Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440]
16 Sep 2025
My guest today is Jeff Horing. Jeff cofounded Insight Partners and has been the Managing Director since 1995. This is one of Jeff’s first public conversations about building one of the world’s most successful technology investment firms with over $100 billion in AUM. Jeff reveals the mechanics behind Insight's legendary sourcing machine—60-80 people systematically calling companies worldwide. He explains their contrarian "one fund" strategy that deploys $12 billion across everything from $10M growth deals to billion-dollar buyouts, and why he thinks this creates unmatched competitive advantages. We discuss remarkable talent diaspora, AI representing a "TAM accelerator," and Insight’s five-ingredient framework for perfect investments. Please enjoy this great conversation with Jeff Horing. For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here. ----- This episode is brought to you by Ramp. Ramp’s mission is to help companies manage their spend in a way that reduces expenses and frees up time for teams to work on more valuable projects. Go to Ramp.com/invest to sign up for free and get a $250 welcome bonus. – This episode is brought to you by AlphaSense. AlphaSense has completely transformed the research process with cutting-edge AI technology and a vast collection of top-tier, reliable business content. Invest Like the Best listeners can get a free trial now at Alpha-Sense.com/Invest and experience firsthand how AlphaSense and Tegus help you make smarter decisions faster. – This episode is brought to you by Ridgeline. Ridgeline has built a complete, real-time, modern operating system for investment managers. It handles trading, portfolio management, compliance, customer reporting, and much more through an all-in-one real-time cloud platform. Head to ridgelineapps.com to learn more about the platform. ----- Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Show Notes: (00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best (00:08:35) Insight Partners' Investment Strategies (00:13:06) Evaluating Software Businesses (00:22:51) The One Fund Strategy (00:29:32) The Evolution of Insight's Sourcing Strategy (00:35:09) Operationalizing the Sourcing Process (00:44:43) Adapting to Market Changes and Strategies (00:49:45) Navigating Market Corrections and Investment Strategies (00:51:40) Challenges and Opportunities in Venture Buyouts (00:54:12) Talent Development and Retention at Insight (00:56:03) The Importance of Sourcing and Pattern Recognition (01:02:08) Scaling and Operationalizing Investment Strategies (01:20:24) Impact of AI on Investment and Software Markets (01:27:40) Reflections on Winning and Selling Strategies (01:30:34) The Kindest Thing Anyone Has Ever Done For Jeff
Chapter 1: What insights does Jeff Horing share about building Insight Partners?
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Chapter 2: How does Insight Partners evaluate software businesses?
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Chapter 3: What is the One Fund Strategy and its competitive advantages?
Ridgeline is a technology partner, not a software vendor, and the people really care. I get sales calls all the time and I ignore them. Ridgeline sold me very quickly. We went from 7 billion to 23 billion and the goal is 50 billion. Ridgeline was the clear front runner to help us scale. In your view, what most distinguishes Ridgeline? They reimagined how this industry should work.
Chapter 4: How has Insight's sourcing strategy evolved over time?
It was obvious that they were operating on another level.
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I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus Review, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing.
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My guest today is Jeff Horing. Jeff co-founded and leads Insight Partners and has been the managing director since 1995. This is one of Jeff's first public conversations about building one of the world's most successful technology investment firms with over $100 billion of assets under management. Jeff reveals the mechanics behind Insight's legendary sourcing machine.
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Chapter 5: What challenges and opportunities exist in venture buyouts?
It's 60 to 80 people systematically calling companies worldwide. He explains their contrarian one-fund strategy that deploys $12 billion across everything from $10 million growth deals to billion-dollar buyouts and why he thinks this creates unmatched competitive advantages.
We discuss their remarkable talent diaspora, AI representing a TAM accelerator, and Insight's five-ingredients framework for perfect investments. Please enjoy this great conversation with Jeff Horing. I thought it would be fun to begin with a weird but interesting question for our past conversations, which is...
If you could go back in time and think about the original SoftBank Vision Fund, which was $100 billion, huge fund. Of course, everyone was talking about it. Who knows what will end up happening with it? The story is still not fully written. But if you could go back in time and you were fully personally in charge of deploying that $100 billion fund, how would you have approached that problem?
It's a lot of money to put out the door in a couple of years. How would you have done it personally?
