Jeff Horing

Would you be interested in talking to me?

And I started at Warburg.

I sourced a bunch of deals that way, which was pretty unusual for what was largely a shape-the-tree partner model.

and realized I could find deals all day long like this.

And especially software lent itself to being outside Silicon Valley, especially applications.

If you're building banking software, do you want to be in Silicon Valley or New York City?

If you're building pharma applications, do you want to be in New Jersey or do you want to be in Silicon Valley?

And I can go down a list of industries that really made sense to be much closer to your customers, which themselves had clusters around the US and even in Europe.

Most software companies back then started as consulting projects that got bootstrapped to some degree to a product.

So you can actually find these things well after their incubation phase and startup phase, which again was very counter to the West Coast model.

I hear Landry speak.

I start doing what he's doing.

This is working.

I could do this.

And we started Insight.

I had a partner who was a consultant to Warburg.

We started up.

We just started sourcing deals, cold calling everybody.

We found a bunch of deals before we had a fund, and then we scrapped together a $16 million blind pool of capital from some high net worth folks.

And in that thesis was focus, focus,