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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“From somebody more junior, those junior people have a lot of influence at my firm. So they run my schedule for sure. But that's a hard to crack and the partners will get jumped on planes. And I've been this year to Estonia, Sweden.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First of all, we have now about eight teams, which are basically IC members who've been with me, most cases 20 plus years, six of us together for at least 25 years, a few 10 years. And that's kind of the pods that we would say these are the senior people. Within that, there might be some other investor MDs, some principals and VPs. And so it bubbles up, starts with maybe a VP or senior associate working with that analyst that sorts the deal and then recognizing all the key signals to what might be an exciting company. It's not tricky as you might think and maybe the early stuff is, but most of what we do is pretty clear when something looks interesting. And then it just keeps bubbling up. And then eventually it'll elevate to the IC member on that team and say time to meet the company. And let's get you on a plane. And sometimes we can't get into the company with that meeting. So we know all the external data points point to hot. We see that. We're like, okay, that founder does not have an interest in taking a call.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Get paid very good salaries and bonus on that at this age the money is not the driver. The golden carrot is so big, whether it's at our farm or somewhere else and being a successful investor, everyone has a slightly different take on this, but by and large, the real motivation is they want to be successful and win and have a good deal. You don't want to be pushing a partner to do a bad deal and have to put that on your resume for the rest of your life just because you got a couple thousand dollars of deal bonus for the 23-year-olds that are making the calls.”
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 a few of us that do a lot of cyber, please share it with one of us. What's the point of getting educated? And we're all comp the same. This is one for all, all for one to make the firm successful. And we try to direct the deals to where they're both going to get one and focused on.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Hands up for grabs again. You got the ocean. You could call whatever you want once it's on somebody's pipe. It's their deal. And we try really hard to encourage collegiality. So if somebody's looking at a deal that's not getting followed on on somebody's pipe, please pass it and we'll work together on it. And we tend to overcompensate for cooperation. Obviously people like their own track records. It's hard to take type A people and make them full players on that. But I think we do a pretty good job of that. In general, you're going to step on toes. I think other firms are more delineated by buckets. You go after infrastructure, you go after AI. And I think what we found was a lot of misses that way. It could be just a partner's predilection to doing a certain type of deal. And so this other kind of deal, it's just as good, but it's technically in one partner's bucket doesn't get acted on. We try to create a little bit more openness to what those lanes look like, but the partners at the senior level know if somebody finds a cyber 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've got lanes and we've got technology to claim. I mean, it's probably a lot like if you were in a good software company and you looked at the BDRs in that software company and looked at the sales folks and you thought, all right, who gets what territory? And we're not going to give people territory in the same way, but we're going to give people a chance to claim a deal. And then it sits on their pipe and it has certain rules around how long it could stay in that pipe until it's acted on”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“16 or 18 funds that were started by Insight Alum. I've got 30 plus partners at other firms today that were Insight alums. It sort of reflects the fact that we are building a good model for people to learn how to invest. It may not be the only model, but it's certainly a good model and people around the industry obviously respect it.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The process has gotten a little bit more sophisticated because founders also want to meet with more senior folks. We have mid-level folks that could help direct manage and coach. So we have a lot more support for these folks to be really good and they're getting daily coaching from the folks who've been there and done it. Almost all the partners at Insight, but one or two at the investment committee level started off in that program. We have largely cultivated our own teams over the years. We also have a very big practice of McKinsey-like brains that are there to help the portfolio. So they come in also fairly young, maybe two years at McKinsey and then join InSight. And that's another career path for people to get to know investing, but to know it through the operational side. But it's a fantastic talent pool. One of the core differentiators of insight is we have the best youngest talent by far in the world. I would absolutely put us against anybody on talent. And we have.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My management style, which is not very good, but can be very effective for the right people is to throw you in the water and just say swim. We have a much better training program right now, so thankfully I have some of the folks that have come through the sourcing program that are still with me have been able to institutionalize some of the lessons to get people up the curve quickly. But within a few months, you've learned what you can learn from the system. You're learning from your peers, but at the end of the day, no one tells you go call XYZ. You have to kind of sort this out yourself. You hear, you listen, maybe your partner that you work with is giving you some advice on industries that they're intrigued by, but it's a lot of trial by error and learning and different folks pick it up in different ways. Different folks are better suited for that than other jobs, but it's pretty much a self-starter, highly personalized initiative to get going. We've probably in aggregate 60 plus people, depending on you count 60 to 80 people that are still heavily engaged.