YouSaid · the spoken record

Jeff Horing

lines on the record: 92
first: 2025-09-16
most recent: 2025-09-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Access for me who had no one else to talk to. Nice air issues, challenges, and focus. So that to me was certainly one of the best things that happened to my career.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mentoring has always been an area where some of it might be broadly self-interested, but most of that is selfless. And I've had two examples, but my first job at Warburg, the person I work for there, pulled me out of a hat in terms of resume, saw something in me that no one else did. I think I tried getting a job at 100 firms. And he was the only one who was willing to hire me. I learned a lot in that experience as well. But then I think when I started Insight, we sort of randomly bumped into an interview by the name of Steve Friedman, who's the just then retired CEO of Goldman Sachs. I think it was a mutual connection from one of the high net worth guys at Goldman that knew one of my partners. Steve, for reasons I still don't know, one of the nicest guys I've ever met took me under and gave me amazing counsel in the first decade, ultimately introduced me to his co-CEO, Bob Rubin, who also became part of that mentoring. And just with such a nice”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's definitely a lot of positives in our culture that don't get seen by entrepreneurs. It's a combination of we don't have to be the loudest voice at the table ever. We want to be the most helpful voice at the table and we don't need credit for that help. So we want to stand behind the founders who really do a lot of good work internally that reflects itself in as much as you can do in this industry at really collaborative teamwork approach. And we've got a big firm and there's no doubt you'll always have people stepping on toes, but by and large, the idea is to really support each other in a meaningful way. We talked about winning, which is a big part of us. We also just never want to give up. We really, really want to be there to the end. We're lead investors. We're not passive investors. Somebody's going to be on top of these companies until the end. It's important for us, even though that's not where you make money. Those are the worst hours of ROI that you can possibly get is taking a deal that's gone sideways and trying to fix it.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're feeling much more of a rinse and repeat model. I don't think we have crazy ambitions to expand the business beyond what we're really good at. We'll absorb what we think are great deals, but the bar has never been higher since summer of 22. We've been pretty focused on making sure that we make as much money as possible for LPs. I'll call it a little bit more boring. I had at one time firm building ambitions that I still have a little bit of where we could add assets and making us the world's best software company what would make me a great partner for my portfolio. We still have some of that ambition, but it's going to take a different flavor.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had a good year on that one. We've sold a lot this year, but the easy things are the ones that come naturally, IPO, strategic knocks on your door, they pull you in, you sell. The harder one is when you have to push it to make it happen. I think at one point 99, we had a 4X on our 99 fund in the public markets that we couldn't sell, that we're locked up. And by the time we could get off the lockup, it was down to a 1x. These are quick windows that come and go and you kind of learn. Some of this was also, we put COVID as a piece of it, which was a combination of demand shift and change, you know, some ideas that look great 2021 virtual conferences looked like a great idea that felt like that could really have legs even post-COVID. The answer is they had no legs after COVID or very little legs. And then some of it was just us decision making, probably not what we thought it was over Zoom. And we had like everybody else a year of remote work really, really.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't care about beating other people so much as just satisfaction, my own success in winning. So it's a different kind of drive than I think other people get. I have friends who I play golf with. Want to beat me. That's what drives them. I'm like, I just want to get my own score as low as possible. If you shoot a 65, high five and you'll buy you beer. I'll be the happiest guy to give you 20 bucks. I don't really care at all if I have a good round. And I think the culture of the firm has maybe modeled after that. I attracted people like that, but I would say the majority of us are much more focused on our own success than it is that somebody else isn't at the other end of that successful. That's what gets us a little endorphins for the day.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They will build products as well. I don't think it's a great use of time in most of the legacy apps to be trying to out engineer them with a new product. There's just more to that market than just the actual body of code that runs your core banking. There's just a lot more going on. I think we're still quite a ways away from even getting to the point where the speed to which you could build software is so dramatically better.