YouSaid · the spoken record

Mark Johnson

lines on the record: 60
first: 2021-05-06
most recent: 2021-05-06
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You're never going to reach, and pursuing the goal of reaching it, most importantly, who you go on that journey with and what you do along the way is what truly matters. Because honestly, the least enjoyable part of climbing a mountain is being at the summit.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've learned in the last decade that it is about the journey and not about the destination. I think I spent probably the first 40 years of my life, or at least the middle 30 from, you know, call it 10 to 40 in aggressive pursuit of specific goals. And while I think that determination served me well and I'm appreciative of it, Astro was my first sort of step into the unknown. And in many ways, the Tom and Jaral trip was a metaphor for this. There's a spot in that climb called the Shearer Plateau where you first get a look, you get high enough that you can see the summit of the mountain. And it looks like you've got a walk 100 miles out and you've got to go 100 miles up to get there. And it seems like you're never going to get there. And I keep that image on my phone because we did get there. And you realize that life is about just making that journey, seeing that thing off in the distance that appears.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The statements from my mom and dad that ring in my head most often is my dad said to me often, if you aim for nothing, you'll definitely hit it. My mom will often say, Mark, make deliberate moves. I guess it's her version of the same thing, which is you need to plan. You need to pursue. And you don't really have the luxury in this world of just hoping good things happen. You got to try your best to make the best of what you got. And I think that's served me well. And it gives me a real drive.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Jonathan Livingston Siegel by Richard Bach. It speaks to all the things we've talked about today, right? This idea of knowing that ideal speed is not a number that you achieve, he says in that book. It's being there in that moment when you're learning that you're learning and you're going from 80 miles an hour to 90 miles an hour to 100 miles an hour and eventually even faster than that. And you quickly realize it doesn't matter what you're trying to achieve. It matters that you're trying to improve. And that book is this amazing study of that concept learning how to get better at getting better. And it's really inspirational and very well written about a little bird that breaks from the pack and wants to fly high and fly fast despite the fact that he's a seagull.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Inactivity. I have trouble saying still and sometimes you do just have to wait for things to develop, but I'm prone to action.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buying coffee for my wife every morning. One of the wonderful advantages of the lockdown is with no business travel for the last 12 months, I have the ability to wake up every morning and go to Starbucks and get her a cappuccino, which is something I really enjoy.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I would consider myself not a triathlete, but a guy who tries to do as many triathlons as he can do. Over the last decade or so, I've probably done a dozen or so. And I don't know if it's the old days of swimming, the ability to transition between sports, but that activity is what I do to sort of keep myself in shape. And it gives me something to strive for.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are doing great deals and making sure that the deal we do is an astral quality deal. And that's something that everyone's committed to, but it's something that you've got to build organically through the hard work of having our weekly calls, going through our ICE process, passing on deals that look like they were going to happen and didn't, reviewing the hundred deals we looked at the prior year. So a lot of it's just the hard work of trudging through all of that activity, but it's been wonderful.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It really evolves. Today, the challenge is managing the portfolio in the beginning. Of course, there were challenges attracting capital. Every challenge kind of evolves with the stage of the business. The challenge is they change every day, which deal to do, which deal not to do, how to do it, how to create our processes and commit to those processes and get everyone coalesced around one idea. It sometimes seems when you start a business that is a private equity firm and your product is deal making, the impetus is to say, well, let's go do some deals because that's the product we need to go produce. But the inherent tension that everyone needs to understand and really wallow in, if you will, is we got to do the right deals. We got to have what one of my partners calls our North Star, which is not just doing deals and not just doing deals because we are paid to find and do deals.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have to be careful with some of the war stories I share. But when there's too much true sort of cooperation going on and the heyday, call it the 2010 timeframe, when the Titans were clashing on mega deals, it could sometimes get a little sharp elbowed. Everyone's looking to win the deal. You don't quite understand everyone's intentions, and it seems that we're all moving in the same direction, kind of collectively performing due diligence, but then you realize there's a cabal that's formed. I mean, it's fun. I enjoy the intrigue and it's kind of made for TV, I guess. But at the end of the day, it began on occasion to sort of get in the way of the real job that we have to do of just truly good investing. And I think that's why as those firms began to grow, you saw a little bit less and less of it because there was more competition going on than there was real value creation.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fund that has a different cost to capital than we have where it makes sense to collaborate and you've got trust and relationship, it's a wonderful thing. We've also got a lot of institutions that invest up and down the balance sheet. So we're doing a deal right now with another fund that's not much bigger than we are on the equity side, but they happen to also have a credit product or preferred equity product. Working with the people that speak your language and invest in a way that you invest is just a great way to create value when you can.