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Orlando Bravo: Finding Your Niche | E16 · In Search Of Excellence

• 0:00
  Orlando Bravo: Don't think success is doing higher return deals and somebody else or building more wealth than somebody else or having a bigger firm success is doing things right. When you look back, did you do your craft and your art the right way? And did you do so much with what you were given?
• 0:19
  Orlando Bravo: That to me is success.
• 0:24
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to a Search of Excellence which is about our quest for greatness and our desire to be the very best we can be to learn, educate and motivate ourselves to live up to our highest potential.
• 0:32
  Randall Kaplan: It's about planning for excellence and how we achieve excellence through incredibly hard work, dedication and perseverance. It's about believing in ourselves and the ability to overcome the many obstacles we all face on our way there. Achieving Excellence is our goal and it's never easy to do. We all have different backgrounds, personalities, and surroundings. We all have different routes on how we hope and want to get there. My guest today is Orlando Bravo Orlando is the Founder and Managing Member of Thoma Bravo, which manages more than $100 billion and has been ranked as the best performing private equity firm in the world. Since Orlando joined its predecessor firm in 1997. Thoma Bravo has completed more than 350 acquisitions worth nearly $155 billion, and it presently oversees a portfolio of 50 software companies that generate $21 billion in annual revenue and employs more than 72,000 people around the world.
• 1:28
  Randall Kaplan: According to Forbes magazine in 2019, Orlando became the first Puerto Rico born billionaire and has a current net worth of $6.3 billion. Rolando serves on many nonprofit boards, including Brown University, and he has been an incredible and very generous philanthropist who has given to many causes. Orlando, thanks for being here today.
• 1:46
  Randall Kaplan: Welcome to In Search of Excellence.
• 1:49
  Orlando Bravo: Randy, thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
• 1:53
  Randall Kaplan: I always start my podcast with our family because from the moment we're born, our family helped shape our personalities, our values and the preparation for our future. You were born into a privileged life. And Mike was Puerto Rico in a city of 100,000 people, which is best known for being the poor for tuna fishing vessels and 1945. Your grandfather started Bravo shipping, and eventually your dad ran it. The company serves as an agent for the huge tuna fishing factory ships that enter the port of my request. Could you tell us what your parents were like? And how growing up in a privileged life influence your future, and the kind of values your parents instilled in you?
• 2:29
  Orlando Bravo: First of all, Randy, nobody knows that about my background, I am impressed. I actually saw my dad here in Puerto Rico last week, and we were talking about his business there with the tune up factories were there. I think my parents are the main reasons for my luck. I had my dad who had the small agency business, around the tuner ships that came into the ports, the canneries that existed back then they're no longer around for a number of reasons. And he instilled in me hard work, and entrepreneurial spirit ethics, how to do business, right, how to be a small business person and make a great living and do it the right way. Since I was 10 years old, I will go to the office on the weekends and work with them. And they communicated by telex, with the chips that I will go to the pork with him and I would try to help in whatever way I can, or I could when the chips were important. So it was a very active lifestyle where his work was intertwined with family, my mom, just an amazing influence on my life. My mom's family immigrated from Cuba. And my mom was not only extremely hardworking, but she had a vision for the family and for the kids of doing something different of exploring different things. Even though I grew up privileged, I grew up in an isolated place. And being privileged in minor ways is very different than being privileged in New York City. And my mom thought big, and she thought about the world. And she let me explore it mainly through the sport.
• 4:06
  Randall Kaplan: Did they teach you specifically about the value of work ethic? Was this part of your DNA? And at what point in your childhood or part of your childhood? Did you decide I'm going to be the very best that I can be?
• 4:20
  Orlando Bravo: My dad taught me work ethic and ethics by example. My mom really pushed me almost to the point where right now I'm so happy and she wonders if she pushed me too hard on the work ethic front. She used to have this quote that I remember she told me so to me when I was a little kid, delayed pleasure.
• 4:41
  Orlando Bravo: And I think modern society, and the next generation we would disagree with that, that was always ingrained in me is if I can accomplish something here and then I can move on to something else, and so on and so forth. And that stayed with me since a really young age because when she introduced the sport of tennis to me, it was She really correlated and helped me correlate hard work with good luck, or hard work with results.
• 5:06
  Orlando Bravo: And it was so tangible at such an early time. That's always been with me.
• 5:11
  Randall Kaplan: So let's talk about what you were like as a kid, you started playing tennis when you were eight years old, you practice primarily at two places, a local university and a Hilton Hotel. You were very good. You played in a lot of local tournaments. You did very well in those so much so that your parents started driving two and a half hours to San Juan on weekends. So you could play against better competition. You said you love this opportunity.
• 5:31
  Randall Kaplan: You're excited to go to a much bigger city to play against much better players. Can you tell us about the excitement you felt about playing against better competition people who are better than you? And can you tell us why you consider yourself an underdog and how that mindset influenced your tennis career and your future?
• 5:52
  Orlando Bravo: Yeah, that on the one hand, it was really exciting. And I have less pressure, because I felt like I was the outsider, the underdog coming from the relatively small town to the big city to play. I remember once when I actually won a tournament, this place called palmas Del Mar, it was a clay court tournament, important tournament in Puerto Rico, there was an American head of the tournament, who mentioned all the way from my wrist. And that feeling was just awesome. But at the same time, it was a lot of added pressure. Because if my family was making that big effort, it wasn't just me. It was a whole family affair of driving those two and a half hours every weekend. And I lost and had a horrible match. The pressure of letting everybody else down was pretty big. So it was both the excitement of being the underdog, but then you have that added pressure.
• 6:44
  Randall Kaplan: But you rose to the challenge and you kept winning and soon competition in Puerto Rico wasn't good enough.
• 6:49
  Randall Kaplan: So in 1985, when you're 15 years old, he moved to Bradenton, Florida to enroll in Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy to pursue a possible career in tennis. For our listeners and viewers who don't know Nick voluntary has coached the Williams sisters, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, and Monica Salas, all of whom at one time were the number one players in the world, Nick is considered one of the best, if not the best tennis coaches of all time. Can you tell us what your experience there was? Like what time you woke up in the morning, the hours you went to school, the hours you train, and what you've described as physical pain? And can you tell us how all of this and the other lessons you learn there, including playing with people better than you who ended up as the best in the world, were critical factors on your path to excellence,
• 7:35
  Orlando Bravo: you really learned humility pretty quickly, because you think you're doing well in something. And then you go to a different place, and it becomes a lot bigger, and a lot of difference. And you understand your limitations really quickly. So one thing was understanding where you fit and where you could go. And I want to talk more about that. But the days were really grueling. We had alarms on at 630, you had breakfast, seven to 745. Then there were three types of schools that you could go to I went to the more academic one, once again, advised by my parents, and they would put you through they had a schedule where you would go to college and real school with other kids, but they accommodate your schedule. So you would start at 830. And nonstop except for a 15 minute break. And a two after you were rushed back into the academy about a 20 minute drive 30 minutes for lunch. And then you were on the courts, relatively when 145 till about 545. You had half an hour to shower, an hour for dining hall.