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“50 more firms reaching out to that individual. We've shifted from a world where capital was a little bit more in power. It wasn't perfect in even the 90s. It was already shifting. But today, clearly the entrepreneur has got lots of choice and we're very sensitized to that choice and really want to make sure that we meet that.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process, and that's the last 20 years other than technology, the hiring and profiling of what we do hasn't changed tremendously. The class sizes, generally speaking, have gotten bigger as the market's grown, but we're just trying to cover everything. So whatever that takes in terms of human resources, the next chapter for us has been probably the last five years is just technology really making impact on who you focus on. There's a lot of firms like ours, I think, that are trying to do that. I think the human in the loop still matters. That's our belief. Entrepreneurs aren't just going to react to the first email they get from you. So the fact that you think XYZ company's super hot doesn't mean they're going to return your phone call. I'll have analysts give you stories of 25 phone calls, a couple FedExes and then landing on somebody's street corner begging to take a meeting. It's hard sometimes to get the attention of somebody who's successful, especially in today's world where there's probably”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My partner Jeff Lieberman and one other partner. And so they started doing it too. And Mike was, for him, it was second nature because he'd been doing it his whole career, which wasn't very long at the time. He was probably 25. That kind of elevated us and we were basically investors doing it ourselves. And then we made a decision in 1999. We hired a young man out of Dartmouth, which is where Mike went to school. And he became our first official analyst. We decided to go right after the undergrad kids because we realized it's a really hard job. If you've actually been working at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, you kind of get spoiled and you don't want to go back to picking up a phone and calling somebody up without any context. It's a lot of effort. And that became the first two chapters really. We then started to operationalize what that young man was doing. And we started having classes and then we started going down to best schools to recruit. And then we started to have training programs and we started to really institutionalize that entire.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chapter one is me and my partner then. Chapter two is I hired three associates, one out of Summit, my triplet, which was a big decision and brought me concrete. I've been there, done it at the best of the best.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The lead investor in almost everything we did. These were kind of bootstrap businesses that didn't have partners, and I wanted to be helpful to the founders, and most of the founders were technical by background and didn't really have that Oracle sales DNA that was really the cutting edge of what B2B software was back then. We started to build some network of people who knew how to do that and ultimately brought some of those folks in-house. And one of my first hires as a partner was somebody who's president of one of my companies, who's one of the best sales guys I'd ever met. That was the thesis. Focus sourcing value add by being the best at what we could be. And obviously the world's changed a lot since then, but those core ingredients are still 100% insight.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“around the US and even in Europe. Most software companies back then started as consulting projects that got bootstrapped to some degree to a product. So you can actually find these things well after their incubation phase and startup phase, which again was very counter to the West Coast model. I hear Landry speak. I start doing what he's doing. This is working. I could do this. And we started InSight. I had a partner who was a consultant at Warburg. We started up. We just start sourcing deals, called calling everybody. We found a bunch of deals before we had a fun and then we scrapped together a $16 million blind pool of capital from some high net worth folks. And in that thesis was focus sourcing. And then the focus was going to give you both an ability to source better because you knew where to look. You knew what magazines to read. You knew what trade shows to go to, all that lent itself to the same. But it also gave you a chance to think about how do I add more value to the companies I invest in. And we were.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Good luck with this comment. And I'm 26 years old. I'm like, all right, that's pretty cool. He's ripping out help wanted ads from the New York Times magazine that you're reading, and he's calling these companies up. And it turned out back then, it was a really opaque market. Very few companies were out there raising capital in any professional way. Entrepreneurs are really receptive to just being called up and saying, hey, I think you've got something cool. Would you be interested in talking to me? started at Warburg, I sourced a bunch of deals that way, which was pretty unusual for what was largely a shake the tree partner model and realized I could find deals all day long like this. And especially software lent itself to being outside Silicon Valley, especially applications. If you're building banking software, you want to be in Silicon Valley or New York City. If you're building pharma applications, you want to be in New Jersey or do you want to be in Silicon Valley? And I can go down the list of industries that really made sense to be much closer to your customers, which themselves had clusters.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“vision to where it is today by any stretch. So that was the start of it all. In like the early 90s, I was still at Warburg. I went to a conference and Kevin Landry, who was at the time the founder and managing partner at TA Associates, was presenting to a large crowd and he was walking through his playbook. And I was like, the classic Vince Lombardi story, here it is, I don't really care.