Limited Partner, John McCarthy, is back for another book club episode. This time we talk about Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow -- and how it applies to private equity. Try listening to this episode with your System 2 thinking.
By popular demand ... it's our annual March Madness Episode from two guys that know nothing about college basketball but love bracketology. It's the Elite Eight -- Lou Adler vs. Daniel Pink, Geoffrey Moore vs. Strunk & White, Malcolm Gladwell vs. Dan Carlin and HBR vs. Kara Swisher.
Jim spends an hour talking about Information Security with Evolve Security's CEO -- Paul Petefish. We keep bumping into Pete and his team at 1871 - and figured it was time to talk a little bit about Information Security. Everybody KNOWS that it's an important topic, but how does one get started figuring out where they stand from an InfoSec standpoint?
Jim, Devin and Ryan sit down to discuss why people are so bad at interviewing and what they did to fix their own mistakes. They cover the strategy and tactics for improving your interviewing skills and provide some helpful tips you can try out on your own.
Limited Partner Mike McClure sits down for a discussion about the other side of the fundraising table. We cover: the first meeting, following up and what can set you apart from all the other GPs in the market.
Over the past year we've changed out a number of tools and software that we use to manage the fund. Come have a listen and find out what things we've moved off of and our new favorites. Spoiler alert: Contactually, Microsoft Office 365, Egnyte, NetSuite, Squarespace, Intralinks ... and Basecamp.
ParkerGale is looking to add three professional to our team -- two Principals focused on Operations and one Associate for the Investment team. Take a listen to find out if you (or someone you know) is a good fit.
The latest episode in our Fundraising series. We spend an hour talking with John Cosgrove from Beartooth Advisors - the team that worked as our agents on the ParkerGale fund. Come have listen and find out how Beartooth approached our fundraising process and learn all the ins and outs of working with an agent. (This is an updated version -- fixed the audio from the original release)
Jim and Devin spend an hour talking with Jay Bartlett and Scott Orleck from Parthenon-EY Ernst & Young LLP. We've worked extensively with Jay and Scott on buy-side due-diligence projects over a number of years. They share their experiences tackling questions workig with us around market sizing, growth rates, cyclicality, and the competitive landscape. All of which serves to answer the fundamental questions: Is a particular industry a good industry in which to invest? And is the target company the right company to buy? Jay and Scott reveal the three main reasons why deals go bad.
The second episode of our trifecta covering the raising of ParkerGale's first fund. This episode starts off where we left our intrepid heroes just after their first close in September, 2015. Come have a listen as we talk about our decision to hire a placement agent and our marathon of trips in late winter/early spring in pursuit of capital.
Devin and ParkerGale Limited Partner John McCarthy continue their book club series with an investing classic, "The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks, the legendary cofounder and Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. Turns out that Marks most important thing is actual nineteen things -- come have a listen as Devin and John focus on three of them.
Devin and ParkerGale Limited Partner John McCarthy kick off their book club series with an unusual choice, "Rumsfeld's Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life" by Donald Rumsfeld. Some surprising advice in this book when we apply Rumsfeld's observations about leadership, business, and life to investing.
Devin and Jim spend an hour talking about the strategy and tactics of raising ParkerGale's first fund. This episode covers the pre-launch up to the fund's first close.
Jim and Alan talk about a scary subject on our Halloween episode -- Distributed Denial of Service attacks. Two weeks ago the internet experienced an unprecedented DDOS attack against a popular DNS hosting service -- Dyn -- that blocked access to a huge number of popular sites -- eBay and PayPal included. What does this mean for the small business owner -- should you avoid the Cloud altogether? Come have a listen and find out.
We had a great conversation with Kevin Hurley, a recent graduate from Fullstack Academy. Kevin is a high school math teacher who caught the coding bug and decided to switch careers. He's exactly the kind of self-motivated technologist that will thrive our the tech economy. So, if you are thinking about jumping into the tech space, or you're a CTO looking to hire talent from "outside the box" -- then come have a listen. One more thing ... if Chevy Chase is reading this description, we assure him that in this episode there will be NO math.
Jim talks about all things social media with Cappy Popp and John Maver from Thought Labs -- a leading Digital Marketing Strategy company. We've worked with Cappy and John on a number of projects in our portfolio, and they know what it takes to develop a social media strategy. This is the first part of an ongoing series on social media marketing. In this first part we cover the basics of when/why/how you should consider a social media campaign for your company.
Alan and Jim spend a fun hour talking with Zeke Nierenberg, Academic Director/Chicago from Fullstack Academy. Fullstack teaches qualified non-programmers to code using an immersive 13-week program. Our bias going into this conversation was Alan's belief that you can't learn to code in 13 weeks. Zeke managed to school us both with Fullstack's point of view. Come have a listen and and decide for yourself.
Alan and Jim spend an hour talking with Ben Johnson, author of BoldDB and and freelance Go developer. The Go language is a relatively new open source programming language (and platform) started by Google and maintained by a community of developers. The authors promote "Go" as being easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. Go is somewhat unique in that it compiles into a native operating system executable that can be easily distributed across platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS). Is "Go" the right choice for smaller companies? Have a listen and find out.
Devin sits down with Jeremie Bacon, CEO and Founder of Synap, to discuss Private Equity, Managing People and Movie Quotes.
Jim is back talking with Brian Walker, CEO of AE Marketing Group on the topic of Influencer Marketing. Does it work for B2B companies? Why or Why Not? What types of "marketing" projects should middle-market business-to-business companies focus their precious resources on? (If you have a dollar to spend, where should you spend it). We branch out into a side discussion of trying to calculate the real size of a company's addressable market, building simple "market" data marts and fallacy of "Big Data" in marketing.
Alan and Jim spend a fast half hour talking when you should consider upgrading older pieces of custom (homegrown) software. You don't have to upgrade older software just for the sake of upgrading it -- and converting from an older language to a newer language doesn't make the software any better. The first of a three (or maybe four) part series on modernizing your infrastructure.
Jim and Alan spend an hour arguing about whether you should consider bolting an
application programming interface onto older applications as a path to modernizing them. The conversation meanders into a brief history of application-programming-interfaces without getting too nitty-gritty -- suitable listening for Founders, CEOs and technologists.
The first of many conversations with Brian Walker CEO of AE Marketing Group. We've found that Marketing is often the third wheel at small companies -- behind product development and sales. Brian's team takes a CoCreation and Customer Experience approach to building and marketing products that gets the marketing function heavily involved in improving operations and products. So, come have a listen!
We all know there are tons of Private Equity funds. So what are the ways they try to stand out from the crowd? We cover the four biggies: Focus, Size, Sourcing and Team.
Alan, Jim and Kristina talk about a rare phenomenon in technology -- slowing down sales -- intentionally! Faced with the need to undertake some major software refactoring, we chose to put the cap on new sales while we raced to update the platform. This caused real tension between the board, sales management and the engineering team. Come have a listen as we talk about the details of this successful effort.