• 8:39
  Orlando Bravo: And you had to be in study hall for two hours no matter what.
• 8:43
  Orlando Bravo: sitting there quietly, if you didn't want to do homework, if you even didn't have any homework done, you just had to sit there. And then you had half an hour before going to bed and it was lights out. And you had counselors kind of walking around the dorms, making sure that the lights were out. We slept for kids per room. And on the one hand while it was grueling, and the only time we left the academy was either to go play tournament, or on Saturday, we'd go to the mall at night to watch a movie or grab some food in and it was tough.
• 9:13
  Orlando Bravo: But the camaraderie and the people that you meet, and just having kids that are looking at the same that have the same interest in the sport, that are traveling together that are going through the same journey.
• 9:24
  Orlando Bravo: That level of support was so big that it made it very doable.
• 9:30
  Randall Kaplan: Jim Courier was your roommate was super cool to see him progress and get to number one in the world.
• 9:36
  Orlando Bravo: Unbelievable. Jim is one of the most gifted athletes and certainly one of the hardest workers and one of the smartest as well. He has it all. And what was so cool is seeing him become one of the best with the same style as I would hit with him or watch him play when he was 12 years old.
• 9:57
  Orlando Bravo: Just much bigger, faster, hitting the ball a lot harder.
• 10:00
  Orlando Bravo: Did he and I have stayed in touch over the years, and he just a phenomenal person.
• 10:05
  Randall Kaplan: You have these dreams to go pro and you get to a top 40 Junior ranking in the United States, and then you peek, you'd put in a ton of work and your dream was to go pro.
• 10:15
  Randall Kaplan: And it wasn't going to happen because you weren't good enough.
• 10:18
  Randall Kaplan: At what point did you realize it wasn't going to happen? Was there an exact moment? And if so, what was it? And how did you deal with the disappointment of having your childhood dream shattered?
• 10:29
  Orlando Bravo: It was probably the first tier of the 16 and unders were before Kalamazoo, which is the main term in the US 16 and under 18. And under, before that tournament, I kept losing in the second or third round. And I just saw the top 10, which included Jim Courier.
• 10:45
  Orlando Bravo: Certainly Agassi, Michael Chang keep getting better and exponentially. That was a very pivotal time when the game for the top completely changed. And everybody else kind of stayed in the same group, I switched relatively quickly. And maybe it was a defense mechanism to say Whoa, it's much better than to go to a great college, or play the sport at a good college. So the goal changed so quickly that I didn't really I don't feel like I suffered through the pain of of that crushing disappointment of not making it because also that goal was hard enough. If you didn't do well, especially in Kalamazoo, you were not going to get recruited, potentially to some of the places that I wanted a shot
• 11:31
  Randall Kaplan: shot at. I want to make a quick comment about the world of professional tennis. If you want to make a good living doing it, you need to be one of the top players in the world, only 50 players make over a million dollars a year and over the last seven years.
• 11:44
  Randall Kaplan: On average, only 195 players made more than $100,000 A year 76% of all professional players make less than $20,000 a year.
• 11:55
  Randall Kaplan: So it's fair to say you probably pick the right career from a money making point of view.
• 12:02
  Orlando Bravo: Yes, that is true. I did and I noticed that I am in touch with some pro players. And if you have for example, the number 60 in the world without naming a specific individual, if they are not from the US for sponsorships are more feasible, you get almost no sponsorship money and you're having to live your own p&l, which is the prize money you went in tournaments minus your coach minus the travel minus your physio and whatever else you need to spend money on. So the margins are really thin.
• 12:35
  Randall Kaplan: There's a pro golfer who I don't want to name we became friends with them when it comes in plays at Riviera, we'll stay with us. And uh, he I was very surprised to learn the life of a pro golfer, you play the program on Wednesday, you get there on Tuesday, you play the program on Wednesday, you have four rounds, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And then you either leave Sunday night or travel on Monday and you're living from a hotel room, you're paying for your own flights and your own food and you have a trainer, and sometimes a coach, it's hard to make any money at all you're playing, hoping you're going to crack through and win a tournament.
• 13:13
  Orlando Bravo: I'm glad you mentioned that I've noticed how the p&l is ingrained in each of these pro tennis players. And maybe it's the same in golf, where when they're playing a tournament, I noticed that most of them are staying in somebody's house to reduce no matter how successful they are.
• 13:29
  Orlando Bravo: And it could be one of the best in the world. But they're not paying for hotel because they they learned that very early not to have to deal with that cost.
• 13:37
  Randall Kaplan: Well, he told me it's very lonely is the first thing and it gets tiring checking into a room each day and he wanted a home cooked meal. So my wife Madison cooked nice meals, we went to dinner one night, and he felt like a human being is what he said and how he called it. So for me, it's fun to learn about new things. Like you said, it's a p&l and it's very hard to make a living. Let's talk about the value of an education, which for many of us is one of the building blocks of our success and our search for excellence.
• 14:07
  Randall Kaplan: You attended private schools.
• 14:07
  Randall Kaplan: You went back to Puerto Rico to finish high school. And although you weren't good enough to go pro, you're good enough to play in college on a tennis scholarship. You went to an Ivy League school and when you get there, you're intimidated and scared you wouldn't make it so much so that you took Pass Fail classes your freshman year.
• 14:25
  Randall Kaplan: Ultimately, you did make it in fact you really made it you graduated Phi Beta Kappa with degrees in economics and political science. For our listeners and viewers who don't know Phi Beta Kappa is the oldest and most prestigious.
• 14:38
  Randall Kaplan: tourney in the United States for academics is typically awarded to the top one to 3% of the student body is something you don't apply for they found you.
• 14:46
  Randall Kaplan: So you're the top 1% of one percenters. How did this happen?
• 14:50
  Randall Kaplan: How did you go from I'm scared and I'm not going to make it to graduating in the top one to 3% of your class and what's your advice for people? If we're too scared or intimidated, and fear failure, whether it's in college or grad school, or whatever else in life, for that matter who are telling themselves, I want to do that, but I won't succeed. So why should I try? My advice
• 15:14
  Orlando Bravo: is like Carl toma once told me making mistakes means that you're trying. And, of course, you know, you try not to make the same mistakes over and over again, that's part of you, managing your own journey.
