.”
Horing: Top-down TAM analysis is flawed compared to relative ASP benchmarking
“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…”
Horing: Venture buyouts beat late-stage venture on risk-adjusted return
“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…”
Horing: Insight hires undergrads because Goldman and McKinsey alumni are spoiled
“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 …”
Horing: Investment stage is not a strategy
“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…”
Horing: Anthropic's coding-driven inflection is probably defensible
“It inflected with coding and the like, but when you sort of think about how he's invested around that, that's not accidental. That was intentional and probably defensible. Like, you know, there's a risk it's not, but you know, I think it's a pretty interesting…”
Horing: Investing success relies on deal volume and pattern recognition over intelligence
“I think investing is pattern recognition and everyone can draw their own, you know, Graphs out of those patterns, but you know, that's fundamentally the core thesis. Like you could be the smartest guy in the world, but if you don't see the patterns or if you d…”
Horing: Generational VC firms struggle most with declining risk appetite
“If you look at generational firms, Risk appetite is probably the biggest challenge that it goes down. And some, once in a while they get a wacky successful investor who just re-energizes the firm's risk tolerance and it goes back up again, but more often than …”
Horing: Software defensibility is a business knowledge barrier, not technology
“Because that's not what software ever was. It was never a technology barrier. It was always a business knowledge barrier.”
Horing: Software development costs across portfolio are inching down, not collapsing
“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”
Horing: AI will largely expand total addressable markets for incumbent software
“So my suspicion is this is largely TAM expanding for the established companies. They will build products as well.”
Horing: Benchmark and Sequoia are unlikely to accept $1B exits today
“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 …”
Horing: Insight rejects low-gross-retention software unless fixable
“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.”
Horing: Combining high ASP with rapid time-to-value is exceptionally rare in software
“It's rare, like to get the time to value and the ASP is really rare.”
Horing: Senior partners at Insight Partners share equal compensation
“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.”
Horing: 30-40% growing software companies are 'tweeners' ideal for venture buyouts
“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 …”
Horing: Capital scale is no longer a durable moat for investment firms
“Capital is not a huge moat. It was with the vision fund. That was like awesome strategy. I just out raise everybody a way that I could do deals that no one else could do. You know, Warburg Pincus had that for a while too.”
Horing: Measure investors by whether deals die if they are removed
“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 …”
Horing: Insight generated 5-6x+ returns on ~$100M venture buyouts
“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.”
Horing: Top 20 software firms rarely have low-80s gross retention
“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.”
Horing: Wiz doubled net new bookings yearly for six years
“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.”
Horing: Long implementation times inherently slow company growth and customer decisions
“And SAP has massive value to that customer base, but it's a very long time to implement. And that's going to just inherently slow down Realistically how fast you can grow both your own ability to succeed with those customers, but also just the decision-making …”
The other half of the tape: Jeff Horing's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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Invest Like the Best 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Jeff's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| INVEST LIKE THE BESTLEDGER | Co-Founder and Managing Director, Insight Partners | 1 | 54 | 33% 1/3 | full record on Invest Like the Best → |