YouSaid · the spoken record

Robert Smith

lines on the record
62
first
2022-08-23
most recent
2022-08-23
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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

  1. “Single change, no. Like all things, it's many changes. We'll have some businesses that are enterprise businesses, but they've got some small to medium business segment. And then when you do the analysis, you figure out you're losing so much money on a small to medium business segment. It actually takes away from your ability to grow your enterprise business. It might be as simple as change your field sales deployment model. Some people will have all their field salespeople in one location as opposed to distributing them. It's harder to do it that way, but if you do it that way, you get deeper relationships with the customers. These are simple things in some respects. Sometimes you really have to evaluate the way that you manage your cybersecurity practices in that company. These are companies that have mass amounts of data implementing robotic process automation solutions to cut down on the cost of delivery of that product.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Never experienced before. And so we bring an ecosystem to say, here's how we solve that problem in the past for 30 companies. Those are the dynamics that we employ in our underwriting. When you think about, okay, early deals and things, what we did was identify what is it that we can change in this business? How can we change it? In some cases, it is changing a business process. In some cases, it's changing the organizational design of that company, who reports to whom. In some cases, you have to actually change certain members of management because someone who was great helping you grow your business from 50 million in ARR to 100 million may not be the right person to go from 100 million to 400 million.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “That we've seen, built, honed, developed over now doing almost 600 transactions over the last 22 years, right? That improve the operations of the businesses that we then invest in and buy. And the third leg of that stool, honestly, is in management teams and spending time with them. And I like to characterize about 70% of the deals we do at Vista, believe it or not, are founder-managed businesses and 90% of those founders are still with us someplace in our ecosystem, either at those companies or sitting on other boards, et cetera. But one of the things that we do is work with those managers to teach and train and inform and help them run their businesses more efficiently. Part of that whole dynamic is here's what we've seen in the past and you founder A, this founder, the business she's running that day is the biggest company she's ever run and is growing and is encountering issues that they've never felt before.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “The most important thing to think about in our firm is we focus on building systemic solutions that can scale. Engineer mindset isn't what I call an episodic fix, but an engineered solution. An engineered solution can grow at scale. The way Vista is oriented is a group of investment professionals, call it 150 or so of them who are really looking for companies, mission critical, business critical, enterprise software companies that when you bring specific sets of operational improvements create massive amounts of value in those businesses. The second leg of this is a group called Vista Consulting Group, VCG, our value creation group, which includes now our operating MDs and Vista Consulting Group. And what they are focused on is identifying best practices. And this is one of the key things when you think about deals that we do. What are the best practices?”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Still around how we do that. One of the biggest constraints, of course, is finding capable people. And we always talk about this war for talent in our space. Seven and a half billion people on the planet, it's only 29 million of us who write code for a living. I mean, it's the most productive tool out there. It impacts every business during a time of COVID. We all quote unquote went home or went to someplace that wasn't working and were accessing our work through the systems. But there's only 29 million of us who actually write the code for those systems.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Your time? Or how do you now bring in two or three of those systems and platforms together so that it's not just one system of record, i.e. what your salesperson put in, but also starts to evaluate what your customers are actually doing every day? What are they buying and spending patterns? And that confluence brings some insights into that. If you think about it, I call it the second order effect of enterprise software, which is data, the analytics of that data. is in its infancy. And that is where the actual true expansion of productivity will now come. I do think there's a lot of opportunities set there. I think it is orders of magnitude bigger than what we've seen in the productivity to date, but is going to continue to require the adoption, I'll call it, of the platforms. And then, of course, the application of the analytics on top of those platforms. And frankly, there are constraints.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Some that you can think about now for managing sales flows. Before you had a bunch of salespeople sitting around and they put together their information about, oh, yeah, all right, here's what I think I'm going to do and here's my prospect list and they send it to the regional manager and that person kind of moved their Ouija board around and say here's what I think it is. They go to the national manager and then they report to the CEO and the head of finance and okay here's what we think our sales are going to be for this month, this quarter, this year, whatever it might be. And a lot of big companies actually all they do is they digitize that. But did they really bring any insights or start to create predictive analysis? That is just now starting. That's when I talk about the data that now has been digitized across these systems is now accessible. And then you can start to implement algorithmic systems on those to now make it predictive and more accurate. And in some cases now reach forward and say, here's where you ought to.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “To be too much of a cliche, but we are in the early innings of this. Have to remember. The early days Access to computing Power was the rate limiting step. Could afford a computer, governments Large corporations and ultimately Universities, et cetera. And then you went through the micros and the minis, and now Next generation of this, the superscalers, the hosted computing systems, cloud computing is how people really think about it. That has done in many cases you look at some of these businesses. Have multi billion dollar valuations All they really did. Some cases Was to digitize A manual workflow”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “New insights into either products or services or solutions or even different workflows. Hadn't been conceived of before Whole idea and conceit around it was how do you bring, I call it an engineered approach to investing This space called Enterprise Software, which actually is An ecosystem into itself”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Calculations and spreadsheets, and ultimately utilizing things like artificial intelligence to aid in decision making. Created massive efficiency in productivity in our economy. The insight around all of this was, well, at the end of all of this. Is enterprise software, business software Ultimately, Identified as the most productive tool. Introduced in our business economy. Over the last 50 years, and likely for the next 50. As Vista were the first to Stand up a business Really invest just in that space, enterprise software, not consumer software, but enterprise software, these businesses. As you know, we've come to rely on these systems. Are governed by software Manage the day to day workflows and to bring Additional efficiencies to their existing workflows, and in many cases because of This industry I'll call it Artesian's data”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Yeah, exactly, literally, you're actually measuring the outputs of a system thousands of times a second, which gives you the ability to then make changes to the inputs at a similar rate. The nature of that is it actually eliminated a tremendous amount of waste in process industries. And then once Moore's law kicked in and computing capacity. Became more readily available and the insights and the skill sets of people like myself and others expanded through our colleges and university systems, we were able to bring that productivity into the broader industrial environment. And then, of course, the office environment. Where we went from doing things quite manually in the office environment to automated things as simple as word processing.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Whole reason I even got into this space, I started my career as a chemical engineer, was at a time when we were really doing some interesting things in that area. And part of it was we were digitizing the operational elements of what we call unit operations, i.e. running plants and facilities, et cetera. And we were going from an analog model where you're what I call observing an event might be a reaction or state of reaction and then making the adjustment adjusting various inputs to modulate that reaction. Well, when you introduce computing technology into that environment, you go from an observation being episodic or periodic depending upon who's the operator and what they happen to be thinking about at that moment in time.”

    2022-08-23 · Invest Like the Best · Robert Smith - Investing in Enterprise Software - [Invest Like the Best, EP.291] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source