YouSaid · the spoken record

Deven Parekh

lines on the record: 91
first: 2025-08-15
most recent: 2025-08-15
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, I think we're pretty disciplined about how we've grown, and I'd be surprised if you see us have a lot more offices in five years. If you look at take Israel, which Jeff Hooring really drove that strategy for us to get into Israel, I think, and I'm going to get the numbers wrong slightly, but I think we had 60 or 70 companies in the portfolio before we put the first person on the ground. And at that point, There were six firms that had Five to ten people there that had portfolios of five or ten. Because I think the thing that we want to avoid is if you put somebody on the ground before you have a portfolio, then they need to rationalize their existence by creating a portfolio.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, really, it's really for presents. It's New York, it's San Francisco, it's London, it's Israel. Those are really the four places.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're not in the same flow of those companies sometimes as people might be seeing those people all the time. But on balance, I think we've done okay and we've managed to sell to a bunch of strategics. And so I don't think it's hurt us. To be”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We think there's an advantage now, but maybe we're just convincing ourselves that because we live here, but I think that not being, I mean, I can tell you what the disadvantages are, but I think the advantages not being in the bubble. Like we're not all having breakfast at bucks and talking about the same 20 deals. Now, maybe that's bad if those 20 deals or the deals you have to be in, but there's a tendency to have everybody kind of want to do the same thing. And I think not being in that every day lets you step back more and kind of decide what you want to do as opposed to what everybody else is doing. You know, I think there's a disadvantage too, like the strategic buyers are all out there.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, even as a public market investor, you'd say that a company that's growing at 10% is going to have a different valuation than a company that was going to grow at 30%. Now, how do you even start thinking about a company that's growing at 100%? It's hard to think about. And it's not hard to think about it for a year, but if something can grow 100% for three years. And then even if it deaccelerates and compounds off three years of 100% growth, That's a pretty high multiple that you can pay. So the way we really think and talk about it is not valuation doesn't matter, but we think about it in terms of if you're paying a high multiple, then your conviction needs to be high on the growth rate. Now, you're not always going to be right, right? And that's part of the business. We just have to be right enough.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the growth. And this is why these markets are not efficient. You can have very high conviction on XYZ companies' growth, and I can have low conviction. And one of us will likely be right. And if I was right and did it, good for me. And if I was right and didn't do it, it just depends on who's right. So I think the way we think about it is. All of these deals today, certainly AI deals on a multiple of revenue basis, are going to feel expensive. Of course, you have to look at growth adjustment.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Generally, not always, but generally, the price we paid, if the company hit the numbers that we thought they were going to hit, even if the price seemed high on current revenue feels reasonable. So companies that even recently AI companies that seemed expensive six months ago don't look so expensive six months later just based on kind of how their run rate revenue has changed. So the way we think about this is we do care about valuation. We lose deals on valuation. But that doesn't mean the deals that we win aren't high absolute valuations. It's just how much conviction do we have?”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, I'm not going to say the valuation doesn't matter, but I think what you can say is that it's a line that one of my partners uses that we don't overpay. Companies just miss their numbers, which is just, I mean, it's set in yes, but really the point is.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They're guesses. Yeah, okay. I mean, look, in an early stage deal, it's a guess. I think the person who wrote a check in Palantir didn't know that Palantier was going to become what Palantir became. But they saw an entrepreneur with a vision, with a potentially large market, and decided to make the bet that this person could execute and turn into that larger market, right?”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the team then goes out and kind of executes on that. And then if, say, we sign a term sheet, they'll come back with a more detailed diligence package that goes through all the typical diligence things you'd assume. That gets reviewed and discussed again. Sometimes there's follow-up questions that come out of that. Sometimes there's not. It has to get through that second approval process. And then if it gets through that approval process, then we would then fund. Before anything even gets there, we have a number of teams, their staff with these sourcing analysts and associates and mid-level people that really do the hard work before something even gets the investment committee. So Ryan and Richard both run a team. And they each have their slightly different focuses, but they each run a team. And they're meeting with their team on even more ongoing basis to kind of prioritize the deals that we want to pursue.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, look, first of all, that's the beauty of, I think, our model two, which is while we might all have slightly different focuses or areas, we're all just investing in software. If you contrast that to firms where somebody's a biotech partner and somebody's a software partner and someone who's an industrial partner, that's much, much harder because you really don't have any sense of each other's businesses. Here the key metrics are common across all of these things. There might be some technical understanding around infrastructure product or what might be happening in a particular vertical that a partner might have. But the key metrics are the same. And so our process is that every deal, no matter how small or how big, goes through the same investment committee process. We meet once a week kind of common like a lot of other firms out there. And the team, whoever the team is, presents the deal to the IC. We debate it. We ask questions. We ask for follow-up information. And out of that either comes, this is something we want to pursue. We don't want to pursue. We only want to pursue, but only at kind of this valuation.