• 15:24
  Orlando Bravo: risk taking and taking risks that are right for you is the most beautiful thing. And it takes a lot of courage. And you go ahead and do that. I love talking to the younger people in our team and telling them, it's okay, go out there and do bad deals, just collaborate a lot, have the backs of your teammates, and be very open minded, but it's okay to do bad deals, because over time, you will do really well. For me specifically, there were two factors that were helpful. At that time. One was the institution, Brown University gave me a soft landing, that was the right place for me, by far, I did not need any more pressure that I already put on myself.
• 16:12
  Orlando Bravo: And by allowing me to take everything pass fail, I could go and try see how it was without having the external negative validation of having not done well or made a mistake. Soft Landing is really important. I when I talk to leaders, I let them know that, for me the importance of that when we have a new colleague joined the firm, give him or her a couple of wins early. Don't ask for too much too early because they have enough pressure on themselves.
• 16:41
  Orlando Bravo: The second factor that helped me going back to the line of thought that you had at the beginning with work ethic was I was used to working X number of hours a day, whether it was in the sport or in school, and I could send myself in the library from 8pm to midnight when the Rockefeller library and Brown University closed, and I was there. So I over rotated and I Oh, maybe even I overdid it with putting too much time to do pretty well. The second semester I took three pass fail one for a grade, and I did great then it was two and two. And then I finally went went all grades because I felt comfortable enough in that environment.
• 17:20
  Randall Kaplan: I went to a private high school in Detroit, Michigan, very rigorous. They made you play two sports a year.
• 17:27
  Randall Kaplan: The motto was min Sano and corporate Sano sound mind and sound body. It was very tough homework till 11 o'clock midnight, you come home from practice play a sport I got to Michigan. And I thought I have so much free time. I don't know what to do. But I was intimidated as well. A grade school book in the first lecture class was 500 people there, how am I going to be the best here?
• 17:47
  Randall Kaplan: Like you I had all this free time I was in the library every night, whether I had a test or not. And what's interesting from that group, there were 10 of us in the law library with this beautiful gothic building one of most beautiful buildings you've ever seen. And all 10 people who were there in our little group, five of us are in touch today had been phenomenally successful in life, which is been super fun for us to see and support one another. I was scared I actually took one pass fail class in the class. I didn't think I may not get an A. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa as well. And then I went to Northwestern law school and I did well there also but I had the same exact experience in college, and through the hard work that you mentioned was able to do well. And it served me well in life. Let's talk about the start of your career. You graduated top your class at Brown then you get a very prestigious job and mergers and acquisition department and Morgan Stanley that was headed by a guy named Joe Perella, who had spent 40 years as an investment banker at his own firm before he joined Morgan Stanley as Chairman of their mergers and acquisitions department. Like most junior bankers, you work grueling. 100 hour weeks, most analysts are locked away in a data room, crank out 100 Page Excel models but you spoke fluent Spanish which got you in front of other clients. He had the opportunity to work on some pretty cool deals including the foreigner$50 million acquisition of the Puerto Rico supermarket chain Pueblo extra International, which was purchased by a Venezuelan billionaire named Gustavo Cisneros. And that deal opened your eyes to the world of buyouts. You were learning a lot about business and finance. But after a couple years at Morgan Stanley, you decided you didn't want to be a banker. Then you went to Stanford to get a JD MBA. You're originally accepted to law school, then you're repeatedly called the Business School and you got in there.
• 19:40
  Randall Kaplan: Graduate school is very expensive. The average cost of going to law school is $50,000 a year which means that it's going to cost you $150,000 for three years. To go to a top law school the cost is $70,000 a year or 210,000 over three years. When you're talking about business schools, the average range is between five 50 and $100,000 and when you're talking about the toppy schools, Stanford's 241,000 and Wharton's 230,000.
• 20:07
  Randall Kaplan: And of course, it doesn't factor in the opportunity cost of the income you're giving up, which can easily add another $200,000 or more, depending on what you were doing before. There was a recent Gallup poll a 4000 adults who got a law degree and only 23% said that the decree was worth it. On the flip side, a 2021 survey by the Graduate Management Admission Council concluded that individuals with MBAs are $3 million more over a span of 35 years than those with only a bachelor degree. There are a lot of young professionals listening today who are thinking about graduate school and are asking themselves the same questions. Is it worth it? Will it help me and do I need it? Did you need a JD MBA to succeed and what's your advice on getting a graduate degree or backing up step is a college degree necessary to our success and our path to excellent
• 21:01
  Orlando Bravo: college degrees absolutely necessary. And I am not suggesting that somebody without it cannot be successful.
• 21:09
  Orlando Bravo: The rigorous analytical, qualitative, deductive reasoning skills that you learned in college, the communication skills, writing skills that you learned in college being part as you were mentioning, being part of a peer group, and navigating a journey with that peer group that has similar interests, because the later you go to any school, whether especially grad school, then you're starting to get into a peer group that is looking at the same thing, so you start collaborating with them in friendly competition with one another that drives one another like these athletes.
• 21:46
  Orlando Bravo: Right, Roger made Rafa better Rafa made Roger bet during that journey. I think it's, I mean, a college degree, I'm a huge fan of, I also believe that for graduate degrees, you an individual should do what they feel is best for them at the time, I would not counsel a young person, the following way, I would not say you should get an MBA in order to do this. If that person wants to do whatever it is, and they want to do it now. And they don't want to go to graduate school, don't do it.
• 22:18
  Orlando Bravo: Just go Go follow your path.
• 22:22
  Orlando Bravo: However, many individuals want to spend a couple of years of business school or another trade or law school, reflecting on what they really want to do. And I think that's an important time and a formative time. I would not do anything differently than I did. I really enjoyed law school. I believe you enjoyed law school as well, jurisprudence, a way of thinking, I was completely inspired by my law school professors, and by my law school classmates, many of which were choosing public interest paths, and different very deep thinkers about big issues in society that are very helpful as a business person as a leader. And in this school, of course, you have the incredible camaraderie of this very competitive, very outgoing set of people that ended up becoming lifelong friends.
• 23:15
  Randall Kaplan: What was it like working for Joe Perella? I read all the books when I was in high school in college. He was an icon in then, are you still in touch with your classmates at Morgan? Stanley from back in the day when I moved to Los Angeles, there were a group of us young professionals very, very motivated. And it's been fun to see us grow in our careers have families and kids. My kids go to a private school on the west side of Los Angeles. In some cases, our kids go to school with one another, which is very cool.
• 23:48
  Orlando Bravo: Well, first job Perella wouldn't have known me that I was an analyst. I don't think I was invited to any meetings that he was at working for the associates of Morgan Stanley was brutal, because they were looking to make their mark.