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“generating and getting the data well if i could automate a big portion of the 95 of the time that you're getting data into the system that's hugely valuable we've got already half a dozen or more companies really re-accelerating off of new products that they've launched in very short time frames that are creating massive tam expansion for their businesses and i have no doubt the bigger public companies are working aggressively at the same thing like microsoft microsoft looks at that could i build a new powerpoint with it probably i don't know maybe but can i make powerpoint the existing product way better with a copilot probably can i think that's way more interesting or adobe how much better is adobe that has a 3 market share of humans to photoshop and now could expand it to 20 because user interface and learning curve has gone down by an order of magnitude my suspicion is this is largely tam expanding for the established companies”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Budget. I think you'll probably be seeing a lot of companies feeling the pain of that's not the cool kid on the block to buy a CRM software today. That's just not my priority. I want to automate something else. So that matters. That's growth rates. There's obviously a few companies that are probably more squarely challenged by what it can do because they're probably working around documents and doing image recognition, things like that. What's your point of existence now? By and large, I don't worry about the usefulness of software so much as the budget being moved away from software to AI. And then on the flip side, which is what we're really focused on, is it's a massive TAM accelerator. My core software is not as sexy, but now I can go after a whole set of problems that my customers have that I before could never automate. I'm on the board of a couple CRM-like vertical applications where we're just capturing data. 95% of the person's day is...”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because that's not what Software Ever was. There was never a technology barrier. It was always a business knowledge barrier. Maybe you could literally have AI look at SAP and plagiarize it and try and build something equivalent. I'm just not worried about that market changing the cost of developing. First of all, we haven't seen any of it in our companies. The cost of developing software is inching down, but it's not collapsing overnight. And I can't explain exactly why. But the idea that a complex application is going to get built just because we have a better productivity tool. We've gone through generations of productivity tools in software development. This is more profound for sure for those who are old enough. The 4GL was a pretty profound tool too. Back in the day, you just had a database with a screen. Applications weren't all that complicated. And the 4GL was meant to basically make it really easy to build the screens. It was impactful, but it didn't radicalize every SAP and all these other companies didn't get displaced because of it. But it's taking away a lot of problems.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What you could do as a consumer and watching my own family in the last three months convert from Google search to Gemini or to ChatGPT. And it was a game changer in so many ways. And we kind of were playing around the edges of it in some ways. And then about a year ago, we started to see the application of it where we really played the most in the commercial landscape. And now you're seeing phenomenal. I mean, we probably have 25 Agentic AI bets that we think could be really profound in the commercial markets. We've been noodling on all sorts of impacts it's going to have, but it's clearly a phenomenal growth engine. It's also sucking a lot of the air out of the traditional software market. So I think the bear case on software, hey, I could just use Claw to write my next SAP or not losing any sleep over that. Quite the opposite.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Because the blockchains, no one could articulate use case. And it was back when I debated this with people, I was 12 years in. Come on. There's a whole religion around it. And maybe someday every bank will be on it, whatever. But it's definitely way longer than anyone forecasts to be valuable. And I certainly had a funny story someone once told me, all the technology guys that love blockchain think the technology is kind of meh, but the finance aspects of it are really cool. And all the finance guys are like, the finance aspects of this aren't so great, but the tech looks really cool. I'm like, huh. Nobody was like, this is the best database I've ever seen in my life who understood database technology. And finance guys are like, this isn't really how the world in finance is going to work. So we've looked at other waves of technology and been a lot more sanguine about the potential and even the self-driving car. That was a big hotspot a decade ago. That was more vision. This one is different. And I don't know if it was the problems it could solve immediately. This certainly the consumer side of this is mind-blowing.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Remember a bunch of years ago, even before the chat GPT aha moment, and I'm not the technology wizard in the firm by any stretch, but we were already doing vision deals, and I could see language was next. I was like, imagine if you can automate vision in language in the workforce. There's a lot of jobs for that's pretty much what you do. I started talking about it at some of the LP meetings, and then we were doing the vision stuff, which was not in any way exploding like a language has exploded. Not sure why. Like never got the buzz. I don't know, but vision just for whatever reason was good, but not compelling. And you could look at MRI companies. 10 years later, they're 80 million. That's like the biggest one maybe. What happened to that? I can't explain it. But for some reason, the language took off. We looked at other waves and it was pretty easy for us to kind of sit on the sidelines. Others on your show are big fans of blockchain. Maybe now it's crypto.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great business if you don't get fired, you're going to be pretty successful. The impetus to really stick your neck out on the spectrum is really low. Especially in bigger organizations, I hope they make mistakes. My biggest frustration with one of my partners who left was the things he didn't do. Why don't we do that deal? We always had five reasons not to do it. He was very conservative and to the point where we missed a bunch of really good things. You need the balance. I've got a lot of partners who are holding people back from the cliff. It's a good yin-yang of some folks that are going to make you feel really scared to stick your neck out, but then hopefully, especially my senior partner, is knowing I've got their back always. I am never going to get upset with somebody if they took a calculated risk that didn't go well.