Jeff Horing

I love software.

Wanted to just do software and was really interested in doing smaller deals than that firm was set up to do at the time.

Nobody would hire me.

Then software was tiny.

It was IBM and Microsoft.

Just to put a setting in the world, SAP was sort of this mainframe guy coming along.

Oracle was probably the coolest company

cat in town in terms of open systems, client server compute, but it was a really, really small market.

You can count on one hand.

I think the top 50 software companies, number 50 was like 10 million.

It was tiny, but I loved it.

I thought it was a big growth bucket.

I thought specialization had a real edge.

We were disadvantaged by being in New York.

I guess I could have moved, but I had family and other reasons why I liked New York a lot.

Trying to compete on the West Coast terms made no sense to me.

So one, picking an area of specialization where the model was still pretty new to people and it was pretty different than the hardware companies before it that were really more typical venture investing.

And the DNA of a sales guy of software back then, an Oracle's DNA, that was a really different DNA than what most folks were used to.

So we thought specialization was absolutely critical.

to understanding an industry really well.