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open systems client server compute. But it was a really, really small market. You can count on one hand. I think the top 50 software companies, number 50 was like 10 million. It was tiny. But I loved it. I thought it was a big growth bucket. I thought specialization had a real edge. We were disadvantaged by being in New York. I guess I could have moved. I had family and other reasons why I like New York a lot. Trying to compete on the West Coast terms made no sense to me. So one, picking an area of specialization where the model was still pretty new to people. And it was pretty different than the hardware companies before it that were really more difficult venture investing. And the DNA of a sales guy of software back then, an Oracle's DNA, that was a really different DNA than what most folks were used to. So we thought specialization was absolutely critical to understanding an industry really well. And we picked software in hindsight. It was probably the best bet I've ever made. It wasn't because I saw.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I wrote the original business plan, which is not tremendously different than today, I was leaving Warburg. I love software, wanted to just do software, and was really interested in doing smaller deals than that firm was set up to do at the time. Nobody would hire me. Then software was tiny. It was IBM and Microsoft just to put a setting in the world. SAP was sort of this mainframe guy coming along. Oracle was probably the coolest cat in town in terms of.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Return curve with a lot more upside and ability to control your destiny in a better way. It's become a bit of a necessity too to get on the balance sheet by getting in a little bit earlier”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In fact, holds really well to time. And some of it was just our DNA was so driven off of sourcing. And the history of insight was based on some experiences where I found some small deals that didn't fit with a bigger firm. And I was like, I don't want to be that guy. I don't want capital to dictate my strategy. It turns out it doesn't have to. You could get a little bit invested in finding your way to backing up the truck for bigger ownership. And then as the world changed, it's increasingly hard to come in late. So now I would argue that there's some really good firms that have been around for as long as we have that were the preeminent late stage funds that, like us, look at some of these later rounds, are like, that's a pretty tough spreadsheet. There are other ways to deploy that capital that seem better risk reward adjusted. There's some that are great, but most, I'd say the spreadsheets start to look like two to three X. You could do much lower risk buyouts or venture buyouts or other types of deals with the same”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We don't fit into a bucket my whole life. I've never fit into a clean bucket. And that's probably the most glaring one. How do you think about that? I'm like, well, it doesn't feel like that at all when you're on the inside. It just feels like a well-oiled process. But from the outside, we look like an N of one. You go back in time to firms that scaled over the years. They almost always scaled on check size. One of the reasons insight exists today is literally because some of the best firms in the world at the time we started it were moving up market and putting in rules of we do $50 million checks. We do $100 million checks for the reason you outlined because those are the checks that will probably move the needle. They'll obviously sequoia and benchmark and others will tell you they've written plenty of $5 million checks that have been breathtaking in outcome. But I can see the logic as you get bigger that that's a temptation to kind of put that constraint in place. Our DNA just didn't want that anyway. So some of this was not fully thought out in the way I've described it.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I want to bridge to a cell. I want to do this, that. I could argue that goes both ways. Plenty of those have actually worked out where we have bridge to a sale. We have recapped the company and gotten some of our original money back, but you could certainly see how you could be chasing good money after bad if you're not careful.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Biggest is you lose a little bit of discipline from third party pricing. It goes both ways. So sometimes we preempt deals and we think we get great deals. I'd say more often than not. That's the belief that we have is we make it easy for the founder to pitch to the founder is you're done if you want us. You got us for life. If you want to go out to find another partner, that's okay too. We've got our position. We're not going to be upset with that, but we're also here to support you the entire journey up till 2017-18. That was really common. The world got really competitive starting in 18. A lot of those follow-on checks we couldn't get them at the values that we thought were exciting or the founders just wanted 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
“To be a typical pitch to a growth fund, but it's clearly not an early stage bet anymore. Check size is too big for an early stage bet. What do I do with it? We don't have to think about any of those conflicts. We certainly have to think about conflicts between the two funds, which can be managed, but it's not zero. Am I bailing the company out? Am I really supporting it? How that all looks optically could get funny over time.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“with management with a $5 million position in some of our biggest exits from Monday and Sino a bunch have started with under $25 million bets that have come up to $200 million over time. We just see secondary opportunities. We see follow-on opportunities. If you zoom out, you're like, isn't that the most rational way to do it? Why would you do anything else? And I know there's some phenomenal firms I've heard on other podcasts that have a ton of respect for and they intentionally want to give that bet away. And then obviously the more common approach now is I'll have a separate pool of capital for that bet. But that has its own constraints because sometimes the charter of that fund, the pitch to the LPs is a little more nuanced than you find yourself in tweener bets. And I'm sure you could talk to a bunch of early investors that have growth funds that aren't always at their best deals. And you're like, well, how'd that happen? Sometimes they find a way to do it. And it's great. But a lot of times because the deals get bit up a little earlier than they expect, it doesn't really fit what you would consider.