Private Equity Spotlight: The Future of Enterprise Software with John Hodge

[00:00:00] Sean Mooney: Welcome to the Karma School of Business, a podcast about the private equity industry, business best practices, and real time trends. I'm Sean Mooney, BluWave’s founder and CEO. In this episode, we have an amazing conversation with John Hodge, partner and co founder of Rubicon Technology Partners. Enjoy.

[00:00:34] I am super excited to be here with John Hodge, who's a partner with Rubicon Technology Partners. John, thank you so much for joining. Excited to be here with you.

[00:00:43] John Hodge: Well, thanks, John. It's fun to be on.

[00:00:45] Sean Mooney: I think this is gonna be a really fun one. John's had a really kind of one on one set of experiences that I know I'm really excited to talk about.

[00:00:52] So maybe before we get into some of the core of our conversation, John, I always like to start these by talking a little bit about the story of you. Can you tell us a little bit about how you kind of came up in life and how you ultimately got into this industry of private equity and beyond?

[00:01:09] John Hodge: That's great, John.

[00:01:09] Yeah. All we start with, I'm born and bred in Buffalo, New York, which this week has been a little bit tough. All I'd say is that both my parents have lived in Buffalo and they're two lifelong fans of the Buffalo Bills and the Chicago Cubs. So the thing I would tell you is that we're resilient, right?

[00:01:32] Long story. I was born in Buffalo, which is a great place to grow up. Great core of that place is a blue collar city, but just great people and genuine people at all times. My parents both were educators. My father was a professor for 35 years, geophysics. And my mom was an English teacher for 35 years and all their careers.

[00:01:54] They worked in pretty much one place for 30, 35 years. And my brother, who I have an older brother, 15 months older, I'm the only undereducated one where they all have advanced degrees and I don't. So that tells you a little bit about the background. So good place to grow up at great experiences. But I was, it's interesting.

[00:02:13] It's going to sound kind of funny. I was an athlete and I was a swimmer, which there's probably very few people that believe that a competitive swimmer can come out of Buffalo.

[00:02:22] Sean Mooney: That was gonna be my next question, but I think we're going here naturally.

[00:02:26] John Hodge: It's a long, interesting story, but my parents put me in the pool mostly because it's the only thing that would tire me out.

[00:02:32] Swimming is a very unique sport. It was great where I was a successful swimmer in Buffalo, New York. And I had a great team and a group of people who I grew up with. And this theme will go through a little bit of how the people you decide to work with or be team members of are the major component of your success.

[00:02:51] They just are. But I was recruited as a scholar athlete by a couple of universities. I actually ended up going to Stanford, which at that time had just won. The national championship. And it was a very, very unique team. And I was really, really lucky just to be honest with you, to be able to be recruited by a university like that, but also into a team that was known as probably one of the best college swim teams in the history of the sport.

[00:03:18] Right. So I went to Stanford and the thing I would say about Stanford, other than giving me a great education was the first day of my freshman year, I met my wife. At Stanford. She was a scholar athlete also. She was the captain of the soccer team. Going to Stanford was really important, but the main reason it was important is I met my best friend and my wife.

[00:03:37] So I was a biology major, believe it or not, at Stanford. And the main reason I was a biology major was two reasons. One was, it was one of the only majors where I could actually get through the undergraduate there because of my swimming schedule. It was mostly applied learning and labs. And so that was great for me.

[00:03:54] I really enjoyed it. And it was the one thing I could do to graduate pretty much like on time. It was a great education and scientific methodology was really, really important. The other thing about Stanford was we did win there. I was a part of a team. We won two national championships there. The type of culture and people that I was able to learn from and assimilate with were just some of the most world class people you'll ever met, not just athletes, but people. And so when I say I'm lucky, it was one of those experiences, which I can remember almost every day, sometimes in the pool with some of the greatest. I was swimming with my heroes and they were teaching me.

[00:04:32] Sean Mooney: I mean, I love that background. Serious athletes are, one, we see a lot of them in private equity for good reason, it creates this kind of mentality of discipline, tenacity, grit, overcoming, constantly pursuing kind of your best next.

[00:04:47] And I think swimming is probably one of the ones that is the most enduring and takes real, real dedication to be at the upmost level. A national championship is something I can't even fathom.

[00:04:59] John Hodge: I saw this and I still trying to find this study about 10 years ago that they did this major study of college athletes and what were their success.

[00:05:08] And this was mostly in business. Okay. So this wasn't whether it was nonprofit or anything like that. And it was a really interesting study where that three sports, if you ask somebody of all college athletics, who do you believe in business would be the most successful, and some would say basketball players, football players, because of all that, you know, the three sports were wrestling.

[00:05:29] Swimming and cross country. And they did a correlation and the correlation you'll love this. Okay. The correlation of those three sports were one. It is a sport that tastes so much work ethic that you can actually change your physical body. So you think about wrestlers, right? Wrestlers literally do things that are in human swimmers.

[00:05:52] They are the most over trained athletes always in the world, right? If you don't mean cross country runners are similar, the second trait. That they had is it was a individual sport that is contributing to a team atmosphere. So if you think about that, right, which is back to kind of specifically private equity or anything we do is you have to perform yourself first, but doing it in a team context, you motivate better.

[00:06:16] Okay. And the third, which is the most important reason, no one comes and watches. They're self motivated. Okay. Right. Ah, that's interesting. So those three things, it's one of the most interesting studies I've ever seen. And the third, I actually think, and we'll talk about this and successes and young people is self motivation without ego is probably one of the most important things of success of young people.

[00:06:40] Sean Mooney: No, that's fascinating. I never thought about it that way. And now it kind of changes the way I think about things. So that's really helpful. And if I look at my former self, I know that I was never, other than like. 13 off the bench in a small school sport. So I was like, oh man, somehow I made it.

[00:07:01] John Hodge: But listen, life lessons around athletes are really important. The other thing that I learned a lot, humility is really, really important. I swam again with heroes, right? The greatest thing was they were there to help me, right? It was just fundamentally amazing to me. And then after Stanford, I was not going to go to medical school.

[00:07:21] One is I didn't really have the grades. Two is. I always say that is a huge life commitment that you've got to be a hundred percent willing to do it. But the other thing I would say is I enjoyed academics. That wasn't my primary. You'll hear a little bit. I'm much more of an applied learner than I am an academic.