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Top four partners, the top six partners, the top eight partners. The vast majority of those people all grew up with an insight. And we've really created a culture, if you join insight as an analyst, you can make it to the top. And that's very different than a lot of firms out there. And I think that's created a very positive entrepreneurial culture where we give people a lot of autonomy. We give people a lot of ability to find new areas to invest in and magic happens.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and others. So Mike Tripolit and Jeff Lieberman, we have so many people who've kind of contributed to the success of the firm. Ryan actually joined InSight as a summer intern right out of college. He's now on the investment committee. Richard Wells joined us out of Harvard Business School after a successful career at TCD and some other firms and has been a huge driver of returns. He's had some great deals that have exited just this year. I think that one of the things that we're most proud about at InSight, and this is also, I think, very different than a lot of firms out there, is that If you look”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we're able to do in those situations is find the ones that are interesting companies and we go to the shareholders and say, we'll buy 70% of the company, we'll buy 100% of the company, you can either choose to roll some of your investment if you think there's upside. If not, we'll give you a return, whatever it is. And then we were able to take control of those companies. What happens in a lot of these venture companies is they have very diffuse cap tables, right? You have seven, six, five different people, five different opinions. It's actually hard for the CEO to get alignment with their board on what the strategy should be. We can create that alignment. And so maybe he really wanted to execute an M&A strategy, but only half the investors were willing to put up more capital. We're able to, in that case, clean up the cap table and then make whatever changes in strategy team, whatever it might be that are necessary with a totally aligned board. That's a strategy that touches both. It touches some element of venture.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're going to interview an LP, they'd say, Well, I'm not getting enough money back. I don't have enough DPI. And so I'm overallocated. That's probably the number one complaint that institutional investors have. Well, if you look in venture, there's just a massive amount of funding of companies and company creation and funding over the last. So you have thousands of companies out there. Many of them have not reached a scale where they're ready to go public or have a strategic really be focused on them. They just don't have the scale yet.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What the film is doing. And I think things, just overall, things are blurring in this world. One of the areas that we're very active in right now. Is something that we call venture buyouts. And you'd say, Well, okay, like that seems like that's both, and to some degree it is. But what is it really? Well, what's the biggest issue you hear right now in private equity?”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And what we've done is if you think about every functional area of a software organization, whether that be sales, marketing, product, customer introduction, strategy, and now AI transformation, we have a team for each one of those areas, and we have a team for each one of those areas that's also stage focused, right? So we have a team that works with early stage companies. We have a team that works with mid-stage companies, we have a team that works with more mature companies because the recruiting needs for a company with $500 million of revenue are very different than the recruiting needs for a company with $5 million of revenue. And that team is over $125 people that's focused on really making sure that the companies, they're getting the benefit of not just anything we know, best in class thinking outside the firm, best in class within the portfolio. And those three things together is really, I think, what allows us to have a very...”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think of it as McKinsey or Bain if you walk into the office, you won't see a lot of those people in the office because if they're doing their job, they're actually at their clients. In our case, our clients are our portfolio companies.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Software investors out there. The second thing is the way we source, though more firms are doing it now, which is we have over 60 people full-time. That's all they do is deal sourcing. And think of it as our outbound sales team, but it's a really smart outbound sales team that are people who won their successful end up being partners at InSight. And what we're able to do is have tremendous market intelligence because we're talking to anywhere from 20,000 to 30,000 companies a year. Obviously investing in a much smaller set of those. And then the third thing is our kind of a value add approach, right? Because all investors like to say they add value. It's hard to do. Very early on in 2000 created what we call insight on-site. And the reason it's called Insight OnSight is because those team members are meant to be on-site at the company as opposed to in our office.