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With one of the best track records in private equity, Bravo manages 179 billion in assets,
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Bravo has grown at a blistering pace. Last year, the firm returned over $13 billion to investors. In 2019, Orlando
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became the first Puerto Rico born billionaire. Private equity firms, the good ones, definitely beat the public
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markets. We are in the business of turning great innovators into great businesses.
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Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Toma Bravo's Orlando Bravo. [Music] [Applause]
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[Music] See you. Thanks for coming. How are you, David? Good to see you. For those that
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don't know, let me just do a a couple of data points and then we'll just jump into the story because Orlando has an in
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Wait, are we are we seriously going to ignore whatever virtue signaling JL is doing over here? What
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what's this uh virtue signal you got going? What are you doing right now? Well, this isn't virtue. This is um my
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bestie Tulsi gave me an official scarf from her office for my wife and I stole it from my wife.
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So, I'm wearing it. And I know you probably didn't see it yesterday, but Jason was run over by the
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director of national intelligence, Tulsy Gabbard, yesterday. He was so tilted. She was walking through the Russia hoax.
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He was so tilted he had his phone googling and grocking trying to get and and all he could come up with is this.
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And literally in this tone, what about Paul Maniffort? And nobody knew what that meant. Nobody knows who he is,
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including her. Okay, so your mother why you got to beat up on Jason so much you should be a
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nicer to him he is your bestie sorry continue Orlando has an incredibly inspiring story but let me just set the
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backdrop of what uh Toma Bravo is to Bravo started in 2008 so what is that 17 years now and now has just a little
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under 200 billion which is incredible but here are the two stats that stunned me in June you raised $34.4 4 billion in
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basically like a set of fund vehicles which is I want to understand how that is even possible and then you basically
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have owned now or 500 companies and many of the big software companies that you know we probably interact with and have
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to deal with. But before we get into all those details, I think what's inspiring
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is you are a child of Puerto Rico, a small town in Puerto Rico, and I've texted you this before, but I just
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wanted you to tell everybody, how does a guy, and I'm not I'm saying this in a nice way, from literally the middle of
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nowhere, get here? How does that happen? Your parents, your family, like how does
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that happen? Well, by the way, thanks so much for having me. And I'm not sure how we're
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supposed to talk about serious stuff and private equity when when when we have this, but
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you persevere. I I got this. Look, um that touches my heart that you asked that question
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because when Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, kind of everything stopped for me because my best friends are there, my
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family's there, um cousins, my my whole upbringing. I got there on a plane the day after.
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And where were you at the time? I was in San Francisco. Okay. And we had gotten a message from Puerto
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Rico saying there's some shelters, particularly one that was really close to my hometown of my that had only two
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days supply of food and water. And there were all these kids and everything else.
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And the government of Puerto Rico, they had they had trouble serving these towns. So we said, "We'll go from San
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Francisco and bring you a bunch of food and water and we'll we'll be there tomorrow." And they actually showed up.
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When I landed, three of my friends that I hadn't seen in a while, my best high school friends, one of them asked me,
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"Oh, now you're doing all this business stuff. How did that happen?" And I said,
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"Well, the odds are one of us had to get lucky out of out of everybody here, one
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I mean that there's there's some odds to that." But was that something like your parents
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gave you where they're like, "You have to go, you have to do something or Yes. Now, at every turn, I tell you
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this, how exactly I got here. I've never created anything new, but I always had my mom who was a Cuban immigrant. And
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for her, just me staying there, it didn't feel right to her. She was always, you know, she would put me in
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positions where I would always have to be traveling to San Juan to play tennis, the sport of tennis individual. Then if
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I did well, I remember I played my first tournament when I was 10 years old in Karacas, Venezuela. And I saw wealth
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back then, Karakas, Venezuela in 1982 was quite a place and you played in this fancy club and then you if I do really
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well, I get to play in Florida. So she was always always kind of giving me a road map for that. I was lucky that I
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wasn't that good to go pro. So I went so so that I went into business. But then the same thing at at work, you know, I
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had the two best mentors and the only thing I give myself credit for is at a young age I really listened. I had
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discipline and I would kind of kind of take it all in. You were also the beneficiary of an
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incredible mentor. And there's these great stories. Yesterday we heard, you know, Vlad tried to get a job at Climate
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Corp. Couldn't started Robin Hood. You know, famously, um, my HR lead at Facebook introduced me to her then
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boyfriend Ben Sberman. We interviewed Ben. We ended up not hiring him. He immediately started Pinterest. And when
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you graduated from Stanford, you only got one job offer from like a threeperson firm basically. Do you want
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to tell us about that story? Yeah, I would you know at 1997 there was not not much private equity
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and the venture business you didn't hire a lot of people. It was also it was also
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small. Now I I want to add this to the story. I had I got one interview with one of the largest private equity firms
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at the time and the head of the firm spent time with me. Very very nice guy. But you know what he said and this is
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1997. There's not much opportunity in our industry anymore and the industry is taken.