[00:07:37] And I think that that's really important for you to self realize when you want to be successful. And so, but what I did figure out there was I wanted for some reason to be an investor. And back then this was 89 and I had a biology degree. If you remember Technology was actually a smaller market than actually the biotech market was back then.

[00:07:56] And so you'll love this. I started looking at being an investor in biotech, right? And I wrote a whole bunch of letters cursive to partners and venture firms. And by the way, they didn't, there wasn't really private equity back then. It was pretty much venture, right? I had one of the great conversations I ever had with one of the founders called Larry Moore, more David Dell ventures, one of the first venture firms in the world.

[00:08:16] He sat me down and he had lunch. It was great. And he said, John, you're really talented, really motivated guy, but you have no experience to be a venture capitalist. Okay. And we don't have a job back then. They didn't have the jobs like of analysts or associates in the venture. It was just like, you had to have experience or not.

[00:08:30] So he said, go get trained someplace and I'll make some phone calls. And so he said, great training back then would be the investment banking world. So at the time I was working at Oracle because back then it's just like Google. They hired everybody. If you graduate from Stanford, you get a job at Oracle.

[00:08:46] Right. But I started looking and I got a job back in those days, the beginning of technology, they were really the boutique banks. And there were four of them that were the leaders in advising tech startups. We call them the harms, right? It was H and Q was Montgomery Robertson Stevens and company, right?

[00:09:04] If you don't mean. And so luckily I got a offer from Robertson Stevenson company, believe it or not, in a great firm, Sandy Robertson, one of the great people, and you'll love this. We have a dinner every year with our analysts and associate classes from Robertson Stevenson company.

[00:09:20] Sean Mooney: No way.

[00:09:21] John Hodge: Some of the greatest people I've ever met are there.

[00:09:24] And it's a really nice group and it was a great place to be in the early 90s.

[00:09:30] Sean Mooney: Hi, this is Sean. Wanted to take a quick moment to tell you a little bit why BluWave exists. It's based on this whole notion that assessing opportunities and building business is really hard. We all know third party expert service providers can dramatically help, but at the same time, it's hard to know who's good.

[00:09:49] Usually leaving you, like I would do, and call friends and ask, Do you know someone who does this? Or just go the square peg round hole route. So after nearly 20 years in PE, I decided to solve my own problem and create a BluWave. Today, many hundreds of PE firms, thousands of portcos, leading public companies, private companies, All call BluWave to instantly get connected with the exact third party service provider they want that's pre credentialed by BluWave and perfectly calibrated for their need and really good.

[00:10:19] You too can give us a call or visit our website@BluWave.net. We're free to use and you can benefit the same way other top P firms do act the show. It was interesting, so for our listeners who weren't kind of in the business world, then that was kind of this. Core ecosystem where everything started there's just legendary people for a whole variety of reasons that saw this opportunity and got it going in ways that I was on east coast investment banking and the reason I went into investment banking coming out of my undergraduate schools because.

[00:10:56] My roommates were from Northern New Jersey, and that's what they were told to do. And so I'm like, okay, I guess I'll do that. Yours was much more deliberate and intentional, but always remembering, like, every once in a while, one of my friends would say, no, the action's out West, and it would be Montgomery or Robertson Stevens or Hamburg, you know, it's just like, and they would just one by one go over and then the world just spun so fast.

[00:11:21] John Hodge: It was really fun to be there at the beginning. They kind of hired me as an analyst, like everybody else. And I started doing biotech stuff cause I had some background, but I immediately saw quickly at Robertson Siemens and company, the biotech had some government regulations and there was a whole bunch of limitations and I'm like, yeah, this tech thing, very few companies were going public in the early nineties and everything like that.

[00:11:43] Again, I was at the right place, right time with a really, really great people. And I got real great opportunities to work. In the technology industry, very, very quickly. In fact, then technology was really simple. It was semiconductors and it was software. So I started a lot of my career, believe it or not, in the semiconductor space.

[00:12:00] And during that period of time, I kind of looked and I figured out, I really like this technology thing. This is something that I'm going to spend my entire life. It's a dynamic industry. It's a meritocracy. There's a lot of dynamics here. It's a growth industry. People listen to young people. It was a very unique place where it wasn't like, as you well know, in investment banking, everybody could talk. And actually the younger people sometimes had better perspectives, right? Because it was a young industry. And so you can be very successful very early, but I wanted to be really successful in the tech industry. And there was one firm that was the premier firm of the time, very small firm was at the time, Morgan Stanley, a guy named Frank Quattrone.

[00:12:38] And luckily again, I was an associate on a deal and Frank had recruited me to come to Morgan Stanley. And again, one of those just things where I got really lucky to go to Stanford. I got really lucky that Frank saw me as somebody he wanted to work with. And back then there was really literally only three of us working with Frank back in the beginning of the nineties.

[00:12:59] And that's when Back to kind of how investment banking and technology evolved. It went from these boutique banks as really the primary drivers of advisory services for global technology companies. To Frank saw this insight, which is you need a global investment bank that has the technology expertise.

[00:13:18] If you can combine those two things, you're going to be a leader in the space. And he was a visionary way before anybody else spending time there. And so I was there at the very beginning, again, in a very small team when we started Morgan Stanley. And ultimately I spent my entire career with Frank, everything from Morgan Stanley to Credit Suisse as the leader in global advisory.

[00:13:40] Services for the technology companies. And you can name pretty much through the nineties and early 2000s, every single major transaction, whether it was an IPO, whether it was an M& A transaction, Frank was unique. And then also George Boutros, who was, who came in in the M& A side, again, back to kind of being lucky back to back to my college days of being around people who were the best at what they did.

[00:14:04] I was lucky again, to be around two or three of the people who were not even close to be the best at what they did. And I learned from them. And it was a very unique time in technology also to learn from so many companies.

[00:14:14] Sean Mooney: Once again, I'll point out for our listeners who are maybe a little bit younger, if you're not familiar with Frank Quattrone, he's on, I would say he's on the Mount Rushmore of tech investment banking for sure.

[00:14:24] And so chat GPT, Frank Quattrone, and you'll learn more, but I think another really great point is like so much is about. Who you associate yourself, but you got to make your own luck at the same point and work hard to get into the groups with people who are going to have that like mindedness. So I love that.

[00:14:39] So I want to get a little bit to in a second on what maybe are some of the things that led to you founding Rubicon. But before we go there, I've already learned a lot of stuff that I never even knew before about you. Is there anything else that it'd be great if we would know you better if we knew this about you?

