Roundtable #4 with Jason Lemkin, Woody Marshall, Deven Parekh, Harry Stebbings | E1071

You can wake up in the morning and decide the glass is half empty or you can decide the glass is half full. We went over a year without any tech IPO. We went about a year without any kind of meaningfully large strategic MNA. Cisco just bought Splunk. You had three companies go public at real scale, which are real business models. That, to me, is a glass half full.

(instrumental music) Well, I am so excited for this. I think we have some of the best minds around this kind of virtual round table for this. I'm just gonna start off by, one by one, I just wanna do like half a minute of an introduction so everyone gets a scene and actually hears the voices. So Deven, let's start with you. Can you introduce yourself in 30 seconds?

Sure. Uh, Deven Parekh, Managing Director with Insight. Uh, been at Insight since January of 2000. When I joined Insight, the market was rip-roaring, uh, and about four months later, it was no longer rip-roaring. So I've kinda been through the current rodeo before. Insight is a kind of a global investor in software. We do everything from kind of early growth to buyout, um, and, uh, about 70 billion dollars of assets under management. And happy to be here, Harry.

Amazing. Woody, over to you. 30 seconds, hit me.

Yeah, uh, Woody Marshall, um, a general partner at, at, uh, TCV. I joined TCV in the beginning of 2008, so the world was not rip-roaring, uh-

(laughs)

... you know, when I, when I, when I joined. Um, you know, TCV's been around, uh, for almost 29 years. We do two things, growth and, uh, technology, uh, primarily software and consumer and, you know, and fintech. You know, just to give context to, um, if there are lots of different, you know, uh, uh, definitions of growth, about 70% of the, of the businesses that we invest in are at least 50 million of revenues and, you know, about half are profitable. No- n- none... It's not a requirement, it just, that's how it comes out to, you know, you know, in the, uh, when you look at the data. But for us, we're, we're focused on growth assets. There's a bunch of them that just may be profitable because of the, you know, the underlying, um, you know, leverage they have in the business. But that's what we've been doing and that's what I've been doing, you know, for, uh, the better part of, uh, almost 30 years.

And Jason, I think for everyone that loves the round tables, which everyone does, (laughs) they probably know you, but hit us with your 30 seconds anyway.

Sure. Uh, Jason Lemkin, uh, I, I run SaaStr, the largest global community for SaaS founders, and I've been investing, seed investing for about 10 years. I'm pretty excited, I've got three or four after 10 years that I'm hoping will IPO at the end of next year. I've had some billion dollar exits, one with Insight, hopefully one with TCV soon, but I'm, I haven't had an IPO yet, so I'm super excited to learn how great it's gonna be at the back half of next year. And we've got some standing bets around this, by the way.