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Now our firm is multiples bigger than they are. And the same thing will happen in the future for the few of you
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that may be interested in private equity. you'll come by and create a firm and it the American spirit and
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entrepreneurialism and being at the right place at the right time because we started doing software and it's hard not
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to do well if you started doing software back then and had all this uh this wind
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behind your back. So, I didn't I couldn't get a job. There weren't many. And then Carl Toma hired me. And at the
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end of the process, this is interesting. There were a few private equity firms that kind of opened up a position for me
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to do Latin American private equity. And I'm like, "No, I've I've spent too much
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time in the south. The money's in the north. I I you know, I want to do US buyout tech. That's what I wanted to
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do." And Carl was great. He said, "If you want to do tech, that's not something we do, but you know, start
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looking at it and and we'll we'll help you." And so, so just tell us about how the
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decisions you've made now to build this business. How many people do you have? How do you run 200 billion effectively?
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How do you raise 34 how do you what do you tell people to raise 34 billion? I don't I don't even I don't even
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comprehend that. I think you do. Come on. You guys have done pretty well. I appreciate that. But but it's uh okay.
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So we have we are very very focused on keeping the team very small. So we have about 230 people at at Toma Bravo within
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the organization. Um the the reason is you if if you have too big of a team, you become internally
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focused and start dreaming about conversations internally. And as I always say, the deal's not in the
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office, the company's not in the office, and the buyer of your company's not in the office. So, you always have to be
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outward facing. The second thing is I got the benefit, and so did my senior partners of incredible mentorship. I can
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tell you so many stories about Carl Toma spending time with me in 1998 on the deal we were going to lose. And I would
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be like, why did you spend all that time with the CEO and me on his kitchen table? He wanted to teach me how to
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sell. He wanted to teach me how to do a deal. and and that was just incredible. So if we have too many of those, we
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can't we can't touch the next generation leadership. So that is that is part of our philosophy. Now how do we raise that
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money? Look, our first deal, it's always been one step at a time. Our first deal
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was 50 million. The second deal was 100 million enterprise value. The third was data at 250 million. We didn't buy a
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company in Silicon Valley till 2010. Uh that was Sonic Wall that we paid 550 million in take private. That was our
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first foray into real cyber um in in higher growth uh businesses. So one little step at a time. There was a time
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that we couldn't raise a billion dollars but now we have enough of a following that you know people people
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what is the role of private equity in the US economy do you think what is the role that it should play? I think it's a
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great change agent. It's it's a business in a way similar to venture where what matters is the
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returns that you put up and you have incredible alignment with the sources of capital. They give you the money and if
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you make the return, you can stay in business. And if they give you the money and you don't make the return, no matter
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how big we may be, we slowly lose that and and we're out of business. And and that that alignment is so important
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because you're such a big change agent to companies. These software companies are not meant to be owned by the same
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group for 30 or 40 years. Management gets tired. It's exhausting to run. It's exhausting to be a CRO. And the more
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they trade hands. You have somebody with maybe a new idea, maybe a perspective, and maybe a perspective that was right
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for the company at that time. And that buyer like private equity can assume be super entrepreneurial and try to do
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something special. So Orlando though the the just building on that it clearly has
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alignment with the investors but maybe you could talk a little bit about the broader alignment with society jobs the
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reputation of PE sometimes is a bit too cutthroat and if you hear oh a PE a firm
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bought my favorite brand or our firm got bought by you know our startup got bought by a P firm it's like okay
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they're going to cut half the people and there's going to be layoffs or maybe this brand is going to get saddled with
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debt and absolutely gutted for parts. So what's fair or unfair about that sort of
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PR crisis? Maybe there is with PR with with PE. That is 100% fair in the 80s, 90s, and
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maybe early 2000s. Private equity has nothing to do with that. Now about 50% of the private