[00:14:56] John Hodge: The thing that I would say that everybody really understands is. Being from a place like Buffalo and getting good roots in kind of what I would call a genuine culture is really, really important because sometimes as you well know, the perception in my perception, when you are advising and working for some of these premier companies, they think that persona.

[00:15:19] Is one that is how I should put this as egotistical, and I would say the most important thing to know, at least about me, that I've worked very, very hard over my career is trying to be genuine, grounded and humble in what you do. Okay. Because just because you work for Morgan Stanley or you work for Blackstone.

[00:15:38] Doesn't mean what you do is more important than what other people are doing, and that's throughout my entire career. It's the same thing if I was an athlete and I think back to kind of my roots in buffalo and my parents specifically They're very successful people also But they're pretty humble in what you do and you want to be quiet humble and confident in everything you do because you can see my history and every time people look at my history and my pedigree they have this perception of these things and I think First of all, I don't believe that's a formula for success.

[00:16:10] And second of all, I think it's tiring is the word I would use.

[00:16:14] Sean Mooney: And I love that. And I love coming from a really kind of this. Blue Collar Town of Buffalo, both of my parents were from Cleveland. The difference is that you all at least got to taste like the championship round of your sports. Whereas I've never really experienced that.

[00:16:29] So thank you mom and dad for cursing me with these teams. Even though I grew up in Austin, Texas, so I didn't get to root for the Cowboys either when they were good. So that's a whole different conversation. But it's so important. And so that was one of the things that was really important when I was a kid is being put into manufacturing jobs where I was pushing the broom and.

[00:16:46] I'm an expert at painting things safety yellow to this day, and I think you can still see some like yellow paint underneath here if you look, but, but it's important. And that, that was one thing in my subsequent jobs that I had was we would look for kids that grew up. Do they work in restaurants? Do they work in a manufacturing plant?

[00:17:01] Do they do these kind of tougher, grittier jobs? And it doesn't mean that those who didn't couldn't be humble and smart and driven. But that was something we would look for. And one of the things that we used to do that I don't think you can do anymore, and we certainly don't do it here, but we used to have, we'd call it the drink test where before we had given offer, we would take someone out for a couple of drinks and just see, like, once they let down the facade, were they just good people that you wanted to be around the 35, 000 foot test?

[00:17:30] John Hodge: The most important thing that. Whether you want to work with somebody, especially in our industry is they have to be able to do real work independently and be self motivated, be genuine people. A lot of what we've seen with how you hire younger people and everything like that, they get so good at the resume building crap and the interview skills and all of this stuff that it's really hard sometimes.

[00:17:53] And we've done a lot to pick that apart just because the hiring and to your point, getting to people and who they really are. Is really, really important in how to motivate them. That doesn't mean they have to all look at the same. I'm a big believer in diversity of experiences, diversity of skills, diversity of talents.

[00:18:10] You have to, especially in private equity. But to your point, we do a lot of the peer test, in our organization and the main reason I founded Rubicon and everybody says it's a strategy to market or anything like I founded with my three other partners Rubicon because I wanted to work with the people I liked, that's it.

[00:18:26] And when you get later in your career, if you have the ability to do that and found a firm, that's the primary foundation of everything we do. And that's our investments to like our investments, our people, we hire our people, we train, it's just. Life's too short. I only want to work with people I trust and I admire and that's it.

[00:18:45] Okay, and that's how you found a firm

[00:18:49] Sean Mooney: Hey as a quick interlude, this is sean here wanted to address one quick question that we regularly get We often get people who show up at our website call our account executives and say hey i'm not private equity Can I still use BluWave to get connected with resources?

[00:19:03] And the short answer is yes. Even though we're mostly and largely used by hundreds of private equity firms, thousands of their portfolio company leaders, every day we get calls from everyday top proactive business leaders at public companies, independent companies, family companies. So absolutely you can use this as well.

[00:19:21] If you want to use the exact same resources that are trusted and being deployed. And perfectly calibrated for your business needs. Give us a call. Visit our website@BluWave.net. Thanks. Back to the episode.

[00:19:37] Let's talk a little bit more about that. I mean, so Rubicon extremely well-regarded, well-known, successful firm. You don't build Roman a day. What were some of the insights and experiences that you had that kind of. Helped you form Rubicon and get it to where it is today.

[00:19:53] John Hodge: It's really interesting and there's a little bit more history here where I left investment banking Spent about 15 years there and then I went and got recruited again to the probably the best firm in the world in private equity Which was blackstone at the time the largest private equity firm They were looking with that largest fund in the early 2000s to do technology investing again Learning from the best is the right way to go but the insights I have there which is again because I always wanted to be an investor was They are the best Private equity firm in the world.

[00:20:22] It's a small firm. They had an operational strategy that was really good, but the insights I saw there about being a technology specialists versus a generalist were very interesting and that I had been around the evolution of technology, private equity. Because I was advising most of these companies, believe it or not, technology, private equity only really started as a product in the late nineties.

[00:20:46] I mean, the first private equity deal was done for Fairchild Semiconductor. I sold Fairchild Semiconductor out of National Semiconductor, right? And CVC bought it. Francisco Partners and Silver Lake were not founded until 1999. It's a really young industry. And I kind of saw everything that was going on, all their strategies.

[00:21:04] And so, and then I was at the premier private equity firm. But what I saw and then what I saw with my three other partners at the time was there was a unique time. We founded the first one in 2011, 2012, which was the product and the private equity product was still an immature product for technology.

[00:21:22] Okay. And some of the successful firms in enterprise software specifically, which I'll talk about enterprise software, why we focused on that exclusively, not just because that's where experiences were, but there was this business model there that both Tomo Bravo and Vista at the time who had evolved into the leaders in that space had started in the middle market, but they have become very, very large, very, very quickly.

[00:21:46] And no one really was serving that market at the time in 2000. Okay. Okay. So there was this market opportunity at the time. Our insights when we founded Rubicon were pretty important, which was we wanted to create a firm. If you have an ability to create a firm, it's a really, really hard. As you all know, you've done it, right?

[00:22:01] You're an entrepreneur. It's one of the hardest things anybody will do. And doing it also in one of the worst markets in 2011, 2000 was not great. We wanted to create a unique firm with a unique culture, first of all, but second of all, is that created repeatable, knowable returns. Okay. Now everybody says that, okay.

