Co-founder and CEO, Francisco Partners
I got my degrees in electrical engineering and computer science. And I realized that it wasn’t as fun as some other jobs seemed to me. On a whim, I started interviewing for investment banking and loved the people.
We were almost bankrupt when I took over running Francisco in 2005. This year, we were ranked as the number one performing private equity firm in the world, based on 10 years’ worth of data. I’m proud of that, but a lot of that happened because we were in the right place at the right time.
Quote
Success is measured by what you do for your investors. Plus, it’s more fun when you’re winning.
Author Name
Dipanjan “DJ” Deb
The biggest constant of tech is change. If you look back over 60 years, tech has outgrown GDP by a factor of two. It’s just easier to make money when you have tailwinds. A big epiphany for me was if you get the macro right, you can screw up a lot of the micro, but if you get the macro wrong, it’s hard to make money. I’m betting most of my net worth on the fact that tech will continue to grow. Now, it’ll be cyclical, it’ll have fits and starts, but anything that can get dislocated will get dislocated. That’s the history of technology.
The drawback is there are some technologies that are going to get eviscerated. That doesn’t happen in most other industries. The upside is that terminal multiples tend to be much higher. So if you aren’t getting eviscerated, chances are you’re adding a lot more value than a normal non-tech company would. We call our strategy complexity arbitrage: you buy confusion, hopefully at a discount, and you sell clarity, hopefully at a premium.
We’re stewards for lots of pension funds and endowments and insurance funds, and the first thing I say to my team is, Do no harm. Our business is not the venture business. It’s trying to get two and a half, three times your money with a low loss ratio. Success is measured by what you do for your investors. Plus, it’s more fun when you’re winning.