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equity deal volume is in technology. We we do that. We're we we're very narrow. We only do software. If you look at any
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software deal we've done in the last 12 13 years after SAS became irreversible in '05
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you're paying 7 to8 times revenue and the financing on 7 to8 times revenue is maybe two turns of revenue so you're
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putting in five to six turns of equity in the company 30% debt 70% equity if you're not building and growing that
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business especially if it's big nobody's going to buy it from you it used to be that for those old school deals if you
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look at the return twothirds of the return will come today from the cash flow of the business from your yield and
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a little bit in the terminal value. It's flipped about 2/3 or more is terminal value appreciation and you make very
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little. So you're a growth investor on your yield. We really are we had to transfer to that because look the the
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lucky thing we had was after I personally made a lot of mistakes 97 to the internet bubble bursting. Carl Toma
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was going to fire me and this is also true. He he talked about it in his 70th birthday and and he gave me another
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chance and I said, "Okay, I'm not good at what we were doing then. I'm gonna go for existing management,
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really established companies and software." In 2000, you could buy recurring revenue and software cheaper
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than in all the other categories that private equity liked. Think about radio, uh, cable, whatever. Rec outdoor
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advertising, anything. So, the partnership said, "Sure, let's try it. Let's try with something small. At that
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time, you could buy cheap. But what happened is in 2010 after the financial crisis, most of our
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competitors that were doing those deals and it was heavily competitive then for these smaller transactions, they left
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the business because now software became super expensive. So there's a but we said chamat but then
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we said oh instead of complaining that we cannot do what we were doing before because everything changes. Now we have
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the wherewithal to buy the best and the number one. So let's go for the number one player that can grow.
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So you started doing a lot of these SAS deals in 2010. When you sit there with your partners in 2025,
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is there a risk of SAS being cannibalized from within by AI or you know how it can just be rebuilt in
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different ways? How do you underwrite it today which is different from how you may would have underwritten it in 2010?
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Our investors don't love to hear this because for right our investors especially the large institutions that's
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kind of our market that those are our our our people that have backed us for a long time besides good returns they need
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consistency and predictability they would rather have us do what we were doing in 2002 in
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these deals and why why can't you just keep doing the same thing and it all changes one is there is a big risk of AI
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in this business I mean in a big big way there's so many verticals that are going
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to get disrupted there's so many areas that are very confusing and you don't want to touch so it limits the space
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significantly even if you believe what we believe which is in the enterprise it's going to take a while because we
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always say technology is evolutionary not revolutionary because our customers are buying this stuff for cost they want
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the ROI and you need to see the plan and everything else but one is there's a big
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disruption and that's and other all these areas we don't get into. Um, and we have to keep learning um and and
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updating ourselves. That's that's a lot of of work that the young people in the firm as well will have to do. But we
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have another equally big or even bigger challenge which is if you look at our trajectory, it's not like one day we
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woke up and said, "Oh, we can do a $10 billion deal." No, we we started 50 that trajectory in 2010. We did three billion
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dollar deals in a row. Um we bought blue code we took it private. DelTech we took
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private we bought digital insight from into it. When those worked then we did a $2 and half billion dollar deal that
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became Dinatrace that was compare. Then when that worked we did a $5 half billion dollar deal which Dina was here
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yesterday. That was the business that we sold to NASDAQ and that worked. But now
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we're doing $10 billion deals. We have to sell those for 25 to make money. Wow. our our alternative here, what we
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have to underwrite is an IPO at a big discount to the comps when we paid a 30% premium to the comps to buy that company
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in the first place. So, we kind of start 50% in the hole. Well, to do that. So, you have to Anyway,
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I wanted to ask you this question because I I asked a friend of mine about you and he was competing with you to get
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the Boeing business and you you bought the Boeing avionics business recently for 10.5 billion, which I think all of