[00:22:19] Right. Like, as you all know, in private equity, you worked in them. Oh yes. We want to do repeatable, knowable returns and controllable returns. Okay. Everybody says that it's really, really hard to do that. So there are really four components. Of how we thought about creating the firm. One was the market we're in.

[00:22:37] And I'll talk a little bit about that. The second was it has to be operationally focused from the beginning to the end. Okay. Right. And there's a lot of flavors of that. And I'll tell you there are learnings there. The third is if you're going to have an operational strategy, you have to design your firm to have that operational strategy.

[00:22:53] Most firms believe operations are second class citizens, and that is a disaster already, right? If you don't mean. And we'll talk about how we designed a firm differently. And then the last thing that you and I already talked about is you have to create a culture. And the most important thing is a culture to support all of that, right?

[00:23:09] And those four things are the components of what we saw and are the really, really important things in foundationally how you build a firm. And listen, there was just four of us at the beginning, three of us now. And all of us had those same insights, and what we wanted to do, but it's really difficult to look at that and then be able to have it be successful where we are now.

[00:23:30] Sean Mooney: I love that. It was reflecting what you're just saying here is amazed me thinking one of the things that I kind of beat the drumbeat on here. in broader private equity is like the business of private equity needs to be run like a business. And what you're articulating a long time ago before this was ever talked about is like, we're going to starting a business.

[00:23:47] Like we're going to have a strategy. We're going to operationalize it. We're going to even think about culture. Culture was not a term that was often used in private equity up until maybe the last five years. And so all the things that You're sharing back in 2011, we're never really talked about, or you never even entered the lexicon of the industry.

[00:24:09] John Hodge: And back to kind of my history and linking it back to my history is, I had been a member of very successful organizations through my career. And I knew what the components of, to your point, a successful business or a successful team, what are the components of that? Okay, and if you think about them, those four components are critical.

[00:24:26] I think the other thing that it was pretty insightful what you just said, Everybody, when I'm talking to LPs or talking to anybody, what's your most proud component of what you've done? And what I would say every time we've done over a hundred transactions, we are successful in our returns is our best portfolio is Rubicon.

[00:24:46] It's a portfolio company. Okay. It is like, how do you manage a business? How do you motivate the teams? How do you structure it to make sure it's there for longterm success? And to your point, Back to private equity, it's a very immature industry in some senses, right? And it's very personality driven. It's got totally outsized ego for what the value it adds, right?

[00:25:10] And if you can take those things apart and just treat it like, to your point, just like a business, like I'm a manufacturing business and take ego out of it, I think it turns into a really, really great industry. Okay, right. For people, it is probably the most intellectually interesting, rewarding, and can be financially rewarding place for anybody to work, but it is work and it is a service industry.

[00:25:35] We are not the tip of the spear. Like they say, that's not what we are. We're a service industry.

[00:25:40] Sean Mooney: It's an interesting mind shift. I was talking to somebody the other day, 90 percent of what we get asked for our resources for value creation, for due diligence for portfolio companies. 10 percent are the firms themselves, the PE firms themselves, and they'll say, Hey, we need a group, but we want someone who only does this kind of like, very recently, it's like we want a long term strategy, someone to help us do this.

[00:26:03] Like we were with our portcos, who does this for other PE firms? And I was saying, well, if I were you, I would get one who does it for your portfolio companies because you want that mind shift in terms of thinking like your business, like a business. And they're like, oh yeah, that makes sense. But to be fair, private equity is still its own thing.

[00:26:20] You want experience and exposure, but to your point, thinking and building these companies and being more like a Dan or her is really, I think, been critical to the evolution of this business.

[00:26:30] John Hodge: Well, I think the other thing too, back to our insights as founders of the business too, is it's why we were able to be successful in how we founded the firm.

[00:26:38] There were a couple of things that were different than a lot of other private equity firms, we back to kind of. The diversity of the original partners of our firm were all had diverse backgrounds and diverse skills. And we didn't spin out of another firm, right? We were really going to create something that was different.

[00:26:54] Within the space that was already known. That's something that I think is critically important, when you're founding a firm, it's important to align, but it's very, very important to have different opinions and different skills, especially if you're going to have an operational strategy, you can't have a bunch of people who think that they're smartest guys at the table sitting at the end of the table. You have to have people who have actually done this before. That's really, really important in how you construct. A firm and then the other thing that was I think really insightful is back to most private equity firms And you know this even the young ones are personality driven many times and some of them are really successful We didn't want to do that because we wanted to be sustainable in a way That is different, right?

[00:27:37] We we believe fundamentally our job back if you think about it is to add value and support our portfolio companies and it's more of a Service oriented approach than it is an egotistical tip of the spear. And to do that, you have to design the firm for long term. The individuals who founded the firm are going to be important as a support, but they're not going to be the main components of the success of the firm.

[00:28:01] And that's really, really important. And I would tell you after studying a lot and being in this industry, a lot, a lot of people don't do that. And I will tell you in our firm, I say this to all of our young people and all of our other people, while. Jason, Steve and I had real success and luck and being able to found the firm.

[00:28:17] It's their firm. Okay. How do you want to meld that firm? We've given you a platform and a structure to be successful, but in private equity, private equity is a very execution driven business. That's very noble if you do it correctly and everybody can contribute. We're not hedge funds like you're making big bets and there's one guy making those bets.

[00:28:37] Everybody's doing everything and everybody contributes, right? It's a very, very unique industry that way.

[00:28:43] Sean Mooney: Yeah. And I love that you're building something that's built to last, right. Versus built for the next fund cycle. John, let's double tap in here a little bit. You mentioned your operational approach.

[00:28:53] Can you talk a bit about how Rubicon kind of approaches value creation and the resources that you're bringing to bear for the growth and development of the companies that you're investing in?

[00:29:03] John Hodge: Yeah. And I think our strategy is very unique. Other than the firm design is the reason why the original institutional investors gave us the money.

[00:29:12] We have a very, very specific enterprise software. And most of your listeners know what enterprise software is. Enterprise software is a very diverse industry, but it's high recurring revenue businesses, okay. And they're automating business processes in the simplest terms, very, very high retention rates, very normally, very, very high gross margins.

[00:29:31] But they're very, very process oriented. Also, if you think about software companies, okay. Right. They automate business processes. And so our thesis was our main insight is that about 80 or 85 percent of most enterprise software companies are the same. Okay. So. Let's create a set of tools to help these companies improve ultimately their operations of the business to ultimately create a higher value business, right?

