Jeff Horing

They almost always scaled on check size.

One of the reasons Insight exists today is literally because some of the best firms in the world at the time we started it were moving up market and putting in rules of we do $50 million checks, we do $100 million checks for the reason you outlined, because those are the checks that will probably move the needle.

Though obviously Sequoia and Benchmark and others will tell you they've written plenty of $5 million checks that have been breathtaking in outcome.

But I can see the logic as you get bigger, that that's a temptation to kind of put that constraint in place.

Our DNA just didn't want that anyway.

So some of this was not fully thought out in the way I've described it, but it in fact holds really well to time.

And some of it was just our DNA was so driven off of sourcing.

And the history of Insight was based on some experiences where I found some small deals that didn't fit with a bigger firm.

And I was like, I don't want to be that guy.

I don't want capital to dictate my strategy.

It turns out it doesn't have to.

You could get a little bit invested and find your way to backing up the truck for bigger ownership.

And then as the world changed, it's increasingly hard to come in late.

So now I would argue that there's some really good firms that have been around for as long as we have that were the preeminent late-stage funds that, like us, look at some of these later rounds and we're like, that's a pretty tough spreadsheet.

There are other ways to deploy that capital that seem better risk-reward adjusted.

There's some that are great, but most, I'd say, the spreadsheets start to look like 2 to 3X and

You could do much lower risk buyouts or venture buyouts or other types of deals with the same return curve with a lot more upside and ability to control your destiny in a better way.

It's become a bit of a necessity, too, to get on the balance sheet by getting in a little bit earlier.

When I wrote the original business plan, which is not tremendously different than today,

I was leaving Warburg.