Jeff Horing

Software wasn't big enough to think about buyouts, even unlevered buyouts.

It just didn't exist as an industry.

And there was also a pretty strong belief broadly in venture capital.

that giving cash to a founder was a four-letter word.

You never do that.

That was rule number one.

And I bet if you talk to some of the best of the best and ask them what they were like in the 90s, secondary sales to founders were just not acceptable.

TA Summit were breaking that model a little bit in the 90s.

When we dug into software, we pretty quickly realized if you built a good software company

assume that the risk there was that the founder got demotivated.

That was the reason you didn't want to give him cash.

Now he could afford a house.

He's not going to work so hard.

And we just felt like if we break it, we can own it and we can manage it.

We just got a lot more confidence as we did more of these that if for whatever reason it didn't work out with the founder, they decided to retire, whatever it was, we're okay running this.

We could find a new CEO.

Obviously that's a big part of all venture capital jobs is keeping management where you want and not everything works out with the original

team, we saw two deals that the owners were not typical shareholders.

One was a former founder that had hired a full team and we bought the company from him or we bought his shares.

We're like, well, we don't have to demotivate him.