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us care about because hopefully it'll improve flight safety and all of that other stuff, but we can talk about that
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in one second. But he said Orlando's incredibly difficult to compete with because they're so he's so ready to buy
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the thing he wants to buy and he doesn't really, you know, nickel and dime at the
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edges. It's like, let's find a fair price and we'll just transact and it makes it very hard for everybody else to
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compete with. When you get that conviction, are you just willing to just basically put that much money on the
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line and say, "We're going to figure this out." We are. That's sort of Warren Buffett's
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mentality, isn't it? That he he already knows all the companies. is he knows which ones he wants to buy and when they
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come up that he doesn't nickel and dime he just quickly works out a deal. Is that something is that a mentality that
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you have? 100%. It all it all fits together with having a small team. We also have a
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small portfolio. So in every fund we'll buy 10 to 12 companies. We we strive for the two core
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competencies that we try to have. One is buy the best and operate the best and just focus on that in a 3 to four year
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time frame for our funds for investing our funds. We cannot say with a straight face that there are 30 of the greatest
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companies that were available to be bought at that time. Right? So, so that's why and two we cannot say
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with a straight face that we can try to influence management with everything we learned from an incredible mentor if we
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had a portfolio of 30. That's as much as as we can handle. So, we have to go for
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it. Now, I do want to add that what I love about the private equity business, one of the items is that those deals
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because the decisions that you make with your partners an hour before the bid is
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is really really important. It's really telling. Well, can you take us behind the TikTok
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of this Boeing asset? It's I think it's like a it touches all of us even if most
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of us don't understand that it even existed actually. Well, it it basically runs maybe you cannot fly an airplane,
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right, without Jeepposin and and its system. And the way the deal started, uh, we called the the CEO of Boeing,
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actually sent him an email saying, "Hey, we could buy this division and we're paying these these good prices." So,
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there was some interest. The process started and there were about 15 private equity groups, all excellent groups
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involved in the deal. But, why would Boeing want to sell its avionics business? I guess maybe start
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with that like Yeah, it seems pretty core. It's a good business and I I I'm happy that they
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decided that. So, you're saying that was a bad decision to sell a cockpit? We'll take it.
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Fair enough. Um I I wanted to ask you a question about Can we get the answer to that though?
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What what what is the strategic rational for Boeing to want to sell its avionics
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business? Is the idea that other plane manufacturers can then use that avionic system? I'll give my answer and maybe
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you can. I think Boeing is in this incredibly difficult position where there's a lot
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of diffuse things that were happening inside of the business and they had to make a real
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rationalization. What are the few things we can be good at? So, you know, one of
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our friends, Brian Utko, was put in charge of new plane development. I think you know, you can guess what's going to
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happen there. That's a clear strategic bet. You know, getting the 737 or this the max program back online. That was a
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clear bet. But when you do that, you have all kinds of debt and stuff that you just need to clean out. And
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sometimes you have to sell. And by the way, you are right. Your instincts are right because my friends who called me
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basically said this is the gem asset inside of Boeing. I mean, he's being very gracious by not you. So yeah, but
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Jeepson is the thing that everybody uses. United, Delta, everybody needs this information to fly accurately. And
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it was Boeing's business and now it's Orlando's business. Okay. So what's our phone's business? I wish it
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was like it's your Orlando. We um we don't buy stuff. We're generally year zero, year
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one, two investors who help build things, but Sax and I got to watch our friend Elon buy Twitter and um that was
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quite eye opening. It was also the first thing that I think he ever bought in in
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you know a major way like that. What is the playbook for coming into one of these technology companies and you have
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like you said tired management maybe the people who are still saying at this company are the ones who couldn't find
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other work or maybe weren't as ambitious. What's it like day zero, day one, day two when you get in there?