• 24:02
  Orlando Bravo: So they will give you assignments that may not have been necessary at midnight, in order to show it to their VP or their boss the next morning, and maybe something will come out of it, maybe something would not.
• 24:14
  Orlando Bravo: But that was a rite of passage.
• 24:17
  Orlando Bravo: And the first year was a tough year for me, culturally, there and then I accepted it, and I thought I had a phenomenal second year. In terms of the friendships. That's another place where you make incredible friends like you mentioned, I stay in touch with most of them.
• 24:33
  Orlando Bravo: And with most of my open mates, Holly Moore runs her own private equity firm. She was at Silverlake before and Hellman and Friedman before Adam clamor was at KKR. Now he has his own firm. We were in the same bullpen together. Joe Bharata, who runs Blackstone private equity and I are close friends and we were in the same boat but it was a good experience from that perspective.
• 25:50
  Randall Kaplan: When I started my investment firm package At the end of 99, DLj was the best investment bank in town, Ken Molas ran it. And my company had gone public. Everyone thought I had the magic touch. I didn't.
• 26:02
  Randall Kaplan: But I got a call from a couple of the young, the analysts there, and they wanted to come work with me. So they did. And I remember a month after. I mean, I love the work ethic, by the way, you ask them, and this is sort of I can't tell this is good or bad to say, but if you threw a hand grenade, they would jump on it. They just wanted to learn as much as possible. And I remember coming in to work and Tom Barber, who now has his own private equity firm. I walked into his office and back then I got in at six o'clock in the morning, I'd wait for the bagel shop, to open across the street, I grabbed my bagel, I'd go to work. And I look in Tom's office, his feet are hanging out beneath the desk. And I thought he died. I thought, why was he there? So I looked under the desk. He was sleeping on a stack of Wall Street Journals. And I woke them up and I said, Hey, Tom, what are you doing? And he said, I was here late studying, learning about the sector and technology that we were looking at a deal. And I said to him, I appreciate you, Tom. I love you.
• 27:06
  Randall Kaplan: We're not going to do that again. You're gonna know when we have to work the night through which we never did in the venture capital business. You really don't need to you do all the diligence. You talked to some of the CO investors and it was just not necessary. But I love the work ethic. I'm in touch with Tom we also had soon faux work here. I introduced him to Josh Freeman, who I know, you know, soon retired at age 38.
• 27:30
  Randall Kaplan: One day I'm going to be working for soon. It's been fun to watch people who've worked with me do very, very well. It's a very rewarding thing for me to see.
• 27:42
  Randall Kaplan: That's outstanding. While you were at Stanford, you had a summer internship right down the street in Menlo Park and a firm called Seaver Kent which was a joint venture with David Bonderman to Texas Pacific Group, David was and remains one of the most successful private equity investors in the world where you have a summer internship and grad school. The idea is that you work there for the summer. It's like a job tryout and you get an offer to work there after graduation. If you have a good summer. You graduated but did not get an offer. So over the next few months, you started sending out tons of resumes you made 100 cold calls. One of the resumes went to Carl Toma, who is considered one of the founders of private equity. He was the founding partner of a Chicago based private equity firm called Golder Toma, Cressy and Rhona and the two of you hit it off. I have a saying that sometimes our greatest disappointments lead to our best opportunities. Can you tell us how disappointed you were not to get the offer from TPG? Were you depressed? And can you also tell us about the value of cold calling and its role on our path to excellence. And please also tell us about the first meeting with Carl and what you guys talked about. So
• 28:51
  Orlando Bravo: I was so used to being turned down by every single private equity firm in the world, that it wasn't that disappointing itself, it was almost like you would actually send out resumes blindly. And most of the time, you wouldn't even get a response. And sometimes maybe 10% of the time, you will get a very polite letter written back. Let's say well keep your resume on file in case things change. I just thought that the more I did, maybe one would land. And I would get lucky. Carl at the time was starting or predecessor for in 1997. Toma Cressy, leaving with partner Brian Cressy and setting up an office in San Francisco. And they were looking for an associate then.
• 29:33
  Orlando Bravo: So that was a very easy and the first time I met Carl was I went to Chicago, I flew out there.
• 29:42
  Orlando Bravo: And I met him and go there Tomas dtrs offices. And he was the coolest. He kind of sat me down.
• 29:47
  Orlando Bravo: And it wasn't like an interview.
• 29:53
  Orlando Bravo: He was just talking and discussing investing. And the main thing that he said Is he showed me how industry consolidation was not going to kind of work anymore. Those roll ups of mundane industries. Were trading at too high prices as public companies because the public environment was valuing them as internal growth engines.
• 30:15
  Orlando Bravo: And they were not, and that he was really worried about that.
• 30:18
  Orlando Bravo: So how he built that business from 1980 to 1997 as one of the most successful firms. He was being self critical and worried about what was next. And I thought that was incredibly humble. incredibly interesting.
• 30:34
  Orlando Bravo: And I was I was inspired after that meeting.
• 30:36
  Randall Kaplan: did he offer you a job right out of the gate, or did he give you an assignment you had to do?
• 30:41
  Orlando Bravo: He didn't. But I felt then in hindsight, that was true. It went well. His partner at the time Bill Lee back who ran the San Francisco office. He then offered me a job I'm after that I was very excited about that. And to close me or to close the deal, he invited me to dinner in San Francisco with him and with Carl, and I made the bad mistake of asking for more carry. And that dinner did not go well. And I was afraid that the offer was gonna get pulled, but I was able to kind of apologize and get it back together.
• 31:18
  Randall Kaplan: What about cold calling? How important is that, to our success?
• 31:23
  Orlando Bravo: Huge, I do it today. Now, it might be a little easier. If you've done so many deals in software, when you call a software company, they might know something about you. But I love it. I love it. And I actually prefer it to being introduced by somebody else, you kind of maybe ask a favor waste a week, to get an introduction when the other person is more than willing to talk to you and make the call and maybe even more appreciative that you went straight to the source to have an open conversation, or come with an agenda or with a proposal that came very naturally to me. Maybe it's from the from the job search. But also that was the way Carl toma taught me to pursue industries and really learn by talking to as many people as you could. And the close
• 32:09
  Randall Kaplan: corollary there is being a salesperson, you make a call, you have to sell yourself, you have to sell your firm. I mean, at this point, every CEO in the world is going to take your call, they all know who you are. But at some point, they're not. I spoke at Draper University around four years ago. And Tim Draper gives the assignment where each of the students have to go out into the streets of San Francisco and sell 100 condoms with a Draper University logo on the condoms.
