How Orlando Bravo Built One of the Most Successful Firms in Private Equity
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with one of the best track records in private equity.
Comabravo manages $179 billion in assets.
Comabravo has grown at a blistering pace.
Last year, the firm returned over $13 billion to investors. In 2019, Orlando became the first Puerto Rico-born billionaire.
Private equity firms, the good ones, definitely beat the public markets. We are in the business of turning great innovators into great businesses.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Telma Bravo's Orlando Bravo.
Nice to see you.
Thanks for coming.
How are you? David. Good to see you.
For those that don't know, let me just do a couple of data points and then we'll just jump into the story because Orlando has an in.
Wait, Chamath, are we seriously going to ignore whatever virtue signaling J-Cal is doing over here? What's this virtue signal you got going on? What are you doing right now?
This isn't virtue signal. This is my bestie Tulsi gave me an official scarf from her office. for my wife and I stole it from my wife. So I'm wearing it and no judgements.
Yumi probably didn't see it yesterday, but Jason was run over by the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard yesterday. He was so tilted. She was walking through the Russia hoax. He was so tilted. He had his phone Googling and grokking trying to get, and all he could come up with is this and literally in this tone, what about Paul Manafort? And nobody knew what that meant because nobody knows who he is. Including her.
Right.
Okay, so... Oh, Chamath Amore, why do you gotta beat up on Jason so much? You should be nice to him.
He is your bestie. Sorry. Continue. Orlando has an incredibly inspiring story, but let me just set the backdrop of what Toma Bravo is. Toma Bravo started in 2008. So, what is that? 17 years now. And now has just a little under $200 billion, which is incredible. But here are the two stats that stunned me. In June, you raised $34.4 billion in basically like a set of fun vehicles, which is I want to understand how that is even possible. And then you basically have owned now or 500 companies and many of the big software companies that we probably interact with and have to deal with. But before we get into all those details, I think what's inspiring is You are a child of Puerto Rico, a small town in Puerto Rico.
And I've texted you this before, but I just wanted you to tell everybody, how does a guy, and I'm saying this in a nice way, from literally the middle of nowhere, get here? How does that happen? Your parents, your family, like, how does that happen?
Well, by the way, thanks so much for having me. And I'm not sure how we're supposed to talk about serious stuff and private equity when we have this. You persevere. I got this. Look, that touches my heart that you asked that question. Because when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, kind of everything stopped for me because my best friends are there, my family's there, cousins, my whole upbringing. I got there on a plane the day after.
And where were you at the time?
I was in San Francisco.
Okay.
And we had gotten a message from Puerto Rico saying there's some shelters, particularly one that was really close to my hometown of Mayaguez, that had only two days supply of food and water. And there were all these kids and everything else. And the government of Puerto Rico, they had trouble serving these towns. So we said, we'll go from San Francisco and bring you a bunch of food and water, and we'll be there tomorrow. And they actually showed up. When I landed, three of my friends that I hadn't seen in a while, my best high school friends, one of them asked me, oh, now you're doing all this business stuff. How did that happen? And I said, well, the odds are one of us had to get lucky. Out of everybody here...
One, I mean, there's some odds to that.
But was that something like your parents gave you where they're like, you have to go, you have to do something, or?
Yes, now at every turn, I tell you this, how exactly I got here, I've never created anything new, but I always had my mom, who was a Cuban immigrant, and for her, just me staying there, it didn't feel right to her.
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