Insight Partners

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

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

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

“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 …”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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,…”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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 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.”

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