• 32:37
  Randall Kaplan: And it's, you think it's funny, and it is kind of funny. It's awkward, you're gonna have a lot of people look at you like you're strange or weird, or it's not appropriate. But the lesson is a great one. The cold calling is great, but you have to be able to sell yourself.
• 32:51
  Orlando Bravo: I loved him. I met him when I was in business school because I would play tennis with him and get to know him that way. And he was awesome. He would invite me to these dinners, and I am a huge fan of his job. I'm not surprised that he's been that creative, in terms of mentoring people, and coming up with new ways. But see, even today, even if it might be an easier cold call, I feel like we need to prove ourselves just as much every time because it doesn't matter what our past has been.
• 33:22
  Orlando Bravo: What matters is to that individual or to that group, how we're going to do with them now.
• 33:30
  Orlando Bravo: And it's a super competitive environment. So it's it's, it's been a good thing that we've developed that skill.
• 33:36
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about the rough start your career.
• 33:39
  Randall Kaplan: You're 27 years old. When you join Karl's firm in 1997. Your first few deals were disasters, you back to Website Design startups nerve wire and Eclipse networks right as the.com bubble burst, you invested $100 million in these two deals and lost most of it. To make matters worse, timocracy wasn't doing well, either. The firm had made some poor investments in the oil and gas, business and telecommunication business, which altogether made your firm one of the worst performers and private equity at that time. So let's talk about mistakes. When we make mistakes, one of the goals is to learn from them. And my own portfolio, we make a ton of mistakes. And it's never fun to lose money. But there are very important lessons to be learned. When we make a mistake.
• 34:19
  Randall Kaplan: I believe we would learn more from our mistakes than our successes. What did you learn about these deals? And how did it change your focus? And how did the.com Bust play a huge role in your investment strategy going forward?
• 34:35
  Orlando Bravo: First, I was trying to go too fast. And maybe that was also a product of the environment that I was in small San Francisco office. In the middle of me you remember this?
• 34:45
  Orlando Bravo: Well, one of the stocks I bought in my personal portfolio at the time was
• 34:51
  Randall Kaplan: pre IP did you get friends and family shares because I cringed when everybody I know bought it afterward. I think the stock closed at the first day. I'm public at 28. It closed the first day at 144. And it ended the year at 345 giving us a market cap more than Chrysler GM and Ford combined on$3.2 million in revenue 90% of which would come from Apple.
• 35:16
  Orlando Bravo: Believe me I did not get any friends and family.
• 35:19
  Orlando Bravo: I got it. I bought it. I'm like 250 bucks or something like that. Right? But I held that through. But things were happening so fast. And even culturally in San Francisco, things were happening so fast. I my classmates from business school were getting net worths of $2 million over options in a really young company that was about to go public and all this all this stuff. So being in that environment and having for some reason, an affinity towards tech. I said well why don't we do industry consolidation in IT services, since we didn't want to, quote unquote, take the risk of actually investing in a product company because that seems scary. Isn't isn't that strange. So we ended up investing in a, in a tough business model in businesses that were part of a bubble, obviously, in hindsight, that didn't add as much value, and that were very difficult to run.
• 36:13
  Orlando Bravo: And they failed, they failed quickly. They didn't do well, I am proud of the fact of how they failed because I am still friends with the founders, and the leadership of those companies and their good leaders. It was wrong business Wrong place, wrong time, a number of factors. But what I mostly learned from that is that style of investing did not pay me, I would not have fit as an associate in Draper Fisher Jurvetson. Even though I think the world of Tim, I didn't beg him for a job, when I didn't have any Hi fit better coming from law school and investment banking, and perhaps a more conservative culture in Puerto Rico, hi fit better in a place where you could analyze cash flow and think about established companies and do quite a bit of analytics on revenue, quality and margins and start thinking about operations with management that maybe has been around for a number of years. That's also the firm that I joined. That's what Carl toma does. That's what he's about. And that's one of the reasons why there may have been a fit. And I was trying to do something to different that didn't even fit myself. There was a meeting that we had when all those things were not going well. But it was certainly not going well. But already there weren't failures yet. And I was pushing for another deal. And I remember mentioning to Carl, well, Carl, if you want to make return, you have to take risks.
• 37:47
  Orlando Bravo: And he looked at me and he said yes, but not that kind of risks.
• 37:50
  Orlando Bravo: And I always remember that take the risks that fits your makeup, and that you can assume and then you can deal with in tough times. And they are and I had no idea. For example, when those companies needed cash, we weren't part of the venture community to come in with a bunch of friends and finance it and see how we could keep it afloat. We were kind of there on our own.
• 38:14
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about the turnaround. You do some bad deals, and you learn from them.
• 38:17
  Randall Kaplan: You became a software expert and 2002 rolls around. He'd been at the firm for five years. And then Carl, as you lead the acquisition of a product distribution software company named profit 21. It was the first software deal your firm had ever done, and was one of the earliest deals in the software industry where a private equity firm, bought a public company and took it private at that time, lenders were very hesitant to provide capital for these kinds of deals. So you did the deal borrowing very little money, the company was doing $40 million a year in revenues at the time it was trading at one time sales.
• 38:50
  Randall Kaplan: Usually, when a private equity firm buys a company, they often get rid of the CEO and bring in their own management team. You didn't and you still don't today, you kept the company CEO, Chuck Boyle, and you worked alongside him to boost profits by buying your competitors.
• 39:04
  Randall Kaplan: First Company was a company called Fastpack, which is based in San Diego, and you work out of the Fastpack owner's garage for five days going through hundreds of contracts to see if the deal makes sense. So a lot of grunt work after you bought profit 21, you made seven more acquisitions, which doubled the company's revenues to $80 million. And a little over three years later, you sold the business for $250 million, making your investors five times their money. So let's talk about actually how you do it. Tell us about the economics of software, your investment strategy, chasing rabbits and making peace with the past.
• 39:45
  Orlando Bravo: Wow. So once again, I am impressed because I don't think anybody else knows about Fastpack, that first acquisition, one of the thoughts that we had is if that deal went right, we could then do so many more add on acquisitions for profit 21. So that's one of the reasons we were so hands on. On that first opportunity. I remember going through, I would stay late at night, in the garage, the owner would let me stay there. And I would go through the paper change orders of all their customers A through Z. And one of the things that I noticed there which in hindsight, we should have seen the world should have seen there so much growth and there were so many change orders that were related to y2k. And then they start, I was looking at that one and going this is just amazing.
• 40:35
  Orlando Bravo: It was all right here, who did not notice that there was a huge blip of growth. That was not sustainable due to people investing around y2k, but that's another matter. We did the opposite of the mistakes that we had made on those failed deals.
