Ric Elias

But we can take any funnel where there's heavy data, heavy experiences, and use our technology to basically yield a lot more out of the same flows.

That has happened time and time again in every asset we bought.

This was the supposed promise of private equity, that you would buy stuff and make it better and then resell it.

I think in many cases, if you're cynical about it, that really doesn't happen.

There's more financial engineering that goes on than actual operational improvement.

And obviously what you're describing is like unbelievably valuable if you can buy at 10 and pretty quickly you effectively pay four.

So why aren't there 10 red ventures?

Like why aren't there 10 firms that have this specific expertise that are just really good at this function that buy things and make them grow?

It feels like I'm missing it because there aren't.

I've looked.

Tell me how someone gets paid and I'll tell you how they behave.

And most people that are in this space are here to grow something, to sell it to somebody else.

And what we've been able to prove is we've been able to do this across seven or eight different industries.

We've had lots of really good competitors show up in an industry or two, some of them better than us at certain things.

Some of them go the brand, okay, I'm going to build my own consumer brand versus building a much better middleware.

And others, I'm going to do it really deep here and then I'm going to sell it to somebody.

So I think a little bit of this is incentive structures.

If you had to describe how you got so good at this function, is it just iterative learning?

Is it stacking lessons on lessons?

Is it a heavy data focus?