[00:30:00] In the simplest terms. Now, what that meant was, and if you think about the background of our founders, Steve Carpenter is my other partner. He came from Vista, which was one of the original playbook based enterprise software businesses. He spent most of his time in the lower market on the buy and build.

[00:30:16] And he helped kind of craft some of those strategies. So our playbook, when we founded was an actual playbook, we've got a book and it is a set of tools that you can utilize to really optimize product market fit. Things that you do to improve this comes because the insights we had about the market we were in was that.

[00:30:36] Most of the companies we were buying, which are the smaller enterprise software companies, they do a couple of things really well, or they wouldn't be successful, like really well. And most of the companies we were buying do products incredibly well. They're normally, they've been around for 12 or 15 years.

[00:30:53] Their founders were product people and they served a really good diverse product market fit, but they didn't really know how to grow a business. The rest. Whether it's go to market or other things, we're immature is what I would say. And so our thesis was, let's go help those companies take that really good thing they did and compliment them with kind of a set of tools and processes that they can improve themselves.

[00:31:21] And it's more of a self help. I'll talk a little bit about the engagement model. And so the concept we had with our operational strategy is first of all, take a higher level. Everybody at our firm is an operational investor. There's no operations team. There's no investing team. Everybody is an operational investor and that's very unique in our industry.

[00:31:42] That doesn't mean that we don't have majors and minors. Half the people in our firm have come from the deal side of the business and half have come from operations. But everything we do in the language we use is operational. Okay. And if you ever looked at our underwritings and if you ever looked at our investment committees, they feel more like an operational plan that, I mean, listen, we are very sophisticated and that's really, really important.

[00:32:04] And there's no two class citizens either. So the concept back to the insights we had was one is have a set of tools where we can help these companies. And improve these companies and make them in a form where they're self help. So you embed them into the company. They're not consultative that come in and you take them in and take them out. that's really, really important. The second thing you needed is you needed an engagement model though. This is the other thing that private equity firms do really poorly. And you've seen it. How do you engage to make sure that your companies are adhering to your programs? Those two components, an engagement model and a set of processes.

[00:32:38] Are really, really important. And we formed our engagement model in a way that's very, very unique in the industry too, which is we have an alignment process, which we will not invest in a business unless the management team agrees with everything that we're going to do to this business over the first year.

[00:32:53] Now, everybody says they do these meetings. They really don't. So

[00:32:56] Sean Mooney: they're like in the first week after the wire closes, is that meaning usually?

[00:33:00] John Hodge: That's exactly right. But I think, and you know, cause everybody talks about operational investing. The concept of having both a set of tools that you're going to tell the company before you buy them, this is what we're going to do.

[00:33:12] It's not just, Hey, I think you can grow revenues, but we're going to hire three people in marketing. That's not what it is. Here's a process you're going to implement. Here's the tools that we're going to do. Here's the people we're going to bring in. Here's the talent management we're going to bring in.

[00:33:24] And then our engagement model is one where our entire team engages with them. I would say most of the time we're the only investor. And most of the time it's just with the founder. Of the business, most of the business we buy are founder based businesses. And so there's no noise either. Like, if you think about it, alignment really means there's the management team and us, and we're going to be locking arms and working towards that plan.

[00:33:48] And that engagement model you'll see as we've evolved, the firm has become more and more important to how we implement and get our returns and we've continued to hire in that team with really experienced people. But also we've continued to utilize tools. And I'll talk a little bit about, for example, AI and how we utilize those tools to help all of our companies also.

[00:34:10] But if you think about the one thing we've seen over time, the three mistakes, most firms make. In their operational strategies. One is they don't design the firm to actually take advantage of the operations back to what I talked about, which is everybody's got to be the same, everybody's got to be an operational investor.

[00:34:25] The second thing is they have to have a set of tools that is repeatable they work. And we know that we've done it over a hundred companies. And then the third is you need an engagement model that is engaged. Aligned, but also really, really high expectations for what, again, back to performance management.

[00:34:43] We're really good, low ego guys, but the reason you're partnering with us is to improve the business, right? That's what you're doing.

[00:34:50] Sean Mooney: Well, of the comprehensiveness, the intentionality, the integrated kind of elements of this, once again, you're running your business of PE, like a business, which is really important, but also differentiating and maybe double tapping on one of the things you said.

[00:35:04] What I really like is this engagement model as well, where you're making sure you're aligned at the onset and what a lot of people don't realize is when you're bringing in a private equity partner, it's like a marriage where you're going to go through a period of time together where you're going to build something greater than the individuals.

[00:35:20] And so I was. now married almost 25 years, somehow I've lasted. I remember like I was married in the Catholic church and they had this thing called pre cana where you sit down together and you kind of do your checklist of what's to expect. And the difference between maybe what you did and what I did was.

[00:35:39] All the things that I negotiated for in pre CANA got thrown right out the door.

[00:35:46] Whereas it sounds like you get much better alignment from the onset. But like kidding aside, it's so important to make sure you all going to be pulling the oars together and cadence with each other. And you want to go in that direction or not, because otherwise it's just you're rowing upstream and it's going to be hard for everyone.

[00:36:03] John Hodge: Well, the other thing is what we found is we pretty much do two to three platform companies a year. That's what we do. If you think of us, we're very methodical, right? And how we approach this over our history, the reason we win, okay. And why we partner with companies. And many times we win at lower prices.

[00:36:22] Most of the time is because of this process, which sounds kind of funny. Listen, most people. I'll say in our industry, it's maturing quite a bit. There's a lot of companies. There's a lot of money in our market, but it's still kind of unknown. And you know, in your other podcasts, like private equity is this black art, right?

[00:36:39] They don't really know what it is. And you've got these guys sitting in a room and we try to pull that entire thing away and say, no, what we are as business builders, we are here as service providers to help you. And we'll do in a way that is totally transparent. And do that in a low ego way also, right?

[00:36:55] Like it's really, really important. And especially in the middle market, these founders, they're really successful people. Like you can't walk in and say, I know everything because I can tell you what some of these people have been incredibly successful people and they just need help in certain other areas.

