Luca Ferrari

We are a pretty unusual beast.

Unique almost, I think, as far as I can tell.

I think a good representation would be 25% private equity, 75% tech company, meaning we acquire companies as a key engine of growth.

100% acquisitions, no minorities.

And then unlike a private equity, which would typically look to sell them three, five, seven years down the line, we buy off our balance sheet to own and operate forever.

And unlike a private equity, which typically would make relatively shallow interventions, maybe change the management team,

We actually rethink the entire company, try to come up with a vision for the most successful version of that company and work as hard as we can to close the gap between the Cisco and that vision.

And it could be rewrite the software, re-architect the cloud infrastructure, launch lots of features, redesign the UI, optimize monetization and marketing, rebuild big chunks, sometimes the entirety of the organization.

So it's very extensive, deep, time-consuming work.

sometimes radical work.

And if we do it right, that creates a lot of value.

We can reinvest in making our platform more powerful.

So build better proprietary technologies, better access to talent, more knowledge, and go after new, bigger acquisitions.

We felt inspired at the prospect of building the company being our product, building an institution, Berkshire Hathaway, that sort of company that people look at and think was a defining company of its generation.

And so to do that scale is important.

I think it's unlikely that you can be in that conversation unless the company is large and dominant, but also there needs to be some

level of excellence along certain dimensions where the company really stands out vis-a-vis the others.

And for us, it's always been, besides being absolutely exceptional at the functional things, like being incredible at running these businesses, one part that we really want to be awesome at is

spotting some of the best inexperienced talent in the world and being the ideal place for that talent to just skyrocket toward the maximum realization of their potential as quickly as possible.

We want to be the ultimate testing and training ground for incredibly talented and motivated people.