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is really visible. There's very few firms out there, Vision Fund was probably the one exception that could look at that and say, I could think of that divide by 100 as a $2 million check in a billion dollar fund where we all could easily say, oh, of course I'm not going to get too worked up over a two million dollar check. I'll take a flyer. So there's a little bit of risk management and you can do it with check size. So you can look at stages slightly differently. And the second advantage as single fund has, in my view, is all my peers would sort of admit that the best bet on the table is the double down bet. In blackjack, we all know that. You've got an 11 against a 5. You double down. Not only do they give you the good odds, but you have way more information than you had before you got the handheld. We're all not all perfect. Sometimes we fall in love with our babies, but if you went back in time and looked at our double down checks, they were our best checks. We took a $5 million position to a billion dollar position. We never would have seen the billion dollar position without getting the relationship.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was lucky enough to get my first job, and it was a lot of luck, and somebody believed in me that hired me at Warburg Pincus, which founded in 1968 maybe the world was a different world, but developed a one fun strategy. There is included stage and industry. So they were stage agnostic, industry agnostic. Some of that was mapping to LP demand for the biggest of LPs back then, the pension plans. But there's two things I think that if you taught finance in classic portfolio theory, you would be scratching your head and thinking, gee, why isn't everybody doing this? One is risk management. One of the really interesting things about the vision fund was their ability to write a $200 million check that was inconsequential to the return of the fund. Obviously, you could abuse that and take risk that maybe aren't sensible risks, but it was fascinating. Most of us really sweat out those big checks. We're really pretty risk-averse. We want to make sure the downside is absolutely locked in. Probably the XK.”
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 for those companies, fifteen customers that are referenceable is sort of a magic number for inflecting on growth. So the challenge with those companies is they're very hard to sell those products. It's a lot of missionary selling early on. So you can't really scale your sales organization until you have a certain number of referenceable customers that you could lean on. And if every sales guy is pointing to the same reference site, that customer gets a little annoyed after a while. So you're constrained by that. Around 15, not only do you know the product is really pretty solid, but you also have an ability to start to think about supply constraints to scaling, not demand constraints to scaling.”
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 big ROI, big ASP, time to value, CEO in tech and management team that goes behind that tech. That's my five. I think Wiz might be the end of.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really drives outcomes. And you've had folks on your show that talk about happiness and product satisfaction, things of that nature. Those five things”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Customer making a decision installing SAP versus using OpenAI. One is I literally point my cursor to a web page and I'm getting value immediately. And the other could be a three-year, very expensive journey to change my organization to get it up and live and productive. SCP has massive value to that customer base, but it's a very long time to implement. And that's going to inherently slow down realistically how fast you can grow both your own ability to succeed with those customers, but also just the decision making around those complex decisions. Obviously, phenomenal CEOs are always the dream. I listen to the podcast. I'm like, wow, people are really a lot smarter than I am because I sometimes write that story after the fact. I certainly have plenty of phenomenal CEOs that were rejected by a lot of other firms. So it's not always obvious. And then a phenomenal tech team that goes with it. This is a world in the last 10 years where product.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And you're selling half a million dollars a year in the market. So they're 20 times your size on average selling price. Pretty hard to imagine that you're going to be as big as Epic. You can frame it and say, best case, I'm probably 120th. This epic is a dominant player, rare that anyone gets more market share than they do in a given sector. Best cases are probably 120th the size of Epic. So that's kind of a good framing of TAM in my mind as opposed to the how many customers are there. Can I multiply by this? And the sort of top-down approach is riddled with errors in thought. Whereas if you look at what's my selling price, how does it compare? So you want to see that average selling price and then compare it to companies that are targeting the same number of customer universe. And that gives you at least a ballpark. You obviously want to look at the landscape of competitors and say, well, what market share am I realistically going to have? The hidden data point for me, especially for early companies, I've been pushing on, and this is where AI is a pretty neat idea, is what's the time to value? So when you think about it.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So you have to do qualitative, especially as you get earlier, because a lot of these numbers are still forming and false precision, I think, could get you in trouble. I'm a big fan of the value problem. When I think about investing, I want to hear the entrepreneur explain how they're generating real value for the customer. When I look at what makes for the perfect investment, I have thought about the five ingredients to me of perfect investments. So value prop is critical, and that usually could and should translate to selling price.