[00:37:11] And we're here to help them. Right. If you write in back to the alignment meetings. Most of the alignment meetings, and these are really, we call RTP change management alignment meetings, and these are four to five hour meetings. You're not just talking high level stuff, right? And every one of our executives or founders or CEOs that we work with come out of those meetings and they're like, Oh my gosh, this is exactly what I wanted.

[00:37:30] This is exactly what I need. And you have the resources to go do that. And it differentiates us also in the sourcing back to kind of everything. Everything we do starts with operations and it differentiates us, both our culture. And our alignment differentiates us from anybody in the industry.

[00:37:46] Sean Mooney: And I love that.

[00:37:46] And in this day and age, it's a little bit provocative to say, but the capital itself isn't differentiating. It's kind of commoditized. It's what you're bringing. In addition to the capital. And what I really like is that you're bringing not only the capital and the resources, but clarity and accountability in the collective to get and accomplish and win together.

[00:38:07] And that's why people come to you.

[00:38:09] John Hodge: And I would say the only other thing that we're learning and we evolved, we have a lot of learnings. You'll find us as brutal on ourselves as anybody. And we continue to try to improve everything we're doing back this alignment engagement model. It's kind of started that way, but man, we've evolved it a lot.

[00:38:25] Cause we figured out what's gone wrong. Same thing with our processes. The other thing too, is that we are real partners to every one of our portfolio companies. And what that means though, also is this expertise we're supporting them. It's also a little bit of what I would call muscle though, right? Like we are partnered, like we are major shareholders.

[00:38:43] And by the way, we don't use a lot of debt, by the way, the water, unique thing about us is. We use CommonEquity or Peripasu with everything. We don't use a lot of financial engineering. Our underwritings are all operational, right? That's what we do. And it's kind of very unique in our industry to say that.

[00:38:59] What that means is we also though are in the boat together. And when I say muscle, like back to our operational strategy, we're continuing to add really, really talented people with a lot of experience that help in that performance management. And everything like that. Cause when you grow a portfolio, you, when we started, you have sick portfolio companies.

[00:39:19] Now you have a lot more, right? You need a little bit more of that experience in that muscle. And we've been really successful at being able to take this strategy and really expand it. But again, as primary, it's everything we do. And there's not a lot of you back to kind of my history and Steve's and Jason's, we come from a lot of backgrounds, a lot of experience in private equity, and a lot of financial engineering.

[00:39:41] We try to simplify everything in our industry, because the most important thing is, can you make this business a better, higher quality business? The rest will follow

[00:39:52] Sean Mooney: the simplification process and the clarity and the alignment at all. I think makes a ton of sense and it's differential and it's, and it's positive for the future of your business, but also the industry as a whole with that kind of demonstrated leadership there.

[00:40:07] And John, let's talk about what's some of the advice that maybe you all are sharing with your portfolio companies, given this kind of current world that we live in.

[00:40:16] John Hodge: Yeah. And I'm going to start with enterprise software again, as a business model. It's turned into a valuation industry because of the business model itself.

[00:40:25] And why I always start here is that. Enterprise software is really automating a business process in the simplest terms for large companies or midsize companies that somebody had done manually or through Excel. Now they do in a more automated efficiently. The entire thing about enterprise. It's a productivity tool.

[00:40:42] That's what it is today. As you well know, there is a lot of discussions around A. I. And what are we doing to help companies? A. I. A. I'm not an expert in AI, but we've been around this industry for a long time. And it's come in many, many different flavors. And we have invested in companies. One of our first or second portfolio companies back in 2001 had natural language processing is one of the major components of it, which is AI.

[00:41:06] Like let's be clear, right? AI for us in enterprise software is really important for two reasons. And it's going to sound basic, but it's not one is we just like any other company with our portfolios are utilizing AI for costs improvements in our company. So we're mandating tops down. And we have a lot of horizontal expertise around this stuff, which is you need to improve.

[00:41:29] And we need to see that in your business plan next year, right? It isn't just, Hey, we're utilizing AI in this area in sales and marketing, or we're doing it. You're going to get 15 percent productivity gains. That means you're not going to be able to do this. Okay. So it's really important that AI is a tool and it's a tool with major large corporations, probably even larger than ours, but every one of our portfolio companies will be utilizing that.

[00:41:52] In certain areas to help their productivity and profitability. Okay. That's the first thing and we as a firm have expertise Back to expertise alignment and muscle that we will help them do that And the great thing about having portfolios our tools Every one of our portfolio companies talks to each other about this stuff, right?

[00:42:10] It's not us. Our portfolio is our company The second thing with AI, though, is in most of our products, and it depends on how much data you have in your products, we are utilizing AI and we've made in our portfolio three acquisitions also, because sometimes can you build AI, we don't invest in AI tools, we invest in vertical expertise, right, for a cornering company in a vertical expertise that is very specific to each one of those.

[00:42:40] We are looking and trying to help our companies either organically look at how to utilize AI in their product roadmaps. Okay. To help companies again, to improve our companies. The second thing is we're looking at acquisitions to help complement this, but most of the AI companies that are out there, there's all these big ones in the tools, really, really expensive.

[00:42:59] There are a lot of vertically. It's, it reminds me of BI. Do you remember BI? It's the same thing where you get these very verticalized, where you can add huge amounts of value on the tools that are already being developed on a horizontal basis. Okay. And so from an overall perspective, I would tell you AI for us.

[00:43:17] Is a major strategy that we're spending a lot of time with our portfolio companies, both on the product side for them to help improve their ultimate revenue and go to market. But second of all is also in the productivity and. The great thing about private equity, and this is generic to anybody else, but if you have a portfolio and ours is unique in that our portfolio is really narrow the fairway, because it's just enterprise software and all the companies are similar sizes, similar, our portfolio itself can talk to each other.

[00:43:47] One guy's doing something slightly better in AI. What insights did you have? Okay. I'm going to go do that in the product roadmap, for example, and this is one of the great things that everybody doesn't really understand. The greatest resources is. If you have 15 portfolio companies, okay.

[00:44:01] And you're trying to do something, the insights you get, not just from us, but from those portfolio companies and the head of product is immense. Okay. And it's a huge competitive advantage is you see us as a firm mature. The kind of insights we get today versus what we did six or seven years ago from our portfolios are astounding.

[00:44:18] Sean Mooney: Yeah. And that's a huge power to have a, the power of your network where they can work together. And one of the challenges that we, and I think everyone's going through this. All the old benchmarks are stale now. What kind of productivity should you expect? There's nothing, no one knows. So it's just relative versus prior periods.