• 40:49
  Orlando Bravo: Those failed deals were about buying expensive trying to chase momentum and not worrying about profits. When the internet bubble burst buying software meant 100%, the opposite. It was by cheap, buy safe, recurring revenue and stability. And by 90%, gross margins, something just miserably failed, let's still completely the opposite, that the economics were so obvious at the time, you would buy these companies for two times maintenance revenue, one times total revenue, the business model was 50%, variable 50%. Maintenance or recurring at the time, because it was a product business. And you could theoretically drop down 50% of your maintenance revenue to the bottom line, one way to look at it was, you could pay for all the cost of the company with maintenance, and every variable piece of revenue was profit.
• 41:44
  Orlando Bravo: That was the other way of looking at it, there was an academic reason for it, when you separated these companies into a manufacturing company and into a distribution company and you assign royalties, because there are many that work that way. It absolutely made sense. It was also a model where cash flow is greater than EBIT da, because in software customers pay you ahead of delivery of the product. So you have negative working capital. And it was a business that between having these embedded pieces of software that customers find it hard and expensive to replace, combined with intellectual property protection, it wasn't just a really stable place to be debt consolidation, economics, or even better. Because if you were buying customers and putting them in your platform, you could typically get a 60 to 70% EBIT down margin from the acquired customers because he didn't need overlapping r&d overlapping sales, and obviously overlapping DNA, the same thing applied if you were buying products, because you could put them through your distribution channels. So we came at it with a with an industry consolidation angle. That was a way maybe that we sold it to the rest of the partnership. This is one of the best consolidating sectors there are, but it's cheap, right now that's called trial
• 43:02
  Randall Kaplan: is a 75 subscription software company is now worth nearly a trillion dollars that you can target versus fewer than 20, worth less than $100 billion. So you're excited about the opportunities today.
• 43:16
  Orlando Bravo: It's not even close. Back then we were in a tiny niche. And software itself was not that interesting, right back office oriented on premise, difficult to implement all that.
• 43:30
  Orlando Bravo: Now software is clearly becoming the business of every company.
• 43:34
  Orlando Bravo: Digital Transformation is still at its infancy, we still haven't deployed a fraction of what's available from a technology and IP standpoint. And now groups like us are not at the fringes of the industry, we get to be market leaders. And sure we have to pay multiples higher. But these companies aren't growing.
• 43:55
  Orlando Bravo: I mean, you see it, and that's what you invest in. And that's what Akamai is they're growing at a really rapid rates at scale, and changing underlying industries. So being part of that is is just so exciting. I feel that our team, the way I look at it is we've been training for this moment. And we almost are anxious about doing really well at it because there's a point in time that that really fits our background and our history.
• 44:21
  Randall Kaplan: Let's go back to the profit 21 deal for a minute.
• 44:23
  Randall Kaplan: It's a huge win for the firm, and you had a few big wins right after that. And at age 30.
• 44:26
  Randall Kaplan: You're running the firm's Software Group in recognition of your contributions. The firm changes its name to toma Kresge Bravo. And then a year later, Brian Cressy had been a healthcare investor left the firm and the firm's free name Thoma Bravo, you're 52 years old today. But let's go back 22 years to when you became a partner, you're 30 years old, working alongside someone who's considered one of the founders of private equity. And your name is on the door of a major private equity firm, you're making a ton of money? What was going through your head, in your mind? Had you made it? And how are you thinking about then about your future?
• 45:06
  Orlando Bravo: I don't think we had made it then. And I don't think we've made it now. I really, really mean that I really do. And then we were still very small relative to our peers. And we really felt that software private equity was a no brainer from those economics that you and I discussed. It was so obvious that the economic model of investing in software in a controlled way with some leverage and consolidating these markets, compared to all other industries, was just really, really, really good. Now, the changes that software has undergone have exceeded our expectations. So we've been very lucky to be in the right place.
• 45:51
  Orlando Bravo: is at the right time. But then we were really excited that it was the beginning of we could we could really see that actually,
• 45:59
  Randall Kaplan: you've had too many great deals to name. But I want to talk about a recent good one. Actually, it wasn't a good one, it was off the charts incredible. In 2019, you about a software maker for the mortgage market named Ellie Mae, the company had gone public in April 2001, it shares rose 20x, through the middle of 2018, as its revenues increased from 50 million to $500 billion, then the Fed raises interest rates, its stock dropped 50% In three months, because investors had lost confidence in the mortgage market. So you jumped in to buy it, you paid a 47% premium to his 30 day average, and you purchased the company for $3.7 billion, you invested 2.2 billion of equity and borrow the remaining 1.5 billion 80 months later, he sold the company to IntercontinentalExchange for $11 billion in cash and stock resulting in a $9 billion profit in 18 months. Not bad. Just to put some context around this, that's 548 days, which translates to a gain of$1,369,863.01 a day. And the $9 billion is more than the total GDP of 66 countries. Did you take your wife Katie to dinner that night,
• 47:21
  Orlando Bravo: I took my team, we had a party that night. But those celebrations are short lived, because then you are really excited about it. But then you lost a great company, as well. And then you have to go find another one. I was really proud of our partners, I was really proud of management on that deal. There were a couple of things that happened. One is the stock, as you correctly pointed out, when went down because the entire market thought interest rates were going up. And they were dead wrong. Interest rates went completely down through that journey. Now when we really studied it, once we own the company, the forecasts on interest rates are mostly wrong.
• 47:57
  Orlando Bravo: Because when we were selling the company, there were a number of forecasts out there. And we proved that most of the time, it's actually not 5050, they're actually wrong on predicting interest rates. So it's interesting that the market follows these forecasts in order to have a view on future growth and cash flow when if you look back, once again, there's not a correlation there. So that was a an element of luck and good fortune. Now, management in our team did take the company from 20% EBIT down margin still about 60, while increasing its growth rate significantly, also partly due to the environmental partly due to some internal factors that were put in place. We also did some interesting add on acquisitions that helped. And when a strategic approach is here, it has been our view, our bias, that you should really listen and maybe time to sell because they won't be around. If you say no, they'll go build their by somebody, somebody else.
• 49:03
  Randall Kaplan: You said they approach you how many of the acquisitions you made of a 350, over the years have approached you versus you going out and approaching them. And typically, a lot of companies have poison pills in place to classes of stock. They don't want to be bought, even though they're not performing well.
• 49:22
  Orlando Bravo: The majority we approach, it may turn into a very large process in which they approach a lot of people anyway.
• 49:31
  Orlando Bravo: But the majority are things that we have followed for many years, but we have some sort of a pre existing relationship with management and potentially some board members and or there has been an intent for a while. You just have to be patient and wait for the right time, when something like this really makes sense as part of a company's journey.