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I lived through the days of club deals as firms grew and I've had lots of war stories working on the mega deals like I remember Bill and I worked on the Univision transaction when it was Clash of the Titans right you had someone from every big firm or the all-tail deal I talked about when having sold that company we were we were partnered with KKR so the idea of working alongside other investment firms is something that's by no means foreign to me and I think it could make a lot of sense and when you find like-minded individuals that can benefit from pursuing a deal with you it's great it's another arrow in our quiver we we love working with our LPs and our investors but at the same time if marrying talents with another firm that invest in turnarounds or some other kind of segment maybe even an infrastructure”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And investing, but where they can ride along and top up our capital. So our fund can be a portion of the deal and our LP's capital can be a portion of the deal. And that's where I think true alignment between GP and LP really exists if you do it correctly. It's also where we can begin to build relationships with future LPs for future funds and frankly work alongside institutions that may only co-invest alongside us. So to me, it's true partnership and deal making. It's a wonderful tool and it's been a great way for us to work closely with the friends that we already have to build relationships with new friends and most important to fund great businesses and do interesting deals.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's changed over the course of my career, really interestingly. When I was at larger firms that already had not funds that are nearly as large as they are now, but still more than enough capital to do the deals that we wanted to do, co-investment was something that we offered to LPs as an aside. It was usually a replacement for capital that could have gone into the fund, but didn't. And it was kind of nice to have for LPs. I think now the markets matured to a point. where it can be an active part of a fund strategy and it is an active part of our strategy at Astra. So you think about the partners we have from Constellation, large global pension funds as well as sovereign wealth institutions that could put to work much larger checks than we could ever write, but are working with us because they think we'll find unique opportunities where, sure, our fund will be the first priority in source.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And the relationships that we cultivate externally and how well we do that over time, that's going to allow us to have staying power. That's to me what made all the great firms I've had a chance to be around, great for a very long period of time.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To perform exceptionally. And the key to that will be the battle scars, the team we build, the entrepreneurs that come into our fold. I worked at firms where there was a pantheon of great managers who had performed in amazing deals for Carlisle, for Blackstone, and geez, for Whitney going back for decades, of course, because the firm had been around for so long. And I'm excited to build that bench of great entrepreneurs and managers that we work with over time. And so I think our ability to continue to perfect the art, if you will, of finding and doing the deals we do and to build a broad community of interest around that that importantly includes managers, of course, includes great investment partners, financing partners, and others. That's what's going to lead to the success. It's at the end of the day, the people that we bring into the fold in turn.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we first started chasing deals and we hadn't raised our fund yet, I never referred to us as a fundless sponsor. I refer to us as a sponsor that had not yet raised the fund. And now that we have raised the fund and we've done a handful of deals, I really do think of the mission somewhat similarly in the sense that we bring a lot of co-invest into our deals today because what we're really trying to do is perfect the art of doing the types of deals that we do. And regardless of the size of our fund at a given time, what we want to do are a handful every year of great deals that sort of fit that hundred-ish million dollar equity check size range. So think of us as investing what would feel like a billion dollar equity fund if we did it 100% all equity out of our fund at any given time and not looking to grow aggressively but looking”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, as you've moved from a startup to now you're seven, eight years in and you look around the corner and say, well, you want to be doing this for 10 or 20 more years as this kind of next generation of private equity firm, where do you think you'll need to innovate going forward to stay competitive and stay ahead of the rest of the pack”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our business logics fiber networks is inching into the independence phase with our cybersecurity and building wireless and data center assets. We've sort of moved from the foundation to the transformational phase. It's really exciting and it allows us to be really purposeful about where the company is and what they are looking to do over the near term and how that fits into the long-term goals.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and making sure that we are creating real transparency and real connectivity between the investment thesis, the reporting of the business, and the theory behind what we're looking to do. Creation of economic value on a unit economic basis is really important. So assessing customer lifetime value and driving to pure value creation and I wouldn't say an academic sense, but in a truly theoretical and actual sense. Our businesses don't go unanalyzed and they get a lot of attention. And frankly, we don't have a huge stack of portfolio companies to manage, making sure we've got the time to spend with the businesses we own. We spend a lot of time after the first closing of our fund pursuing our first few deals because of this also. We wanted to allow our processes to mature. We wanted to grow our team and we wanted to buy businesses that we knew we could apply those processes to. It's been a great journey and we now have, I would say.