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, you could see this with the secondary market. It's a little hidden secret. Go look at how things trade in the secondary market. If when you're at 70 cents on the dollar, your marks aren't honest. We look at GDR growth rate. Those are the two things we're going to look at in valuations. And that could be a really disappointing three or four times revenues for a lot of companies that were backed in that timeframe where they're not growing fast and they have low GDR.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We can mobilize 15 people from my McKinsey brains to my sales ops team or marketing ops team to dive in and really try and uncover as much as we can in that very short time window that we have. Once in a while, I probably am the only one who does what I call concept deals at a big price, even I'm not doing that right now. I'll do a little bit of those on the smaller side where I feel like a unique team with unique technology and there's not a lot of numbers to support it. But that's going to be a allocated part of the portfolio that's going to be very small. That's more risk managed again by check size. And we have that benefit. So when we start seeing something that maybe our spidey senses are tingling and we're like, this could be something special, maybe we could use check size to manage it more intelligently. But it's really not a big part of the portfolio. It's not what our DNA is. We started with growth, not saying we're only in growth, but we try to put some metrics around most of what we do.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Three hours I can get a lot of instincts. My instincts may be more on, I'll call it the intangible excitement around the deal. Other partners are really good at the financial side. We keep tweaking that a little bit, but that was fundamentally a breakthrough in how we can try and scale judgment without breaking the model and saying let's just have pods of very experienced partners managing and working with other partners, both operating partners and young hungry deal partners, and combine that DNA into a more cohesive team approach and then make sure that an investment committee member owns every single deal. And if somebody leaves, it's on me. If somebody screws up, it's on me. And there's no hiding it.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While and we realized that young partner has a deal comes to me and it's like mom and dad, I'm a little busy hearing one third of what's coming out of my mouth. I pitch him the deal. He nods his head. We do the deal. Deal blows up. Jeff doesn't want to spend time on it because I didn't really take ownership of it. And all of a sudden, young partner's now stuck with a deal that's in trouble. And we're like, this isn't working. We need to think about how you get the most experience on the judgment as well as the other parts of the operation that were more obvious. And so we said, well, look, there's some of us who've been here at the time it was six of us for 20 years. We've all built track records. We've all been through multiple cycles. We have enough time in the day to meet every company that a team of people that would work with us, including young partners, sources. We don't do that many deals a year except for 2021, but it wasn't an insurmountable number. It wasn't like I needed to spend 20 hours on another partner's deal.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You want to keep a bar high, and we've definitely over the years sometimes fucked that up and been caught up in the moment, if you will. We looked at scale in that lens and we're like, this is win-win-win. We were in the right position to do it because we were organizationally already aligned on sourcing. We were already aligned on management. So we had a really think through the investing side and the selection side. And that was the part that we definitely didn't do perfectly the start. We hired young kid becomes less young, becomes principal, and ultimately junior partner. They were on their own and we kind of had a little bit of partners or underwriting deals. We bring it to the investment committee and we debate the deals, which is pretty typical, I'd say, of a lot of firms that have grown is they have senior partners, young partners, but usually they're kind of all doing their own tennis match. Everybody goes out, plays tennis compare scores, and we won the match or we won the tournament. We were trying to be more like a soccer team, but we played tennis for a little bit.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“we love and know. If we put aside all those other ideas and said we're not going to just chase bigger deals because they're bigger, we'll do a bigger deal because the world's gotten bigger. That's fine. Databricks, if you just divide everything by 10, looks like a great classic growth deal. There's nothing unique about it other than it just happens to have more zeros in its business model, OpenAI even more true. If you just turn 12 billion into 12 million, you're like, wow, this is a fast-growing company. Why wouldn't I jump at writing a $10 million check? So some of this was just looking at a world that's just gotten tremendously bigger to when we first started where that would be a good reason to write a bigger check. But if we sort of just said we're going to keep the same underwriting criteria in the same market and just grow with the market, market's getting bigger, which means there's more good deals out there. We're really good at winning them and finding them. Why shouldn't we consider them? Why should we just stick to some smaller strategy or artificially constrain what we do if understand?”