Keep pulling the thread on Orlando Bravo.
Orlando Bravo asserts that the average publicly traded software company loses money, a situation that has not changed in the nearly 30 years Thoma Bravo has been investing in the sector.
Thoma Bravo's assets under management grew from approximately $1 billion to nearly $200 billion over a 17-year period.
A key strategic goal for Thoma Bravo is to drive its portfolio companies towards achieving 50% profit margins and 20% revenue growth.
Orlando Bravo asserts that the general concept of a durable moat in software has never been true, particularly in dynamic sectors like cybersecurity and infrastructure software.
Orlando Bravo believes Salesforce will not be commoditized by generative AI because its defensibility is rooted in the established business processes it supports, not just its underlying code.
Thoma Bravo's standard operational playbook for a new acquisition involves cutting 15% to 20% of costs immediately after the deal closes.
In his early career at Thoma Bravo's predecessor firm, two of Orlando Bravo's first three IT services investments went to zero and the third returned only 50% of the capital invested following the dot-com bust.
The global software industry represents a $1.3 trillion economy based on annual revenue.
The Brava Family Foundation's Rising Entrepreneurs program has successfully launched over 100 new companies in Puerto Rico.
Orlando Bravo believes the private equity industry is still in its early stages and that the next generation of investors will build firms much larger and better than Thoma Bravo.
According to Orlando Bravo, the core value of an enterprise software company is its ability to understand and service a customer's business processes, with the actual development of code being a very small part of that value delivery.
Orlando Bravo predicts that fundamental corporate organizational structures and processes will not change in the next ten years, which will protect incumbent enterprise software providers from disruption.