• 49:52
  Randall Kaplan: Are you super excited and meeting with your team every day looking at these tech companies over the past two weeks, losing 40% of their value I've been buying from my personal portfolio CrowdStrike or Shopify, which has been my biggest position, which is lost more than one half of its value, I think long term and I'm actually loving what's going on right now.
• 50:17
  Orlando Bravo: I completely agree with you. The valuations that we saw on Thursday and Friday, for these growers that scale that have huge terms and good management do not make any sense. It just it's so theoretical to say that a 200 basis point increase in interest rates would have that dramatic effect on the prospects of these companies. It really doesn't make sense and when you extrapolate into four years or five, and we don't think that way. I don't know when that came up. Why isn't it Tanner 15 Or three, I guess it's 10 or 15 is too long, because maybe people want to return from the age of 40 to 45. They don't want to wait till they're 55. And maybe three years is just too short, or too, but when you extrapolate it to the, the normal things that we look at four to five years, you know, these companies had an effective PE of 1213 times for companies that are still shouldn't be growing over 20%. At scale, that's a really good place to be.
• 51:20
  Randall Kaplan: My guess is there's a lot of nervous CEOs right now who are looking at their personal net worth dropping by half. I know some of these people on a personal basis, you have very private kind of your own board of director, conversations. And I think more people are now are open to a deal because they don't want to wait the four to five years or three years, they just don't know, if the markets reacting this way. And the Fed is raising rates SEVEN TIMES IN THE NEXT 12 to 15 months, you have a lot of very scared CEOs, and also boards.
• 51:54
  Orlando Bravo: It's so distracting in tough markets, to be spending so much time apologizing to investors for your stock price, even though you had nothing to do with that.
• 52:05
  Orlando Bravo: Also, it's very distracting, to listen to very different opinions on how to increase shareholder value. Because there are almost infinite ways to increase your own, you should do an acquisition, you should do a buyback, I think you should get profitable. Now let's change the model, maybe you should grow less. All these opinions are valid, but they don't give companies and executives and leaders the direction. And finally, in tough markets, consolidation plays become more important for leadership as a way to grow a bit more rapidly than you're doing organically to differentiate yourself from competitors. And that's difficult to do as a public company. Because investors don't like a lot of leverage, but they also don't like you selling a piece of yourself to buy somebody else. And they second guess was that acquisition done because the company was about to miss numbers, investors go to the negative place. First, as cynical not even skeptical. So in these markets, one ownership group with a clear and consistent agenda that doesn't change is very empowering for for leaders.
• 53:15
  Randall Kaplan: I want to talk about one of the unpleasant side effects of private equity, do layoffs. When you buy a company and make it more efficient people lose their jobs. When you do this. Do you think about the people who get that notice, especially those who live month to month, don't have any savings and have families and do wonder ever how they're going to put food on the table.
• 53:38
  Orlando Bravo: So big time, I want to say a number of things about that. Those layoffs over the past five years, are very uncommon, because groups like us are looking at by market leaders that have rapid organic growth.
• 53:51
  Orlando Bravo: That's the thesis and leverage is a very small part of the total purchase price when you're buying something 10 times forward revenue. Leverage, this doesn't get you a lot. So you're not making making your return the cash yield today, you're making most of your return on the terminal value. Therefore the industry becoming a lot more like venture capital or growth, equity, all these aspects coming together as one. In most of those cases, good ownership groups, let the growth get you to the margin, instead of making a mistake, and cutting headcount and cost that could have a material impact before you really get to know that business on what really pulls the train.
• 54:32
  Orlando Bravo: You don't want to do that in these assets that you're paying good prices for good quality growth. It's not that big of a phenomenon now, as it was 15 and 20 years ago, when you're buying a legacy company growing at 5%.
• 54:48
  Orlando Bravo: That's not making a lot of money, and you're looking to make your return at least 50% on your return on the cash yield today. In those cases, you would reduce headcount. Now hopefully, ultimately, it's like taking two steps back before starting to move forward. An example of that, and you probably experienced this and how come I let's take sales, you take a sales manager managing eight to 12 reps, we say that out of that group say they're managing 10 reps, you should not have more than three underperforming reps.
• 55:19
  Orlando Bravo: Because if that's the case, managers spending too much time helping the underperformance and very little time helping what's driving the business. In organizations that have a bit of a sales problem and may have a broken sales model. You have to take out headcount before you can move forward and progress with maybe different sales plays or strategies, or divisions of territories or quota structures, you name it. Now in those cases, we institute In training, onboarding and onboarding, and we stay as close to the individuals as we possibly can to ourselves, give them a soft landing, so they can move on. We would like to think that I think this is true that given the labor markets and technology, and the knowledge workers that are part of these companies, they're very quickly able to land on their feet into a better opportunity that fits them better.
• 56:20
  Randall Kaplan: The labor market for the technology world, I've never seen it like this. We have full stack engineers who are making 130,000. Now making one ad, they all want to work from home, some of them are taking two jobs. And the employers don't know at my company, Sandy, we're building a Yelp for beaches, we've catalogued 94 categories of data for each beach in the world, more than 90,000 beaches and 212 countries. We've been looking for a full stack engineer since August 15. We finally found somebody who started on Monday, we flew him in from South Dakota, but we had nine recruiting firms looking and the quality of the applicants they sent us weren't good. They all want to work from home. Like I said, we're a four person company, you have to build a team with the DNA necessary. And let's move on to teams. Let's talk about the importance of those around us on our path to excellence. You can't build a great company without a great team and I want to talk about the type of people you hire. But first I want to start with a guy named ace Greenberg, one of the Great Wall Street icons of all time, who ran Bear Stearns for 24 years. In 1996. He wrote an awesome book called memos from the chairman, which is a collection of memos that he had sent to various employees at Bear Stearns over his long career. These memos were famous on Wall Street, on October 16 1987, he wrote a memo to all managing directors and associate directors, there are five bullet points in the memo and the first one was higher PSDs, which stands for poor, smart and a deep desire to get rich. Then he goes on to write please do not infer from this that we are prejudiced against people who possess almost other worthless degrees. That's one way to do it hire people on the basis of their drive and their hunger instead of degrees from fancy schools or grades from the schools. At your firm, you have said that the next generation is always better than the one before it. And one of your famous comments came from one of your young team members, which is this When hiring don't think about culture fit, think about culture add. So what do you look for when you hire somebody? In How do you retain your amazing talent, people who need to be superstars to get a job there in the first place.
