Jay Hoag

There's also a sector overlay because we go to market in different sectors.

So consumer application software, infrastructure software in Europe, four big sectors.

But way back in the day, well before TCV, there were outbound deal sourcing factories, TA Associates being a classic one.

And then some of the folks spun out to start Summit.

It was phone.

It was cold calling to try to build a database of interesting companies, get whatever financial metrics they could, and then sort of through all that and go chase X number of investment opportunities.

We started building that core in TCV in 1999, because originally it was Rick and myself and we were doing everything.

We knew some venture guys and calling it a sourcing effort sounded much more grandiose than it actually was.

We went with that people-driven hordes of associates.

They would come in and commit to three years and then sometimes go off to business school and come back or go off to a portfolio company and come back or just go off to another firm or another company.

But going back about 12 years, one of our associates said, we need to automate this.

And it moved from phone work to email work to lots of scouring of the web and going to trade shows and all this other stuff.

And so we have a data intelligence group that, and I'll stumble on some of the metrics, that is the front end of our sourcing effort.

And there's actually AI-applied data.

here, where we have massive number of data sources tracking employee growth, app downloads, various product usage measures.

And it's ingested, I think,

something like 11 million technology companies, many of whom are really, really tiny, obviously, at this point.

That is ingested and analyzed.

We score companies.

And that, in addition to all the inbound leads we get from benefit of our 30 years, if Reed Hastings sends a note saying you should check XYZ company out, we're going to check it out.