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To a strategic player or another capital provider, but most importantly, it's about pushing the team to analyze itself, to lead without our support, and to not be carried by Estra at that phase. And so it's an exciting process. We have alongside that, what we call the pyramid of value creation. It begins with this foundation that is the culture of the firm. So again, proasper at Astro within, we ask of ourselves exactly what we ask of our businesses and our management teams, which is we need a culture of success, culture of commitment to the mission of the company, obviously a culture of support for the community and integrity. And then from there, you walk through governance. You walk through transparency. You walk through analytics.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Place and call it the first six months to a year of the investment. Then you usually have some form of seminal events. It could be incremental M&A. It could be transformation of the management team. It could be just the launch of a new product. But whatever it is that we've bought the business to go and try to do, we then begin to do after the foundation is set and during that transformational phase, helping the business execute on that is the lion's share of our whole period and really where I think we're doing the best of what we do, although I don't know that you can really dissect which segment is more important than the other. But eventually the business gets to a place where it needs to stand on its own two feet without us and be truly independent. I always say we plan to exit these investments for ourselves and our investors. And if we don't foster independence, then we'll own them forever. And we work very purposefully along those lines too. That could mean refinancing ourselves out with other partners. It could mean exiting.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We spent a lot of time on that. We recently brought on ahead of portfolio management who had come from a bit of the consulting world and he and I over the last six, nine months have literally written what we were calling a playbook to kind of how we build value and how we create value. There's multiple lenses to it. If you think about our deals and how they work from a temporal standpoint, there's the foundational phase, the transformational phase, and then what we call the independence phase. And I have a tendency and it doesn't lend itself to the podcast medium, to A, use a lot of whiteboards and B, to often draw what we call with an asterisk the swoosh, this logarithmic curve that talks about process improvement that constantly happening within our portfolio companies. And the first chunk of the swoosh is that foundational phase, putting in place governance, putting in place really first and foremost culture. So getting the right blocking and tackling elements of the deal.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's right, and having a commitment to process and understanding that point of indifference and what side of it you need to be on is important for the whole institution to understand. We spend a lot of time on that. It's a joint intellectual exercise that everyone needs to go through. Again, I think back to my time at Blackstone where we really learned that. There is no such thing as the perfect deal and there's no such thing as a no-brainer situation. You really got to make sure that you're making the right decision. I often say to my guys, you have to know that we know what we know.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have an investment committee that includes the founders plus two other MDs that are seasoned professionals at the firm and process matters and from the day we found at the firm we instituted that. Despite the fact that even before we raised the fund, we were struggling to identify deals and you sort of want to just do the deal that can get done. But that's not the way to build a track record. That's not the way to build long-term value. And so the discipline of passing on deals that don't make sense is something that's been there since day one. It may come from the fact that we have seen so many deals collectively within our own past. And while my partners have pretty impressive experience in having worked with businesses that succeeded, we've all learned from the businesses that have struggled. So the pain of doing a bad deal is something you don't quickly forget. And I think good investors never forget.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No means the first private equity shop that approached them, but at the same time, we are able to then leverage our credentials in the industry. I always say we like to find situations where we can win based on our experience, our relationships, and our expertise, not our ability to pay a dollar more than someone else. And you can avoid auctions, although even in auction situations, that can matter. Businesses do not always go to a company that only pays the highest price, particularly when they're relatively small and if the seller is working with you to grow the business after the acquisition. You just have to creatively find situations where your expertise matters. It reminds me of some of the conversations you've had in other podcasts that I listen to. You know, my good friend Andy Golden at Princo talks about the same thing. Where can we sustainably apply our competitive advantage and win? That's what we built in the creation of the firm and that's what we use when we identify deals.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You've usually identified the tailwind in the creation of the subsectors, right? Inbuilding would have been one of those six or seven subsets of, call it the wireless pillar. We know that that growth is coming. Then the question is, like you say, should we just buy the hottest thing in that segment? That's where relationship and industry expertise really matters. That's where you really need to lean on your ability to attract talented managers to the investment theme. So the fact that when we approached the folks at CTS, we had already thought through the different subsectors that they would want to pursue. That my partner, Ty Crick, had known the management team there from a decade ago and actually had helped them win some business in their early days and the fact that we've got people like Bill and Kevin and Matt who are experienced in the industry adds credibility.