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five, ten years before that at InSight. But geographic scaling is a really common strategy for a lot of folks, but I could see why LPs would be nervous about that. And lastly, people scale by doing something that they weren't doing before. I'm a great software investor now. I'm going to do healthcare. Now I'm going to do financial services, or now I'm going to do credit or something maybe that's outside my core competency. And Blackstone and others have done that really successfully. But you could argue it's not easy. Maybe Blackstone did a great job of it, but two other firms didn't get those top quartile funds in the areas that they didn't have a lot of experience in trying to scale. And certainly there's plenty of examples where firms fought something in a different asset class and struggled to make it work. We kind of said, well, we don't need to do any of those things. Software's just growing. We're barely scratching the surface on what we do already. Why can't we just do more of good deals in the category?”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A decade ago, most firms that scaled scaled in a few dimensions that were understandably scary for an investor. One was I'll do bigger deals, smaller deals. Like maybe they're priced differently. Maybe the competitive landscape's different. There's a lot of reasons why just writing a bigger check often won't yield better returns. So scaling by check size was not necessarily a clear direction in my view of how to do scale. Some might scale with geography. We tried that. Was that painful? We're 90% in New York City by headcount and probably 100% by investment commitments, certainly IC is all in New York. It's really hard to export judgment. We had a European team that raised the European fund and it was the worst of all timing. It was 2000 and I was ready to pull my hair out. It was so hard to create consistent thinking and judgment that you could say, okay, that judgment reflects the same judgment that we built over the...”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I could see everything. Might have to debate how you pick, but great that you get every pitch. You could certainly see how winning can get better with scale. I've got more resources I could support every round that you need. It could be your one-stop shop. And then obviously on the operational side, that's the biggest impact scale could have because now I could really hire the best and the brightest on my team that could support your business.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Others have cultivated networks in different ways and winning could be, I'm just going to get on the plane and do it, an individual partner that works my tail off and it's not very leverageable, but it's certainly a good strategy. How do you institutionalize, systematize that and operationalize it is not easy. We found also scale was a real opportunity. And I heard Mark Andrewson talk about this too. Every industry, but ours was considered to be better as they got bigger. For some reason, this type of investing, tech investing was like, no, we want you to be a cottage industry. We're smartest partners do all the work. I remember very distinctly sitting down with one of my partners in 2015. I'm like, why the LPs have this allergic reaction to the word scale? Because, again, everywhere else it seems good. I looked at those four buckets of what we do. I'm like, clearly sourcing is better with scale.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He woke up every day and it was like, How do I make that pencil do it something without a human touching it? That's how his brain worked and mine works in a very similar way from a more strategic side, but it sort of systematizing what tasks we do that we could have others do better. And then how do I create moat to the extent that it's possible? Because look, capital is not a huge mode. It was with the vision fund. That was like awesome strategy. I just outraised everybody in a way that I could do deals that no one else could do. Warburg Pink has had that for a while too. When I first joined, they were significantly larger than almost anyone else out there. But that's increasingly difficult. I think Toma Bravo could do that today with her scale in the bio world. Capital is tougher, though. So you just need to think about those four disciplines and say, well, how am I going to be way better? Some guys do it by appearing on podcasts and getting their thought out and their vision and excite the founding community of how smart they are about an industry. That's a perfectly legit way to get.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Outsource a lot of that know how. And then we have an investment arm to monetize that. There's lots of ways to skin the cat. We've just taken one approach. Some firms obviously could do it just by pure presence of being first, and they've made great investments over decades. Other firms might pick different industries. Some firms have done it in BioSpace where they've just used capital combined with expertise to just be able to clean in faster and harder. There's lots of ways to create moat, but most of us back our way into this life. I started when I was very young, but I think a lot come to this after they've had other careers and other things. And this is sort of a nice, fun thing to do and absolutely is putting rigor around that and operationalizing it. We hired one of my good friends years ago as a chief operating officer of InSight. He subsequently started his own firm, but he was a mechanical engineer at McKinsey who spent time at Putnam and Lean.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would say the majority struck me as our strategies were really good investors, which is true probably for some of these guys. They probably are really good investors. And they kind of tweak that into what might sound like a strategy, especially to some LPs. But I think if you really press what I just said, there's only four things we do. We find deals, we win deals, we select deals, and we make them work. And then you put that layer on, how do you do that better than everybody else, put selection aside because that's the hardest to institutionalize. How many firms really can articulate? And there's lots of ways to do it. Mark Andreessen was on here. He has an absolutely great strategy, different than us. And we could never do what he does. But he's thinking about it every day. And he's using his marketing engine that he was just recently quoted as basically, I'm a marketing firm with an investment arm. I wanted to be a software company with an investment arm. That was kind of my pitch 10 years ago to LPs. That's how I thought of myself. People could think of us as we know so much about software.