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What's the playbook? What's you know one, two, three, we got to do these things in the first 30 days.
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It's almost always the same. We we try to buy companies and Jefferson is a a tweener in that because their margins
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were about 25%. But we feel that business can be running like a Denza that we sold to NASDAQ for 50% plus
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running it like a software company and making the right investments. The the playbook is this. You meet with
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a company uh usually a public company that trades for a revenue multiple because they're not that profitable.
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And our our mentality is we try to turn what we call a good innovator into a good business. We have all these
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meetings with management and after we listen a lot to them, we come back to them and we have we put together a plan
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with them to cut cost. So there is that element because you have to get in the game with a certain level of fundamental
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earnings to be able to afford the deal. You you you basically are what we're trying to do is turn a revenue multiple
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day one, say we buy it for six or seven times to an ebida multiple in day four. If that company grew 20% and you achieve
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a 50% margin, you've done that. And then you say, "What are the comps? What is this thing worth? Is it a 20p a 25p?" A
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20p is about 15 times ebida. You could double your asset value without the benefit of that 30% leverage which you
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pay down a bit and that's how you create your return. So you you talk we talk to
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management very openly during the process even before we won the deal even if they're not going to like us etc. and
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we say, "Hey, can we put together a plan where you can make the right investment
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decisions, but can you cut 15% of the cost of the company at closing?" The deal in private equity, talk about the
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change agent. If you don't do that at closing in private equity, why are you going to shock the employees afterwards?
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Your 2, three, four, the deal, since everybody's thinking there's a new owner that's going to provide change, gives
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you the opportunity for immediate change. Now, as my mentor Marcel Bernard used to say, he was the greatest
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operator I've ever met. 35 years at Motorola running different divisions and that was an exceptional school of
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management. No matter how profitable you are, you can always cut 10%. No matter how unprofitable you are, it's difficult
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to cut more than 20%. Because you have to change the way people make decisions, the way management interacts, etc.
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How do you evaluate the talent stack? That was something that actually David was exceptional at during the Twitter
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acquisition. And we sat there in a room and he said, "Well, who's exceptional at
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their job?" And then Elon said, "And who's absolutely critical for this business?" And I just walked up to the
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whiteboard and I drew four quadrants, exceptional, essential. And then there was this sort of exceptional but not
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essential. And we we we then had a clear Elon proved that you could cut 85% of Twitter and it would still work just
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fine. And all the journalists were like, "Twitter's going to go down any day now." And then they were like every day
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they would write the same story. Twitter went down and be like, "Oh no, you lost
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your internet connection on your phone and they'd be like,"No, it's it's not coming up." And it's like, "Yeah, yeah,
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reut the P Wi-Fi password in." And it never went down. It it was pretty crazy. But how do you assess talent when you're
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coming into one of these legacy businesses, you know, 10 years, 20 years into the business?
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History tells you a lot of that. So you you're trying to identify not everybody's good at everything and
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it starts with a leader. If the leader is good, everything is good. If the leader is not good, nothing is good. You
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you don't want to work around them to deal with sales and product and stuff because the nothing is going on. Now
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what does a good leader mean, right? There's so many judgments that come in. Are they is a company hitting bookings?
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Is it missing? Are they good at customer service? What's their retention? How do
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they make decisions? What we look for overall because nobody's perfect is to back what they're look what they're good
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at. We love to do add-on acquisitions for our company. So the reason we like to take out the cost once is the rest is
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about bookings growth and add-ons. We don't want to revisit margin too much. We want profitable growth going forward.
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Let's be done with that and then let's go forward. The leader can stand up in front of the entire employee base and
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said we needed to do this. This deal probably gave us the courage to do what we need to do. Let's go. Let's go build
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the business. So, but we we look at a leader and we say if they're open-minded, if they care about numbers and if they
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have the following of their employees and customers and really know the business, that is something that we
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really, really, really try to work with. With all the changes we make, we've been
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pretty contrarian in the industry because we first try to make them with the existing people. And sometimes, you
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know, we make a mistake on that and they change their mind, but we we try to do that.
