Jay Vas
@jayvas
Investor @ Atlasview Equity Partners. Here to learn & share my learnings. DMs open.
Went to an event yesterday where Mark Leonard (founder/ceo of Constellation Software $csu) was the keynote speaker. The discussion was around general business/career advice. Sharing some of my notes:
“PE ruined the last software company I worked for” is code for: 1. Focused mgmt on oper. metrics/KPIs 2. Got rid of rich comp plans 3. Stopped pet projects with no ROI 4. Put in a hiring freeze to stop bloat 5. Replaced underperforming leaders 6. Held mgmt accountable for results
Google's search results have sucked for a long time, well before the onset of AI. Everything is hyperoptimized for SEO, pure content slop to rank on the first page, making Google pretty frustrating. Despite this, everyone (including myself) thought Google's search business was…
Saw a business with the following profile: Revenue: $54m EBITDA: $5.4m # of employees: 10 # of customers: 1 (yes 1) 🤯
Truth. One more I'd add: Be large. Size matters, a lot.
Want to sell your business for a great multiple? Here’s the recipe: Be profitable. Be growing. Be diversified (customers, channels, products). Hire a good investment banker. That’s it. If you nail the above, you’ll almost always find a buyer willing to overlook anything else.
For most people, over the long run, investment returns are largely a function of how much and what type of leverage you have access to.
Great tid bit from @jayvas here. Great summary of what is happening at these frontier labs
M&A advisors should run a net proceeds analysis with the seller BEFORE signing an LOI with a buyer. Also, buyers should include their methodology for calculating the net working capital peg in the LOI. Limit the number of surprises = higher probability of close
How to achieve multiple expansion in private equity: (meet the criteria of the next buyer) h/t Niklas James of Minds Capital