[00:44:35] And I love your point there about AI is, it's a productivity tool. And you and I will both remember this and like Netscape comes out in 1995 and It's internet, internet, internet. It's a strategy in itself. And there's an internet investment banking group and you get an MBA in the internet and it was blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

[00:44:54] And that was maybe like two years ago right now. And it's like, but what people didn't realize was no, the internet's a tactic.

[00:45:00] John Hodge: That's exactly

[00:45:01] Sean Mooney: right. And it's more productively moves information to and fro. AI is a productivity tool. It's a synthesis tool.

[00:45:09] John Hodge: The other thing that's really interesting, and I think it was the CEO of Microsoft said this, which is that what it does, too, is it pretty much accelerates your process, any process you have.

[00:45:18] But if you have crappy process, it accelerates the crappy shit. So, like, the great thing about us as an investor and as a technology investor is we do process reinvention first. And then utilize the basis of AI, which is an incredible productivity tool with better process. If that makes sense, right? Like there's a lot of stories out there right now.

[00:45:40] Everybody's just grinding on this stuff and they're making huge mistakes. If you have bad process, you're still going to have bad process. Okay.

[00:45:47] Sean Mooney: It's a great point. I started off my early days in P, I started off in industrial private equity. One of the many things I got out of that was the concept of lean and six sigma in terms of value stream mapping, attack the bottleneck, limit variations.

[00:46:01] We have been applying AI to every part of our business and really have been preparing for this for years. And now it's interesting what we're seeing is like, okay, we're seeing huge productivity increases in software development, but now product is having a hard time holding up. And so, but that's the bottom.

[00:46:17] So we can move. The dev up 500%, but if product and testing can't keep up, it doesn't matter. So your point, like understanding how these integrated processes work together, or if you're a hammer and everything's a nail, it's not going to help you out.

[00:46:32] John Hodge: And, you know, cause you run a business too. Like the one thing about our operational strategy, back to your operational strategy too, is we're really now, I mean, again, how we've evolved is it's back to prioritization and making sure you're simplifying things.

[00:46:45] That's the most important thing too. And back to you in the product, like. Product efficiency and to your point, development, huge productivity gains in AI, but what are you developing an app that just doesn't matter, right? If you don't mean like for us back to kind of the human part, what I would call the engagement human part of what we do, okay?

[00:47:05] Versus just the process part. You have to have both is prioritization, critical thinking around what's going to impact you the most. And then Let the tools improve your productivity. Our industry is based on productivity, right? And are there risks around AI for us? I don't know yet. It's been around a long time.

[00:47:23] There is definitely an acceleration. There's no doubt about it. I think that the productivity gains are going to be there. And the one thing I would say about enterprise software specifically is that over 30 years, there's been a correlation with capital spending on software, not services or hardware.

[00:47:42] Okay. Not technology, but on enterprise software. Okay. That includes AI. That is one of the most important things in this global economy. Okay. And that no one really understands very well. Okay. And that is never going to change. Okay. By the way, if you're continuing to automate through enterprise software, it's critical.

[00:48:00] It's why we're focused on this industry.

[00:48:02] Sean Mooney: And we're on this topic specifically, and particularly in this more recent times, there's a lot of change going on. There's a lot of fear associated with that. And as I reflect on every major kind of step function change in innovation, that's largely Each time they would say, the robots are going to do everything, and each time, all it meant is I got three times done in the same 25 hours that I was working each day.

[00:48:26] And so, it's just like, we're going to be more frenetic, but you need someone to drive it.

[00:48:32] John Hodge: Like a consumerization of the technology and issues help the enterprise because of Apple and because of Google and everything. The consumerization of technology really drove a lot. Okay, I think right now it's balanced.

[00:48:46] That's why we don't invest in consumer like, Oh, my God, changes incredibly quick in that industry. But in enterprise, if you're all you're doing is automating and trying to improve business processes, right? There is a more methodical way to think about those things. I think the last thing about the industry we're in, too, which is.

[00:49:03] When we started this, we wanted to be in this lower middle market, which was kind of because people had left the market from an investing perspective, but it was pretty immature, right today. As you well know, like the amount of capital around enterprise software at any size is much more than it was 12 or 15 years ago, because people have figured out the business model is good.

[00:49:24] Cash flows are good. And valuations have been stable over 25 years, right? Like that's what's happened. The interesting thing though, for us, we still win the same percentages. If you're doing two to three platforms a year, competitive dynamics matter. It doesn't really matter that much. The interesting thing about our industry and something you guys may should do some research on is because of the number of transactions that are happening in the middle or lower middle market right now, the actual market itself, the velocity of this market is much more mature, which is really good for our industry for a whole bunch of reasons.

[00:49:56] Okay. For exits specifically where I would tell you five or six years ago, the number of transactions and sell sides. It's tough, but because there's so much both cyclical and secular money that have come into this space. And the other thing that's unbelievable to us too, is there's three times the number of buyers for enterprise software companies today than there was even five years ago, because you just said industrials have to buy enterprise software companies, right?

[00:50:20] Like GE is buying 20 enterprise software companies a year. And you know, the difference between the public and private markets now is an asset class. Is much better. So the public markets for any small company and specifically an enterprise software, no one talks about it. And that is really good for all of our businesses, because if you have an efficient market, okay, right.

[00:50:40] And you have more transactions. It is a more fair market and for our operational strategy, does that matter in returns if you're more efficient? Yes and no. I mean, what we do, the primary thing we do is operational investing for our returns. And so that exit environment actually probably helps us. Okay.

[00:50:58] Right. In some senses, it's independent of leverage. It's independent of any real market dynamics now, which is great. And I think that's something that's been a big positive for the last 10 years.

[00:51:09] Sean Mooney: I remember 1999 when I first started in PE. You know, it's just like, man, I wish I was 10 years older. All these people are going to violence.

[00:51:20] I was like, I missed it. And that every year, you know, every 10 years, I guess it's so much easier. 10 years ago, it was always hard. It's just the, like everything industries mature and evolve. And if you're changing at least in pace and hopefully ahead of it, you're still going to do quite well. That's one of the things that I get excited about.

[00:51:38] John Hodge: To your point, you used, this is the insight that we have. Like everything we do is hard. You've got to wake up in the morning and everything's hard, go to work. And private equity is much more, I mean, it's all about picking the right companies, we're in the right management teams. It's fixing the problems.