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we've really surrounded those two functions with resources that we think could be competitive. And we've helped jumpstart companies where we've gotten the first 10 million of revenue. It's a big impact in the journey of some of these companies in terms of getting them started. We really push hard to bring that program to be as big as it can be and constantly innovating on that. It's all about winning. And so it's a combination of personal connections, showing up and caring about the entrepreneur's problems. They have choice. We know they have choice. They're the winners. We're just here for the ride.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First and foremost showing up hard, getting on planes, invited or uninvited showing up to people's doors and asking them to have a conversation. We started with gee, we know software really well. We can introduce you to five friends who could help you out run your Salesforce, run your marketing organization to 130 people from super smart McKinsey folks that could do any analytical thinking that you might need to the best of the best sales process folks to marketing process to HR process. We bought pretty expensive large interest in Riviera partners, which is the largest tech recruiting firm for CTO and CPO talent, which is really an interesting asset, especially in the AI age where talent is everything. We've put a lot of emphasis on talent. We've got 15 people that do nothing but liaise with Fortune 500 companies. If you're a CEO, first and foremost, give me revenue. If you're a small company, that's number one ask. Number two, ask will be give me people.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On that, we're really, really good in our sweet spot. We still could use our sourcing to our advantage on the early stuff, but we have to use the sourcing to get us that edge. If you just lined us up against the best of the best and the value, those guys are awesome. I'm not saying we're going to be able to connect the dots that they connect because they're just using different dots to me what I'd call intangibles work.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We see every pitch picking in the middle is awesome or picking on the edge is okay. When you see something that's got a little bit of an edge to it on the source where the numbers are pretty tight and the valuation is not West Coast crazy, we're really good and we're really good at winning too. So if you really think about what I do for a living, you got to win deals, you got to pick them, and you got to make them work. That's it. On the picking, we're really good in that middle zone, especially some of my partners that can parse the numbers, look at the trends, and figure out how to get that spreadsheet as accurate as possible. At the edges, it inherently gets harder. We have some disadvantages on early relative to California. The whisper is so strong here, you got to lean in. So there's that whisper deal flow and trends that we won't see. And on the buy outside, there's some equally great investors. It's a game of combination of discipline, focus, and operational execution. And there's some great firms out there. So I think we do a very good job.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the same as the product driven strategies that other venture funds have. And we are a big pattern recognition business. Investing is pattern recognition. Everyone can draw their own graphs out of those patterns, but that's fundamentally the core thesis. You could be the smartest guy in the world. But if you don't see the patterns or if you don't see the deals, your track record's not going to be that good. The culture of just how important sourcing is to being a successful investor, we just drill into people at a very young age that sticks with them in their later life. And I think it makes them look good to the peers that they have that didn't have.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is the Bill Purcell's question? This is my favorite question for C level executives. It's the same question. Who are your best proteges and where are they now? I have one good friend of mine who's retired now, but he's got 12 CEOs of some of the biggest best companies ever. Some of that was timing, right? It was days of Oracle and Oracle DNA was just awesome, but some of it was him. So he obviously built a great hiring system, spotted talent really well, and then cultivated that talent really well, and then had a system of thinking and approaching, in this case, software, but in our case, investing, that's really valuable. But I think ultimately the training you get at 23 at Insight is like no other job in the industry because all you're seeing is at bats. You're seeing more pitches than any other firm out there. You're 23 years old. Your brain is a sponge. It's just looking at all those pitches and you start seeing your own patterns. Inevitably, you're going to become a pretty good investor.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In a pretty tough environment, we try to make it fun too, but they really connect with each other and some of the best friends, I think, in the world have probably come out of that.