Jay Hoag

Very little leverage, all based on company building and growth and a great product.

It does ebb and flow.

I mean, back in 95, when we started, as you might imagine, it wasn't just that there was not much interest in growth.

There actually wasn't that much interest in technology.

So now it obviously is obvious to everyone, but people view it as a tiny prize.

As technology returns have been robust, money follows.

That just seems to be how capitalism works.

And so there are a lot of growth investors, many of them built very successful firms,

Some have gone from success and growth to really scaling assets and becoming much more private equity like big buyout funds, etc.

And that's not bad.

That's just different.

And many have gone from being purely focused on the tech vertical to other categories of growth, be it retail, health care, I mean, health care, IT, just hospitals, etc.,

We've made the decision to stay, I'd say, relatively small, although first fund was $100 million and our last fund was $3 billion, so it's relative, but really just stay focused on technology because we think it's the greatest industry and it also requires a tremendous amount of expertise.

to be able to execute against.

Yes, competition's increased, but I'd say in the last four years, it's actually decreased.

If you harken back to last time I was here, everybody had entered technology and growth investing in 2021, and that led to its own challenges for a lot of the capital that was deployed during that period of time.

Many early stage funds doing growth.

Many public funds doing growth.

Many private equity funds doing growth.

And some will be successful, but a lot may not.