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if you start that filter, you've got your three core sectors and then the 30 subsectors and you get your themes. It sounds like what you're trying to do, if I understand it right, is fine tailwinds in each of these sectors. What happens when you get to that theme or that tailwind level with the pricing and competitive dynamics when there are so many other people out there looking for good deals as well?”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Early 2019. And through the course of the year, we followed the exact process I described to scour the industry for opportunities. And when we landed on CTS, we and they were finishing one another's sentences about the opportunity that existed to pivot their business into this as a service model, as we would call it. They had been among the leading providers of design, infrastructure construction, and support.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Building wireless sector, which is you think about manufacturing 4.0, whether it's automation with robots or assessment of the shop floor, safety precautions, security precautions, there's only more technology being pumped into the four walls of given enterprises. And the wireless networks that live in those enterprises are becoming unwieldy for companies to manage, maybe the largest Fortune 30 businesses can create an internal effectively wireless carrier to service their factories. But we think that one of the major growth areas going forward in mobility is the inbuilding world. Support that infrastructure, the rise of 5G technology actually is best suited for inbuilding environments where low latencies required and the capacity to monitor a propeller as it's built or monitor a robot as it's picking and packing on a factory or shop floor is something that we identified really in I'd say probably late 2018.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is a take private. We may see a business that is a straight LBO acquisition. We may say it's 2018 or 2019. We're in the ninth year of a bull market and buying lots of EBITDA with lots of debt for very high prices is not the way we want to do buyouts right now. fine businesses that we can buy that are relatively small backed by great teams have the opportunity for us to infuse equity capital over time in creative ways and to layer in debt as those businesses grow so a lot of the deals that we did in 2020 which we really began looking for in 2019 were an outgrowth of that strategy which you know i think about our business cts communications technology services we had a very deliberate probably 12 month process of identifying what we liked in the”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Help us support a given subsector. What we will also do is build a cadre of industry advisors who support us in those other efforts as well. So certain subsectors become generally attractive for long periods of time. Cybersecurity, for example, was one of the first that we became excited about. Rich Wilhelm, who's our advisor in that segment, ran the Booz Allen cybersecurity practice for many years. We find people like Rich who can help us have that edge that gives us kind of an insider's knowledge of a given segment. And throughout our networks and throughout our walks of life, we sort of make sure that we keep an eye out for people like that. Once all of that is done and we're finding businesses not because they're being delivered to us, but because they live in an area where we think there's excitement, that's when more of the financing and financial engineering expertise is brought to bear. We may see a business.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We begin to pursue active engagement with businesses, tendons of conferences, and it gives us sort of a list of here are the five or six different things that we like. But the real foundation, the superstructure that allows that to exist within the firm effectively is our quarterly partners meetings. I guess it's been now six years that we've been doing it. We all come together one day a quarter to just reflect on where the industry's headed, what are 10 times three, 30 sub-sectors are that we're focused on, and what the handful of high priority investment areas are below that. From there, if we don't have kind of a purposeful process that says, here are the things that we like and here are the places within our networks that we should be thinking about building relationships and identifying opportunities, we'll never know that one of us has coffee every day with the perfect entrepreneur to”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We have generally a three-pillar segmentation of the communications and technology sector. So it's either mobility, fixed line, or technology services. But within those three pillars that we focus on, at any given time, we have eight to ten subsectors in all of those pillars. So often led by Todd, given, of course, his consulting background, the associate teams with input from the partners are constantly assessing and reassessing, call it on average, 10 different subsectors within each of those pillars that we find generally attractive. From those subsectors, we'll then build investment themes. Those investment themes are then given a deep dive and iterated on by a given team within the firm that shares those on a regular basis with the broader partnership. And then as a partner gets excited about one of those sub-themes.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Could identify within the industry. And if I could sprinkle in some investment judgment and for the most part stay out of the way of the genius that the other four founders created, I felt like To create value in that context. But at the end of the day, what we're trying to do is identify opportunity and help businesses transform in ways that allows them to take advantage of that and to grow with the wind at their back in the industry. And it's often difficult to do that with very large businesses. You may find that you've already soaked up a lot of that growth, but the companies that we identify, the managers that we work with, we can spend a lot of time doing what's really, I would argue the most fun, which is finding your niche and excelling in it, pushing yourself a little bit beyond your ability, or as I would put it in swimming terms, taking another second off your time, which you never hear of someone saying, you know, I swam the perfect race. You can always go a second faster. And that concept has stuck with me throughout my career. And if there's anything that drives Astra, it's that passion for continual improvement and reassessment.