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often do in one of the biggest ones that came out, I bent over backwards to see if we could find a role. But in the end, his entrepreneurial drive overwhelmed what we could possibly do without breaking the system. So sometimes we just can't break our model. And if you're that good and can raise that kind of money on your own, I can't replicate that economics for you. It's just not doable. One plus one equals three in that case. And we couldn't have raised the billion dollars that he was able to raise just on his track record. It's just inevitable, but I think it's healthy for us and 80% of them. We still have a really good relationship with these firms. We talk to them all the time. We do deals together. McKinsey has set a great precedent out there of what could be done if you embrace that network and don't take it as a negative, but take it as a positive. Obviously having partners at other firms, I think is great for us to see deals and there's still a lot of camaraderie of the classes never goes away because you're in that pit working 10 hour days.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit more driven from our public strategy, just to be clear, so it's not in the core fund. That's a good example of one where had I heard the story two years ago, I would have had a much more positive view earlier. This is a classic case where Darius' phenomenal CEO has a very, very thoughtful articulate view of his business. And the second you hear, you're like, okay, there is a mode, or there might be a mode. And obviously the numbers in the last four months there are incredible. It inflected with coding. When you sort of think about how he's invested around that, that's not accidental. That was intentional and probably defensible. It's a pretty interesting bet to make.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“whizzed we backed when it had zero revenue we loved everything we saw including team monday it was an interesting company but not the most obvious funded company was probably five million in size when we backed it and seen it was another public one i'm involved with it was four or five million in size when we got there so some of them just grow and have dams to support those exits but it's tempting to always go for the shiny objects and we fight a lot internally about how do you become part of the generational companies”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the buyouts were willing to take five points lower than everything else. Everything else is blended pretty close to the same 30% is kind of a gross number that you target. We probably miss a little bit more on the early stuff than the venture buyout. Our hit rate is just super high. It's a lower risk profile. So it's a market that's been a little bit better and very few competitors. And it plays perfectly to our sourcing engine. Because how do you find these companies that are selling salmon software to the salmon industry? That's not an easy source. That's people jumping on planes and calling up companies in Norway. It's not mainstream. They're not showing up at the conferences. They're not showing up on venture capital lists of hot companies to back or things of that nature.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“in a venture buy it, you get 30% Baked 10 growth, maybe some operational improvements, and then inorganic growth rates that can consolidate and give you tail outcomes.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early stages like 10% growth is probably 30% growth buyout, which is like this what we call venture buyout. It's probably another 40% and LBOs are probably 20%. The bio market look great when interest rates were zero and multiples were expanding and you went from 15 times cash flow to 20 times cash flow and that was a pretty interesting time to be leaning in. It's a little trickier today, but more entrance prices are pretty good freights are higher. Multiples aren't quite as clear. Growth rates are coming down a lot for big cap software. That's not a fixed number and we don't want it to be a fixed number. It's a guideline. We're never going to get super early as a big number. We feel like one, those get to be much bigger checks that could start at 10% and grow to 20% if we get back to an environment where we could be the lead investor in the next round. And then a lot of the venture buyouts M&A is a huge part of the strategy. So if you look at levers for winning.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then it started getting really competitive. Hedge funds came in, sovereign wealth came in. And as I mentioned earlier, some of those rounds are now getting modeled at two to three X. A lot of things have to go right. So we said, well, we see it all. We could model them all. Why can't we just put risk against that model and try and find the markets that are the most attractive? The market recently corrected in 21. There wasn't a lot of things that you wanted to touch in growth. A lot of the companies that raised a ton of monies that didn't need it, but the ones that needed it, you didn't necessarily want to invest in. But then this whole middle got neglected again. We were like, oh, let's go lean back in on the middle where you've got these 30% growers that look really nice. Cash flows are good and they're salmon farms and roller coaster ride software and things that nobody's really putting a lot of mind to. And we did a bunch of those deals back in 23, 24. Now AI has probably re-energizing some of the growth stuff. But I like the idea of being able to move around the markets based on where we think the most.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Everything else is just a spreadsheet sits in between, and you're just trying to as accurately as possible put that spreadsheet together, risk adjust it, and then put a price against it and say, what's it going to be worth? There's a very big range of strategy that sits in that middle. And that was a view that we had, why constrain ourselves up until 2017, late stage pre-IPO growth was a”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Made a ton of money, especially in the venture buyouts, but the unlevered 30, 40 percent growers, they're tweeners. They're not growing fast enough for a minority investor to get super excited except at a very big discount. And they're not big enough TAMs for strategic to go jumping up and down saying I need to own this asset. So what happens to it? And my suspicion is there are tens of thousands of those now. They're good companies. They should belong somewhere. There's a lot more folks like us now willing to take those bets. So it's not quite the same market it was a decade ago. I said this to my LPs. Stage is not a strategy to me. You could argue seed investing is a very different skill set generally. It's not like we're incompetent to look at something quite that early. We're not nearly as good as a lot of the guys out there and we don't have quite the same deal flow. And buyouts requires a certain transactional skill set pretty straightforward to hire for. It's not like it hasn't been done before, not only in software, but in tons of other industries. There's plenty of skills to do it.