Jeff Horing

First of all, it was an eye opener to me when it happened.

And we had a small strategy that I always envisioned could be a big strategy, but maybe to go backwards and say, what are the best private equity venture deals of all time?

This is a cheat answer.

It's not the real answer.

But in my own view, probably the most cleanest, best example of return is probably VMware.

Technically, EMC was the private equity buyer.

It's about $650 million and sold it for 60 billion.

So that's a $60 billion gain plus or minus.

You could argue Instagram billion to probably a trillion.

YouTube is probably a billion to a trillion.

Interesting, if you look at some of the M&A that strategic companies have made with some synergy that probably delivered a portion of that gain, but I would argue a lot of that was going to happen independent.

PayPal, another good example, almost no real eBay effect that drove that.

we had done a bunch of what we call venture buyouts and some were growth buyouts and these could have been 100 million dollar investments of taking control of smaller software companies where we made five six sometimes more times our money i just always had in my head i would love to be competing

with Microsoft or Palo Alto or eBay for a deal because then the entrepreneur is like, wow, I could have my cake and eat it too.

I could sell to Jeff for a billion dollars my next Instagram and still retain massive ownership, maybe even get reloaded on the options.

I'm not 100% sensitive on those sometimes in that kind of a deal.

And we've done that.

And we've had some bigger deals where we bought companies for about a billion dollars and there were smaller growth standards.

So they were not what you would consider to be classic buyouts where you have cash flows and debt and all sorts of other things underpinning it.

It was really the markets and the growth and the entrepreneurs that you're betting on.