The Ledger
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Bhatia calls Cvent and Bizzabo hated 'necessary evils' in event tech
“Yeah, I think in general, the event market event tech market is a very unloved space. I think everyone knows Cvent. Everyone knows visible, but that's sort of a necessary evil. You know, I personally came from the healthcare market and it's kind of like Epic. …”
Bhatia: Legacy SaaS persists because enterprise buyers face zero career risk
“These are like form written products. Like you have to fill out multiple, you know, pages of long forms. And it doesn't really help you do your job any better. It's just, you know, everyone's on there. So you have to be on there as well. And, you know, they've…”
Agarwal: CEOs should fly economy so employees cannot demand business class
“Like I still fly economy. A lot of people say, why do you fly economy? Is that worth your time? And I'm like, it's not about working my time. It's building a democratized system in the company where if I fly economy, nobody else better ask to fly business.”
Agarwal: Vista takes zero dividends from high-growth software portfolio companies
“So they don't take money back. They want to invest it back to grow faster. So for example, they've never, they don't want a dividend. They said, put that money and plow it back into the business because we want to go faster.”
Agarwal: Cvent was Vista's first high-growth software acquisition
“So what happened with Vista, they used to invest in companies that, you know, EBITDA was a little more focused. Now their focus is high growth. So we were the first company that they acquired that was high growth.”
Agarwal: Cvent will collect over $500 million in cash this year
“So basically, we'll collect more than half a billion in cash this year.”
Agarwal: Going public forces discipline and forecasting rigor on a company
“When you go public, it changes you as a company, because you learn to be much more disciplined, you have to be able to forecast better, you just get a tighter grip of your business, you get different sets, you build different sets of muscles, you know, just li…”
Agarwal: Cvent's profit margins are substantially north of 10%
“And our numbers are north of this, frankly, substantially north of this. Let's just say you want 10% profit.”
Agarwal: Vista used Cvent's $130M cash balance to fund buyout
“We had one hundred and thirty million dollars cash in our balance sheet. They use that to buy our own company.”
Vista Equity paid 7.2x revenue multiples for Cvent and Marketo
“Vista Equity loves 7.2 X multiples. It's the multiple they paid for Cvent. It's also the multiple they paid for Marketo.”
Agarwal: Cvent didn't receive a 20x revenue buyout offer before IPO
“Unfortunately, we didn't get 20 times revenue like Qualtrics as an offer, because maybe that would change your mind if you get that kind of valuation.”
Agarwal: Rolled over proceeds into Cvent during Vista acquisition
“Like I invested back my proceeds cause I was, you know, the largest shareholder at Cvent and I put my money back into the company, some of it.”
Agarwal: Cvent Net Revenue Retention Is Above 100% But Below 115%
“So we're certainly north of 100. We're not, Approaching one, 15, one, 20. So I'll just kind of just say that.”
Agarwal: Cvent powers conferences for Dreamforce and AWS
“We do, you know, helping Dreamforce, AWS, their large conferences of 50, 80, 90,000, whatever, 100,000”
Agarwal: Cvent Doubled Revenue and Grew Headcount to Nearly 4,000
“We closed our deal in 16, and so we have more than doubled already as an organization. So to give you a sense, we were about 18 or 1900 employees. This year, we'll end the year, we're starting to approach 4000 employees. And in terms of revenue, we've more tha…”
Agarwal: Cvent is reducing profits year-over-year to fund growth
“For example this year, we're taking our profits down compared to the prior year because such a great opportunity.”
Agarwal: Cvent operated for 13 years without raising outside capital
“For 13 years, we didn't raise any capital. We relied on ourselves, so it changes the way you look at a lot of metrics.”