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Before you do a deal, what's the secret to figuring out how good the asset is? Do you go talk to customers, backdoor
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references? Do you go find the employees who quit and started companies and interview them? Like, there's got to be
00:24:50
some tricks to assess a company before you even let them know you're interested in them. What are those tricks?
00:24:56
All of that. All of that. Now, we've usually owned a competitor or a partner to the company as well
00:25:04
and and we've usually known him for a long time. Like we recently announced that we were doing the Day Force deal
00:25:09
for 12 billion. My partner Holden Spade met with the CEO of Day Force in 2008 and we've tracked that company for so
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long watching it when does it miss when does it hit its numbers and everything else. It's um
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you get you also once you sign them up uh or are in a process where the company's giving you all their raw data,
00:25:32
you have so much information to make those choices. Like for example, a company cannot say that it has really
00:25:39
really good product if its gross margins on support are very low. And we can bring technology people to
00:25:46
assess that and we have that on our team and they look at the architecture and the the talent and everything else. But
00:25:51
then you go how come your support calls are so high? It's a bad product. It yeah it it it all fits together. If you
00:25:57
have great retention, great margins on support. It's like for example take support. Many people look
00:26:03
to offshore support and now maybe AI would would get on on that and there's no need for that. What we say is
00:26:11
eliminate the reason for the call alto together because there's nothing you can do in
00:26:14
product. So we're evaluating all that. We love it. We geek out over it. There's a handful of PE firms obviously
00:26:19
that are now lynch pins of the capital markets. Blackstone, Apollo, KKR, Carlile, they're public, they are
00:26:28
multistrat. They're huge pillars. And I mean, you've built an incredible business. You have the credibility to do
00:26:34
it. Is there an impetus to do it? Is there an impetus to kind of grow beyond that technology focus? And if not, how
00:26:41
do you stay in your knitting? Because it, you know, how do you do that? How where does the discipline come from?
00:26:47
Look, I I think um we are very pure to our investor base and our colleagues, the two of them at
00:26:56
the same time. What I say matters to them is the return. So what matters for us to grow the
00:27:03
business is get the money, get the deal, improve the deal. Going public does not
00:27:08
help any of those things for us. That that's that's number one. Two is we're really I'm just so grateful. I I really
00:27:17
really am for my mentors. I mean, Carl Toma gave me and my partners the company,
00:27:22
right? And he mentored us. So, we want to do the same thing for the next generation.
00:27:26
And we actually feel we'll make more money by investing behind the next generation when that time comes than by
00:27:31
going public and having a great day and a great multiple and and then what? So, so far we're just going to we're just
00:27:38
going to stay where we are. As we wrap, I I just want to ask you a question about Puerto Rico again, where
00:27:43
we started. You're the first Puerto Rican billionaire. I understand it's um it's just a number obviously, but should
00:27:50
Puerto Rico become the 51st state? You know, we we have Trump talking about Greenland, whatever. Um you know, we
00:27:57
have these ambitions. The people of Puerto Rico seem to want to have a deeper relationship with America. It
00:28:03
seems profoundly unfair that they're in this, you know, sort of middle state. Yeah. It's such a divided place. The
00:28:10
turnouts in elections in Puerto Rico when I was a kid used to be like 90%. It's a whole festival in the island when
00:28:18
elections happen between the party that wants the status quo and the party that wants statehood. Now, the party that
00:28:23
wants statehood has grown quite a bit and some of the tax incentives of being um kind of in this Commonwealth status
00:28:29
have gone away. I'm going to say something I've never said before and I I do believe it'll be better for Puerto
00:28:35
Rico to be a state if the US would allow that. I'm for it. I'm here for it. Ladies and
00:28:40
gentlemen, Orlando Bravo. Thanks, man. Wow. Thank you. Incredible, huh? I'll talk to you soon.
00:28:48
Great job. Thank you. Amazing.