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“many of the entrepreneurs that we were going to be investing with. My other two co-founders, Kevin Bee and Todd Crick, also came from really esteemed backgrounds in the industry. Kevin had been the president of All Telecommunications, Advisor to Goldman and TPG, had worked with me at Carlisle after the sale to Verizon and was just an incredibly knowledgeable operator and very well connected in the industry. Todd Crick and I have been friends since the early 2000s where his consulting firm Incode had been a secret weapon, if you will, of the communications and tech team at Carlisle. And they were really when I first got to know them known as more of a service provider on technical and strategic decisions to carriers, not to private equity shops. And Todd and I worked closely together for many years. He eventually sold his firm to Ericsson. And for me, bringing together the power of what Kevin, Bill, Matt, and Todd could understand about the industry.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And Bill wanted to sit down and grab coffee and just talk to me about what they were doing in the communications practice. At Carlisle in DC, where I had grown up and my wife was from also, and it was a very natural choice. And as you know, I still had that 20-year plan in the back of my head that I thought Carlisle was probably in the cards for me at some point anyways. And it led to a great friendship as well as a wonderful experience. But the idea of working together on something entrepreneurial after he returned from Brussels was something we had discussed. Off and on since our time at Merrill Lynch, my partner Matt Murphy and I had discussed this. And Matt, during the 15, 20 years that had ensued since we were analysts together, had spent time at firms like MC Partners and Great Hill Partners. He had also then pivoted his career into the operations world where he was backed by Abry to work at businesses like Atlantic Broadband and Grande Communications and live the life of”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was an easier thing to get my arms around, and it's really because of the luck I've had in the partners that joined Aster with me. So if I just spend a second with you walking through the backgrounds of the others, first Bill Kennard and I really sort of hatched the idea of Astra after he had left Carlisle to become ambassador to the European Union. One of the seminal moments in my career was a day when a friend said, Bill Kennard wants to meet you. I was working at Blackstone”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We want to do the type of firm we want to build, the type of value we want to create for all involved in what we're doing at Astra. And that's really the joy of the process.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“While catching up and suffering through altitude sickness and all the things that come along. It was perfect preparation for the first time fund fundraising process. Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. And most of all know that the journey is the most important part of the exercise and who you're on that journey with is what matters the most. It's not the destination of getting capital. And even if a chunk of capital had been given to us immediately, who knows if that would have been the right choice? Because what I believe firmly is that we at Astra are in an exercise of identifying those who are great partners for us and what we do and how we do it. Because as we said, people look in the checkup box on an investment allocation spreadsheet can do that easily in lots of different ways. And they can certainly do it without the risk of a first time fund combined with it. What we need are partnerships with RLPs and with our management teams that are strong and lasting and consistent with the type of investing.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Investing in the same way and with the same culture that we have. And that's how we eventually found our friends at Wafra and Glendauer who worked with us before our first fund in the Logics Communications Acquisition. That eventually led to their relationship with Constellation Capital, but also with many other investment groups that would ultimately be part of the first and the final close of our fund and also part of the co-investment universe that supports the deals that we work on. It's been a journey, but you just got to keep putting one foot in front of the other. One thing that helped on that journey, my partner Matt Murphy and I in 2013, we were all approaching 40 and took a bit of time off and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro together. And the exercise of gathering a great group, which in this case was many of my closest friends, and spending a week looking at a peak that you can't reach and gradually walking towards that peak to get.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's difficult because despite spending a long time studying deal making, studying the industry and what makes for a good investment, your interactions often aren't with the LP community on as broad a base as others when you're a deal maker. So you have to get to know a lot of people in the investment community. And it takes a while and it takes patience. And it really just takes an exercise of finding those that I would say are looking for you. The way I think about it and the advice I give others who are beginning that journey is you want to focus on the deal making. Focus on the type of deals that you think you and your firm are suited to do. That will attract the types of investors that are looking for those types of deals and people who add the value that you're looking to add. And that's really the thesis behind all that we do at Asterid, building partnership. It's working alongside others who are committed to”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, when you decided to set out, what is the ecosystem for a new private equity fund to look like? We know there's a lot of demand in the space, but often we see the big guys getting bigger and bigger. So how did you go about that whole process of getting going?”