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So probably the only stage that we don't really play is seed and preseed. But we will do everything from a series A. All the way to a buyout. We have the capability to go across the continuum. I think that's important both ways, right? Like if you're a buyout investor as an example, particularly in a field like technology, which is changing quickly, not knowing what's going on at the early stage, what could be becoming this disruptive is kind of a risky way to be investing in more mature companies, particularly in an AI world where that transformation is happening a lot faster. And the flip side, you know, I think on the early state side, understanding what does it take for a company to actually be public? What does it take for a company to actually be able to raise the bees in C's and D rounds? And what are the key metrics to make, and having the network and ecosystem to be able to help companies do that? It's helpful to have your midstage and growth stage business too. So I think the ability for us to be able to invest across that continuum really makes us pretty unique relative to most other”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I think the approach that we take is we're really software investors, but we're stage agnostic. And what does that mean?”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And my roommate at the time went to go volunteer for college Democrats. This is a first semester of freshman year. Second semester freshman year, I asked my roommate to come check out the DP, the newspaper. And he asked me to do the same. And senior year, I was president of college Democrats, and he was editor-in-chief of the newspaper. Neither would have happened without us kind of having totally different interest. And he's now in journalism. So, you know, I just think that there's a lot of these things. And so those interests, that interest policy related things is interest I've had ever since college and kind of over time I've been able to engage in those things in a more meaningful way.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, those are the things I do outside of the office. I think I've always had a belief that if you're successful, you kind of owe it to give back. So that's one. Two is intellectual interest, right? The things that I'm involved in are things I've always been really interested in. And even in some of these, I talked about how I ended up going to Warden because who my roommates were. Another story was when I was in college, my freshman year, I went to go write for the newspaper, the Daily Pennsylvania, which is a pretty well-known college newspaper.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because I just got lucky. Rising tide lifts all boats. Yeah, that's right. And you don't know whether you're on a yacht or a boat with a hole. But they all rise because the water's rising. At least Tempora. Exactly. That's right.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More disruptive than it could be jobs, it could be relationships, it could be even like if you think about the world today where your world today where there's a tendency for parents, and I'll include myself in this to be too involved, right? Oh, my son got a B because he had a bad teacher. We all have bad teachers and bad bosses and bad roommates. But you learn to adapt. And I think sometimes you have to go through those things. And I think you learn from them, right? Bad relationships, I think you learn something from. So I think you have to, if you take the mindset that you can learn something in good times, you can learn something in bad times. I'd argue you probably learn more in the bad times. I think it's a valuable mindset to try to have. It's hard to have it when you're in the bad time.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a line grab in the early days, and the market corrected very quickly, I think four or five months after I got there. And when you look back, I mean, those were really, really hard years. But I actually think that's where you learn the most. It's easy to be a cheerleader when things are great. It's a lot harder to have to kind of dig into a business, including businesses that aren't going to make it and try to get to the best possible outcome. So from a learning standpoint, and I think this is sometimes the things I tell my kids is like, The worst time sometimes are the ones we're going to learn the most. And there's always going to be, you're going to get to the other side. It might not be the side exactly the way you wanted it, but there's no way you're going to look back and say you didn't get something out of that experience.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economically, it was not a great decision for years because I think I told my wife when I took the job, we just bought an apartment and she was pregnant with her first kit and I said, don't worry, I know I'm making less cash, but I can have all this equity and that equity was like five years. I hadn't really, she was like, I'm not sure I feel like this was the right trade. So you get there in 99 and the deal pace is frenetic. And so you're thinking like, oh, I'm learning so much. I'm getting all these deals done. I also got put on a ton of boards of companies. And the first thing I figured out was, well, a lot of these companies didn't really have a business model without raising a lot more capital. It wasn't just us. It was just that was that time.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. I joined it late 99, 2000, you remember that time? Sure. In some ways it was a great time, and in some ways it was a terrible time. I think in retrospect it ended up being a very good time for the following reason.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a shift in mentality. It's not like an on-off switch for that. But really the way I looked at it is I was, and the firm that I left very generously offered me the opportunity to take a pool of capital that they had and invest in technology as kind of as a way to maybe get me to consider staying there. And I said no, and it wasn't really an economic decision. What I said was I'm not really qualified to do that at that point in time and that one of the reasons I'm Making this shift is to actually learn how to do something.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was primarily at that point that very few institutional investors. So their fourth fund, Fund Four, was going to be their first institutional fund. And so the firm was very small from a number of people standpoint. It was about 10 people. Today we're 450 people, so it's a much larger firm today. But I think the harder part of the transition is it's very different being an advisor, which I wanted this transition, but it's very different being an advisor whose goal it is to kind of get a deal done to being a principal where your goal is not just to get a deal done, but to make sure it's a good deal. And that's a shift.