Jeff Horing

Some firms have done it in the buyout space where they've just used capital combined with expertise to just be able to lean in faster and harder.

There's lots of ways to create moat, but most of us back our way into this life.

I started when I was very young, but I think a lot come to this after they've had other careers and other things.

And this is sort of a nice, fun thing to do and absolutely is.

Putting rigor around that and operationalizing it.

We hired one of my good friends years ago as a

Chief Operating Officer of Insight.

He subsequently started his own firm, but he was a mechanical engineer at McKinsey who spent time at Putnam and Lehman.

He woke up every day and it was like, how do I make that pencil do something without a human touching it?

That's how his brain worked.

And mine works in a very similar way from a more strategic side, but it's sort of systematizing what tasks we do that we could have others do better.

And then how do I create moat to the extent that it's possible?

Because look, capital is not a huge moat.

It was with the Vision Fund.

That was like awesome strategy.

I just out-raised everybody in a way that I could do deals that no one else could do.

Warburg Pincus had that for a while too.

When I first joined, they were significantly larger than almost anyone else out there.

But that's increasingly difficult.

I think Toma Bravo could do that today with their scale in the buyout world.