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Each year for six years. Just when you do that math, if you start at 10 and start doubling that for five years, that's a really big number of new business added each year, which keeps your growth rate if you literally doubled it every year. You would have 100% growth rate ad infinitum.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Zoom out. Simple smath is LTV divided by CAC. That's all you're trying to understand is I invest in money. Assume RD gets somewhat normalized to levels that are industry standard. That's really what you're trying to tease out. GDR is a great predictor on LTV. The less I lose of a customer, the longer it lasts. The present value of that cash flow stream is higher. CAC is the other big variable on that. What you're trying to figure out is the market pull for that. How quickly am I accelerating that number? If I added 10 million of new business this year, can I add 20 million next year and 40 million the year after? And the smaller the company gets, the harder it is to tease out whether you're just rapidly walking into a finite market and you saturate that decision making in that market? Or is it deep enough that you could imagine growing for multiple years whiz, which is obviously one of our favorite stories and great team and blah, blah, blah. They've been able to double or more their net new booking.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We keep learning that you sometimes get fooled into the trap of value and it is not a great way to make money in my estimation. And people do it and people are really good at it. I'm not going to say it's not doable, but buying cheap and technology is not a long list of really rich people who've done that as compared to the people who've just bought the dream. There's a very long list of people who've made lots of money on the dream. We will not do a low gross retention business today unless we really are confident we could change it. We think that metric is really the fundamental driver of all exit values. And ultimately, large companies will obviously make exceptions if we think we can fix things or we think maybe there's a good story as to why it was not enough sales capacity, this, that. At least half my partners would tell you that they'd prefer not to compromise on any of those metrics. Their view is if you look back in time, nine out of ten times those metrics have been the driving metrics for”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You quickly saturate the number of decisions made in a given year. And all of a sudden model out five years with a flat new bookings number and your exit growth rate is going to be a lot different than what Google was able to do, which was compounded 100% for 15 years.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Numbers that usually reflect itself in your average cost of acquisition. Take your net new bookings divided by the spend that you had to get to that. And those numbers tend to move together because you just have to keep filling more of the bucket with sales reps just to stay even. So I think that was an example of one another time years ago, I thought a lot about calling ourselves the second derivative because so much more is learned. A couple guys had this right at Facebook, the billion dollar kind of guys that came in there. But the change in new business is way more important. The change of the change. I'm growing 100% year over year. My net new bookings, that second derivative is really powerful where you see a lot of companies with almost zero change in the new business that they add each year off a small number that could still look like a really big growth rate, sometimes as much as 100% or 75%. But you can copyright that number if it's flat and that happens a lot, for example, in vertical software.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Years ago, one of my companies was going public, and the rage on Wall Street was net retention. I'm just picking a random one. I was already at my 11th grade math, so I'm like, this is one of the most informative numbers I could think of. And yet that was the only number that Wall Street asked. I said, the only number that really, well, two numbers really matter, GDR, which is gross retention, which is how sticky is your customer base, how resilient is that, and more importantly, how much of that bucket you have to fill every year. There are very few companies with lowish software low would be 80s, low 80s gross retention that are in the top 20 market cap businesses. You could probably count on three fingers, companies with that statistic. And the problem is that you get big, and let's say you're losing 20% of your business every year on a billion dollars of revenue. That's $200 million of business that you have to go find just to fill the bucket. And then you, of course, want to grow 30, 40, 50% on top of that. So those become dawn.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll say team broadly because some of us are much better at this than I am, but our analysis of what numbers matter has changed a lot. I remember six years ago at an LP meeting telling LPs we think we're at 11th grade math on software. The industry is probably at seventh grade math on software. I think we're getting closer to college. It's still amazing what we continue to learn about metrics that really are the best predictors for future outcomes, which is really the dream, especially in growth investing. You have almost enough data to start to predict. And we've also gotten better, I think, at understanding qualitative TAM issues and the never-ending journey on management. Every year you'll learn something new in both the good and bad ways. People are always complicated, but you definitely get better at it as you get more experienced at it.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starts with some internal meetings, investment committee, people's new deals, partners meeting to spend time together in 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 to spend as little time as possible on things I'm not good at, of which there's a pretty long list. So those were areas where I think I could have meaningful impact.”
2025-09-16 · Invest Like the Best · Jeff Horing - Building Insight Partners - [Invest Like the Best, EP.440] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source