[00:51:52] If you're a really good private equity investor, okay, what you're really good at is going and fixing the problems. And there's a lot of problems and that's back to having operational strategy. We fix more problems because you have expertise in doing that stuff. And so I try to simplify things and that's kind of one of the main simplifications https: otter.

[00:52:11] ai

[00:52:11] Sean Mooney: I was talking with my friend Lloyd Metz from ICV, and he was paraphrasing a Peloton instructor about last year. And basically he's like, did you expect it to be easy? You know, just get back on your bike and start paddling, you know, welcome to life. And so it's easier to think that way. So John, as we kind of like bring our conversation full circle here, one of the things that I am the biggest connoisseurs of, the biggest aficionados is.

[00:52:39] Life habits, hacks, gizmos, gadgets that make your life a little easier. If you were to look at my Instagram, it's all AI and like gizmos and some barbecue stitched into there. And so what would maybe one of those life habits or hacks that you've kind of. Identified and that makes things just a little better.

[00:53:01] John Hodge: I have three daughters that are smarter, more talented than I will ever be. And now they're all in the working world, none more in finance at all. They all doing much more interesting, important work than I am. But we wrote and I went around to my partners and I just said, what's a couple of pieces of advice getting into away from college and everything going into the working world, right?

[00:53:21] If you're on the end. And so you would appreciate some of the funny things that came back. It's a great list, the do's and don'ts, the simple thing that came back. There's really three things that I would say. The first thing, it's gonna sound simple, get up early. I have never met a successful person that sleeps in.

[00:53:40] Just, I haven't. And, back to kind of working hard, getting up early, it takes something. It's not just like, hey, it's easy, right? Like, get up. So, the second thing that I've always told my daughters is, don't take yourself too seriously. Okay. This world now that we're in, there's a lot of stuff that we do. It is all important, but you cannot take yourself too seriously because if you do, you're not going to have fun.

[00:54:04] Right. And having fun is really, really, really important. And I think the third thing, especially in these younger ages of people, and it sounds simple, but it's pretty hard is to have a positive attitude towards everything. Like the one thing that people always know about me is if you're going to be successful, there's going to be a lot of stuff that's going to be really hard and you're going to have a lot of mistakes.

[00:54:27] You got to get up in the morning. I always say, and you'll hear this on investment committee calls, what's next? You have to be positive the way and specifically in private equity, it will tell you, or in the working world is you got to fix what's wrong, but the next part of it is really what is the successful part.

[00:54:41] And so I know that wasn't kind of a gizmo or a life hack, but those three things are things and that the wake up early thing, it is really important. And getting in the office early and getting to the office is really important.

[00:54:53] Sean Mooney: I think those are great habits. That are so foundational, but so often kind of stitched together in the way that you've done it, right?

[00:55:00] And so I really appreciate one year. I get up early and that's something that I struggle with I mean, but I guess how early is early but Like I'm not a 5 a. m. Person, but I'm also not a 9 a. m. Person I agree that That's so important. Like, get your day started right when it's, it's just every successful person I knew, they were the first ones in the office when it was quiet and you could kind of get things done and think.

[00:55:24] And the people who are really smart got in there early because then they got access to those really smart people. in a way that they, I think, both appreciate because they knew they were simpatico with each other. And the don't take yourself seriously thing is so important, particularly as you're a hard charging young adult.

[00:55:40] It's just so easy to think you're important. And I think very quickly you learn that, Particularly in the worlds that we've existed in, they're like, there's always going to be someone better. So, you know, my first existence that was easily identified.

[00:55:58] And then the, just the positive mental attitude, what you put out there comes back to you and what you feed grows. And so I think those are such amazing three kind of mantras for life that So often aren't combined together in a way that was truly elegant. And I'll have a conversation with my kids this evening about this.

[00:56:20] John Hodge: Now, whether my daughter's ever listened to me, that's the other thing, right? As I said, they're much smarter and they don't listen to their father, which is they shouldn't at some point. So this has been fun. I would say the last thing, just back to kind of a little bit about our culture at our firm and our last LP meeting, I don't really use quotes a lot.

[00:56:40] But I closed Charles Munger, remember, died this year, right? Yeah. Charles Munger is this one of my favorite, his personality. I talk about a guy who doesn't take himself that seriously, but he is incredibly thoughtful and insightful is the word I would use. And he said the most important thing that ever happened, and it's hard, and it's where you started this conversation, is he always wanted to work with the people that he admired and trusted.

[00:57:03] And I will tell you, like back to Rubicon and why we founded Rubicon, this is the last place that all of us are gonna work. And I come to work every day because that's what we did is we work with people both portfolio companies But our companies that I trust and I admire It makes it so much easier because there's times in life where you don't have that, right?

[00:57:23] You can't have that but if you can create that your life is much more efficient more successful and to your point You laugh a lot more, right?

[00:57:30] Sean Mooney: Yeah That's the thing. If you, if you walk through a place and you don't hear anyone laughing ever, then you're like, you might need to work on that a bit.

[00:57:36] John Hodge: That's right.

[00:57:37] Sean Mooney: I love that. So I've learned all sorts of things here that I wish I knew before. I'm incredibly appreciative of it. It's a generous gift. And I want to thank you for taking some time to share your perspectives on how the world works here. So thank you so much. And Appreciate you joining us.

[00:57:54] John Hodge: Sean, thanks. It was fun.

[00:57:55] And I liked the format. You do a great job.

[00:58:08] Sean Mooney: That's all we have for today. Special thanks to John for joining. If you'd like to learn more about John Hodge and Rubicon technology partners, please see the episode notes for links. Please continue to look for the Karma School of Business Podcast, anywhere you find your favorite podcasts. We truly appreciate your support.

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[00:58:52] And you can do the same whether or not you're in the world of PE. Give us a call or visit our website at BluWave. net. That's B L U W A V E and we'll support your success. Onward.

Private equity insights for and with top business builders, including investors, operators, executives and industry thought leaders. The Karma School of Business Podcast goes behind the scenes of PE, talking about business best practices and real-time industry trends. You'll learn from leading professionals and visionary business executives who will help you take action and enhance your life, whether you’re at a PE firm, a portco or a private or public company.

BluWave Founder & CEO Sean Mooney hosts the Private Equity Karma School of Business Podcast. BluWave is the business builders’ network for private equity grade due diligence and value creation needs.