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were high fiving with two times leverage from a crazy hedge fund that believed in us. That was considered a highly leveraged sulfur asset. Today, Verta 4 probably is nine times leveraged. Very different world. But that was the beginning of software buyouts, and we made a series of bets through the mid 2000s. And then we also started looking at taking control of really high growth companies. We had a company that was in Australia and the founders were ready to go surfing. And we had a CEO in our pocket that was ready to take over. And we're like, we'll take that risk. It's $5 million business, but we think we can transition to the new management team and we had the tech team sticking around. And the more confidence we got that we could own control of something and not risk the entrepreneurial DNA that went into it, or it was past that point where that was critical, the more we started looking at those types of deals. It's been a fantastic sector for us.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're okay running this. We could find a new CEO. Obviously, that's a big part of all venture capital jobs is keeping management where you want and not everything works out with the original team. We saw two deals that the owners were not typical shareholders. One was a former founder that had hired a full team and we bought the company from him or we bought his shares. We're like, well, we don't have to demotivate him. We don't even want him involved in the business. And then the other was owned by a large insurance company, which is now called Vertifor. That was the first buyout I'm aware of. It was probably a few others that were not done by private equity firms, but it was certainly one of the earliest buyouts in private equity in 2099. We just started to see the other side of software as it got bigger when they started generating cash flow, which till mid-2000s, very few got to that scale where you actually saw the profits and the cash flow coming in. That particular buyout was interesting.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Go back in time 90s. Software wasn't big enough to think about buyouts, even unleavered buyouts. It just didn't exist as an industry. And there was also a pretty strong belief, broadly in venture capital, that giving cash to a founder was a four-letter word. You never do that. That was rule number one. And I bet if you talk to some of the best of the best and ask them what they were like in the 90s, secondary sales to founders were just not acceptable. TA Summit, we're breaking that model a little bit in the 90s. When we dug into software, we pretty quickly realized if you built a good software company, assume that the risk there was at the founder got demotivated. That was the reason you didn't want to give them cash. Now he could afford a house. He's not going to work so hard. And we just felt like if we break it, we can own it and we can manage it. We just got a lot more confidence as we did more of these that if for whatever reason it didn't work out with the founder, they decided to retire, whatever it was.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we tried to be really thoughtful about it. And usually what we're trying to do intentionally is not reject but postpone because life changes, people's business get better and sometimes things are just not right for us then. The last thing you want to do is damage a relationship with a founder.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One could be, we definitely get turned off by that model. I think it's unjust, but it is what it is. Some people have a view they only want to talk to the top. These are good kids that are really working hard and they're going to get you to the top. Obviously, rejection is really tough too. By talking to so many people, we're obviously.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Got a lot of classic sales skills, which is hunger winning, probably lack of self-awareness. You'll make a phone call to anybody and not care. Ability to handle rejection well, but combined with a lot of content, the really good ones are going to get really deep. And those conversations they have with the founders are shocking. Remember one meeting distinctly in mid-2000s and the company was in New York, so I just popped over to meet the CEO. The first question out of the CEO's mouth is, where's the analyst? You just got me. Sorry. She's still in the office. So they get really connected. The letters you will see us get from founders on the relationship that the analysts had built, the trust that they built with these founders, and the work they do to generate real value for those founders before we invest is remarkable.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. They set it up. And today, every meeting was set up by the Alice, which is fun. The partners that work at other firms, the nice thing they have is that their calendar gets filled up by doing deals so they can't do more deals. It's sort of a nice regulator to deal flow. This sometimes could catch us a little bit because it's so much of what we've done and we've systematized that it's relatively easy for us to get my time set up, which is great, but it also means that it can go on forever. I can't say I'm too busy. These guys are out there hustling. I want to make sure that they get the attention they deserve. They're working so hard.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source