First of all, it was an eye opener to me when it happened. And we had a small strategy that I always envisioned could be a big strategy, but maybe to go backwards and say, what are the best private equity venture deals of all time? This is a cheat answer. It's not the real answer. But in my own view, probably the most cleanest, best example of return is probably VMware.
Technically, EMC was the private equity buyer. It's about $650 million and sold it for 60 billion. So that's a $60 billion gain plus or minus. You could argue Instagram billion to probably a trillion. YouTube is probably a billion to a trillion.
Interesting, if you look at some of the M&A that strategic companies have made with some synergy that probably delivered a portion of that gain, but I would argue a lot of that was going to happen independent. PayPal, another good example, almost no real eBay effect that drove that.
we had done a bunch of what we call venture buyouts and some were growth buyouts and these could have been 100 million dollar investments of taking control of smaller software companies where we made five six sometimes more times our money i just always had in my head i would love to be competing
with Microsoft or Palo Alto or eBay for a deal because then the entrepreneur is like, wow, I could have my cake and eat it too. I could sell to Jeff for a billion dollars my next Instagram and still retain massive ownership, maybe even get reloaded on the options. I'm not 100% sensitive on those sometimes in that kind of a deal. And we've done that.
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Chapter 6: What are the five ingredients for perfect investments according to Insight Partners?
Palo Alto pays $500 million for 30 guys in Israel. That's a different game that we can't really compete with.
So if you were to size a fund today, for the best possible risk-adjusted return, where like fund size dictates the strategy, where do you think you would size it? I think we're pretty close.
What's your marginal one? We're about 12 billion. We're deploying three plus billion a year in invested capital across a range of strategies, but we definitely don't feel capital constrained to the opportunity set. I think if we were to, and I don't think this is part of our strategy, lean in on some of these
Chapter 7: How does AI serve as a TAM accelerator for investments?
big late stage growth rounds, you could envision a bigger fund. Certainly others have raised money specific to target that type of deal flow, but that's not really the thing that that's more of a better version of that vision fund where you're buying into open AI or anthropic and big volume at late stage prices.
We don't lose sleep over that not being our core strategy. What do you make of this? You were an investor in the big Databricks round and Anthropic more recently. What do you make of the late stage private markets today? It's gotten so interesting and crazy relative to when you started Insight.
You've had a bunch of folks on this podcast I've heard who've talked about the changing private public market dynamics. And Databricks is still a private company at this scale is sort of unheard of. You could argue OpenAI is still a young company, relatively speaking to the timing of its revenues.
Chapter 8: What reflections does Jeff have on winning and selling strategies?
But for reasons that maybe represent just the shifting of capital, companies are staying private longer and doing basically IPO plus plus plus rounds in the private markets. We look at these like we look at anything else through a lens of what's the forecast, what's the likely exit value and what's the return on that capital.
Once in a very rare while, you see something at size that prices in a way that you feel like you can make risk adjusted venture like returns.
Maybe a fun thing before we get into insights strategy specifically is to talk about your day and your life as an investor. What's interesting and unusual about you, there's basically nothing available about you on the internet. You don't give interviews like this. You seem to just be a heads down investor. You could have long ago retired.
My sense from talking to some people on your team and talking to you is that you're working about as hard as you've ever done it. What does a given week look like for you?
It starts with some internal meetings, investment committee, people's new deals, partners meeting to spend time together and saying, so this is first day back kind of day in this case, but that would be a typical Monday. A big portion of my day is going to be dedicated to prospects.
And I make a point, as do most of my senior partners, to be spending as much time as possible hearing the stories, whether it's in person or by Zoom, of new companies. Then there'll be a fair amount of portfolio calls. So I probably had three calls so far today on portfolio companies, hopefully more strategic in nature than just what's your latest quarter.
And then some internal meetings on how we're scaling the firm and using AI to do diligence and all sorts of fun things like that. So it's a blend of where I think I can contribute what I try to do. No one's perfect. I spend as little time as possible on things I'm not good at, of which there's a pretty long list. So those are areas where I think I can have a meaningful impact and also enjoy it.
So it's a lot of fun for me to do that.
What would you say is the skill on the prospect side, evaluating a founder, a business, whatever, that you've most improved at over the entirety of Insight's existence? So you today versus you in 95, 96.
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