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So be participants in the growth of businesses like CTS are in building wireless services company or helping with our dark net business searchlight, which is really focused on child safety, on the web. And there's lots of good that can be done. But at the end of the day, who we are and how we can take governance and expertise that's applied in this industry, use it to make the world bend closer to justice. We try to do that.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Often say to NIA or the team within Astra that the world didn't wake up needing another new private equity firm yesterday. There's thousands of them. I think you can sort of generally check the box of the asset class, but the beauty of the industry is a group of people putting their own fingerprint on investing and building relationships in the industry and creating investments that help accelerate the advancement of technology, help grow new companies that advance the mission that I think all of this technology exists for is something special when you can sort of build that type of energy. And then after you've created that, who you are and how you use that perch is really important. So the fact that a firm like Astra can exist where we do interact with our nonprofit partners like SEO or the Navy CEO Foundation and can also”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ideal, and knowing the place that firms like those in our industry sit, it's important for people who have a chance to be entrepreneurial to take that chance. And I knew that if I didn't take it, I would have regrets. And then third, the number one limiting reagent in starting a new private equity firm. It isn't capital. It isn't investment ideas. It's other skilled investors that are complementary to you, that are great people that you can work closely with. Having the opportunity to gather a set of partners like Bill Kennard, Kevin Beebe, Matt Murphy, and Todd Crick, who came from operating regularly.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company's got too big. There's very exciting things you can do with large checks to write at a mega fund, but I found myself missing a lot of the exciting businesses that we could support and work with that were a little bit smaller, that required more like 100 million of equity, not a billion of equity. And there's creativity all around in finance. But for me and in this sector, growth buyouts where you can work closely with entrepreneurs and managers in spaces that are growing fast and exciting in the industry that felt like what would be the pinnacle of my investing practice. That combined with two other dynamics. One, personally, I always felt that this general belief that so much had been given to me through luck or happenstance that I should always try to do my absolute best. And if I have an opportunity to create a firm from whole cloth and push the industry towards something that's closer to its”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A couple of things. One, just a sheer passion for the sector in which we invest. As I built my career, I'd always walk this line of having an expertise but being able to be a generalist. You want to have access to the greatest deal flow so that you can learn the craft of investing however it may come. I look at the time I spent working on a deal like TRW Automotive is that in the auto sector. But at the same time from the day I stepped into Merrill out of Princeton till now, I was always committed to the communications and technology sector. What I saw in the 2013-2014 timeframe was an opportunity to move back to a lot of the investing that I had begun doing early in my career, businesses that were $10 to $50 million of EBITDA, places where all of the technological change that's happening in the communications and technology sector was available to be invested in before the”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experience that was relegated to working with people from the finance community. There were members of the business community that were part of the investing team at Carlisle. There were a former political players that were part of the team. But at the same time, there was still that intense commitment to getting the investment right and driving to a great answer. And you had what I would call nice guys finishing first. There were great people working very hard who were highly skilled in our industry and it allowed you to sort of take into account all the elements of deal making, not just the financial analysis or the consulting frameworks that you would use, but what does a seasoned business leader like a Dan Ackerson think of a business that we're about to buy? What does a seasoned investor like a Bill Conway think? So I was just able to kind of bury myself in very experienced investment judgment, but also a broad scope of business experience that really seasoned it all. It was a wonderful time working.”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not only your own, but something very precious. At Blackstone, I learned the intellectual honesty and rigor that goes into making good investment decisions. The one thing that was certainly taught over the time I spent there was there are ways to easily make mistakes if you don't dedicate yourself to the craft of truly studying in depth what you do. And what I loved about Blackstone was the intellectual honesty of the investment process. There were no questions unasked. There were no holds barred. And making sure that we did our absolute best before and after we brought something to committee was really ingrained in me there. And it allowed me to kind of see what it really means to try your hardest and do your best. At Carlisle, I was able to sort of bring it all together, both literally and figuratively coming home to DC and to Carlisle was a great experience because there it wasn't just”
2021-05-06 · Capital Allocators · Innovation in Private Markets 2: Mark Johnson – New Leaders in Private Equity at Astra (Capital Allocators, EP.193) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source