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was 25 and a vice president, and I was like, oh, well, why would I go join a startup? Now all of a sudden, I lost my startup kind of bug. And so I didn't then, but I maintained a relationship with them. And then in 1999, when I was thinking of leaving barons to go do something on the principal side, I ended up kind of joining them when they were raising their first institutional fund.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, Jeffrey and Jeff Warring and Jerry Murdoch. And then they kind of came to the conclusion that they were going to kind of go do this on their own, that there wasn't really...”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So the two co founders of Insight, Jeff Hoaring and Jerry Murdoch, started They're pre effectively the predecessor to insight at Barron Simonella. And Baron Semonella was kind of a sponsor of these two guys who wanted to do something in technology really early. We were not technology experts. The firm didn't know anything about technology, but we thought we could help them raise capital, or at least the guys who ran the firm thought they could help. But we didn't really have a lot of competency in software. I was the closest thing they had to somebody who understood technology, which just means that I used it. And so I was kind of working with”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Heard of, and I said, Well, my downside case is I'll go to business school. Like, it's really not anyway. So I made that leap. And that was a It was a great experience. They were primarily kind of MA advisory, but then over time they were trying to figure out how to get into the principal business in some way.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a laundry list, and I started as an analyst at Blackstone in 1991 and then had the opportunity even kind of before I finished my analyst program to go to a startup, but it was just not a tech startup. It was an investment banking startup that was founded by Jeffrey Barnson and Ray Manella, who used to be the co-heads of merchant banking at Merrill Lynch. And so I left Blackstone to go to what was then a no-name and to some degree still not well known firm. And I remember having a conversation with my dad at the time who was like, he didn't really know who Blackstone was. And so when I took that job, he was like, well, why would you take Blackstone when you got all these offers from firms he'd heard of? And I was like, well, I think it's going to be really good firm. And then finally he got comfortable. That was a good idea. And I leave to go to this firm that knowing.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I worked for the summers. I worked at a small bio shop after my freshman year after my sophomore year, worked at Credit Suisse, and after my junior year, I was actually first Boston at the time. After my junior year, I worked at DLJ. And then I started at Blackstone. That's quite a...”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have the Twain ever met? They actually have. They have in two different ways. We do now have a team at InSight that does invest in kind of therapeutics, biotechnology kind of therapeutics. We have a team that does it. I'm involved in it, but I'm not the one doing those deals or leading those deals. But it's actually probably also manifested a lot more philanthropically. I'm on the board of NYU Langone. We're funding a bunch of research there as well as a bunch of other kind of universities. So philanthropically, it's been a big focus of mine. And so it's been able, I've been able to bring that kind of interest back into my life in a way that's been satisfying. Really interesting.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I ended up picking Wharton. And of course, people are like, well, what was the thought process you went through when you did that? And the thought process probably was not, it was I was impatient. And I saw the route for medical school was I was going to do four years in medical school. I was thinking at that point I also want to do research. I thought maybe I was going to get a PhD. There seemed like a long time in school before I could actually start my career as opposed to business. I could kind of jump in right away. And I always thought that at some point in the future I would somehow bring these two interests together. I didn't know how to do that.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Seven courses every semester and not these were not easy classes. These were like organic chemistry and quantitative finance. And I just thought this isn't going to be a great college experience if I do both. I kind of needed to pick. And so I...”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of fate in who your roommates are and the people you meet. And my roommates were all business. And I was the only kind of science person. And I thought, well, maybe I should take a finance course or an economics course. I did, freshman year, found it really interesting. And after my freshman year, I decided rather than doing working in science for the summer, I was going to work on Wall Street for the summer and I managed to get a job in Wall Street between my freshman and sophomore year, which was unusual at the time, but I did. I came back after that and said, well, maybe I can put these two interests together. And I was going to do biochemistry and finance. I was going to do the dual degree with a degree in Wharton and a degree in college. Now they have pre-set programs for all these things, but at the time they didn't. But it would involve taking between six and seven.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biochemistry, microbiology, actually won first place in microbiology at the International Science Fair. So my path was kind of being a doctor or probably being an MD PhD. I didn't actually start Penn in Wharton. I actually started in the College of Arts and Sciences. I started as a biochemistry major. I was doing research at the medical school. My freshman year. And I think at everything in life.”
2025-08-15 · Masters in Business · Deven Parekh on the State of Startup Investing · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source