PAR Technology

“In the operating world, you're looking a lot less for rounded people and more for specific talents. And so what I would say is I want that intense bar that you had when I was trying to get a job at a hedge fund or at a bank, but in the operating world, I reall…”

“The first thing I had to do as a CEO, literally the first day in the office, I had to go and terminate 25% of the workforce because we're running out of money.”

“In restaurants where we play, it is incredibly early. It's not a nine, it's 2002 1001.”

“I think in a software business, product development is your capital allocation function. How you determine how you deploy your engineering resources is your, the idea of being a great capital allocator.”

“And in 1982, McDonald's mandated that every store in the world become a par store. And it's an amazing turn of events. In four years, this rinky-dink consulting firm in upstate New York went to being mandated at McDonald's, and PAR went public in 82 off that m…”

“They were in the middle of an activist shareholder fight. The prior CFO was on his way to jail for stealing money. The prior CEO had to step down because of bribery and corruption and investigations in China and Singapore.”

“And I think the next model we're moving towards is transactional where it's saying, Hey, don't pay me for anything, Ted, unless you use it.”

“We're a company that when I think I stepped in as CEO, we had twelve million dollars of recurring revenue. Today we've got 75 or eighty million dollars of recurring revenue. Right. We did that in two and a half years.”

“We should be only building software that is truly new and novel, where we're going to be first or second to market. But if we're late to a market, the catch-up work, we've got to do that through M&A, because then you're buying market share, you're cutting pric…”

“The problem was that when you define your culture with like 10 values, Everybody fits. If I gave Ted a list of 10 values, he'd be like, I'm pretty good at like eight of those, so like, I'm a fit. I always say the values need to be like hard lefts, hard rights”

“I think we raised money through converts. I hated our equity price when I got there. And so we're always raising equity at higher prices through converts.”

“In technology, investors need everything to be perfect. And as a value guy, I've always said, it's so cheap. If it's 85% right, you'll get 85% of the multiple or the value. And I think in technology, that's not the case. People want everything perfect.”

“I'd make arguments that people would actually want to buy more software in the downturn because they want to lower their costs. That's a secular growth industry in a business that's arguably counter-cyclical.”

“When you think about what we do, our business model is scratch and debt inventory. We want to find the Porsche that's sitting in the garage, and we want to go and replace the tires and give it a car wash, and then we're going to drive it really, really hard. T…”

“Par was one of the few companies in that era where you can categorically say the juice is worth the squeeze.”

“The takeaway from all this, the major lesson in PAR and all this is that terminal value matters. Ultimately, when you have a business with a high terminal value that's growing, it creates a lot of room for execution errors.”

“No one is spending time on par. It's in upstate New York. The CEO has a terrible history of capital allocation, and it's a liquid and it's small. If I can actually get a variant view on the company, on their products, I know I'm going to be the only person doi…”