• 58:40
  Orlando Bravo: I go back and forth. In terms of the fancy schools. The reason I go back and forth is the journeys are equally good. Sometimes, somebody that went to a quote unquote, fancy school, you know what they earned it. They showed in their path, all that hard work and dedication. And sure, they may have had better luck with parents that mentored them, or mentors or knew about those schools. And people that did not go to fancy schools could be just as hard work and and successful, they just chose differently. So we've become very open to both and not too opinionated on on either. In that way. What we look for is, number one is give me a good person, give me somebody that in their past, has shown that they come out the right door, that do the right thing, from the information that they were given. We work in a business of partnership, not only amongst ourselves, but with our companies. We cannot accomplish anything without a CEO and her team or his team. And the best we can do is empower them, give them confidence, give them more tools, but it's their job to do, we're not going to do it for them, we don't know how to do it for them. So you have to be a good person to get that buy in, and to develop a strong relationship of trust. The second piece is give me somebody that has a strong opinion, right to disagree, my partners could disagree. It could be of something unrelated to finance or private equity or invest me somebody that stands for something solid, that their journey becomes bigger than making a return on their certainty. And third, collaboration. We our model is to work with existing management to make them successful, to not necessarily hire the proven executive that comes from a different company. Sometimes we'd have to do that in cases when things are not progressing.
• 1:00:33
  Orlando Bravo: But we don't go to that place.
• 1:00:36
  Orlando Bravo: First, we go to the empowerment piece first. So how do you collaborate and delegate and look for help and be vulnerable when you need to in a collaboration setting that makes you really powerful and a really powerful member of the ownership group. We like to hire people that are very young, because we have a big mentorship culture.
• 1:00:54
  Orlando Bravo: We believe in doing things within a certain philosophy and value based system, but then giving people the autonomy and responsibility to be their own artist, and maybe to do deals their own way and put their own imprint in things. I think that's one of the reasons why we have no turnover, we have been able to find leadership positions for young talented adults and our next generation leadership, that is very exciting. And that doesn't have limits towards them. I am personally big into that because I feel the pressure of owing our young, talented team members, the same experience as people gave me and my partners, and the more it is about them, the better the firm will do anyway.
• 1:01:39
  Orlando Bravo: And the better we'll all be.
• 1:01:39
  Orlando Bravo: I've learned a lot from my mentor Marcel Bernard on operations, and delegation, and stepping out of things, and letting things happen organically and by other people that is really powerful. We try to implement that in investing.
• 1:01:58
  Randall Kaplan: Let's move on to the most popular and debated topic today Bitcoin and blockchain. You own Bitcoin.
• 1:02:04
  Randall Kaplan: You're very bullish on it. And Thoma Bravo has invested in several blockchain companies, including the series B round of a cryptocurrency exchange called FTX, which was valued at $18 billion when you invested, which only a year later is raising$1.5 billion at a $32 billion valuation. You said how can you not love crypto? So why should we love it given us tremendously risky nature and very volatile?
• 1:02:27
  Randall Kaplan: price swings? And should ordinary investors be buying it?
• 1:02:33
  Orlando Bravo: I am not allowed to give investment advice. Okay, game, these views are our only only my own. I don't think it's a debate that our current financial system has a bunch of things that are wrong with it.
• 1:02:45
  Orlando Bravo: And that can be improved. And web three and crypto, okay, in a way addressed that. That's one big issue. And they don't address it perfectly yet, because it's new, and they'll improve over time. But transaction fees, international breakage, and way to store value, peer to peer connectivity. These are really, really good themes to address some centralized practices and policies and control systems that have negative unintended consequences. The second piece of why really like it going to young people and innovators, young people today want their own culture, and they want their own financial system. And they're building it. And what's going to come out of that, I'm really optimistic that with the brains behind it and the innovation and the optimism, it's going to be great, there's going to be great use cases that we cannot even envision today that are going to be incredibly powerful. In software, enterprise software. Right now, we're almost nervous that we don't see any crypto threats to enterprise, most of them are happening social media and consumer and other use cases.
• 1:03:58
  Orlando Bravo: But those will come because we can think of use cases we're using the blockchain is back. I don't know keeping a stock, like knowing who your shareholders are, knowing who's buying and selling your stock, limited partner arrangements. There are many of them. So those are the reasons and the themes, or I'm a big believer in it. And finally, I think it's fun. I think it's fun to see a system that is coexisting with a government controlled system and almost competing with it.
• 1:04:24
  Randall Kaplan: You touched upon it briefly, but I want to talk about the value of mentors on our path of excellence. You mentioned Carl Toma, he was a great mentor to you. And I was fortunate to have had Eli Broad and many others who took an interest in me and my future when I really had nothing.
• 1:04:41
  Randall Kaplan: You've said that people should spend the first 25 years of their careers learning from their mentors in the next 25 years learning from the next generation. You've also said that there are mentors all around us and to find the right one you have to listen carefully. Keep an open mind and an open heart and then it will become clear what mentor best fits your values. This is great advice but can you please give some more concrete action steps on how to get a great mentor and you have to work at Thoma bravo to have you as a mentor
• 1:05:13
  Orlando Bravo: to have me as a day to day mentor. Yes. And that's my favorite part about the job is how can I pass on what Carl toma taught me which was what he told me was how to talk to people openly and how to do deals. He told me about his of investing as well. We do this we don't do that. This is the reasons why we are attracted to certain things and certain executives and people. Marcel Bernard had exactly the same philosophy as Carl applied to operations. They both would agree on what is a good leader.
• 1:05:44
  Orlando Bravo: What does that mean? What is being a good executive? How do they prioritize what's important? What do they focus on? They will be in The same page, one of them will look at it from the investment side, the other one will look at it from the operating side. Those were my two, my two mentors. Can I have all the time that I would ask for? So one of the drivers for me is how can I pass that on plus whatever we brought into the equation to young people so that they they can use it in their own way, in a new world with new deals with new opportunities with it with changing environments, with changing cultures with changing social norms. But what do they do with these principles, Marcel used to say, we all need to learn from somebody, nobody's born with innate knowledge. So really being a good listener is important. Mentors are all around us. Because if you take any one of my team members, any associate, I'd love to take their calls and talk to them for hours about something, you and I right, everybody loves to help in the same way we were helped before that also get helps produce better results. And you think that you're dragging the organization around a certain set of values. The 25 years is an example of that, and you brought it up was with one of our young associates the quote that you had, you spent 25 years getting the principles, the tools for people that have done it before, and applying them in your own way, you then after a while after then start looking at what are young people coming up with that is disruptive, that is a big opportunity. And that guides where you should go as an organization and as a group, because the older generation is going to be here so long, and private equity itself, and finance and technology. They're all young person's business. And that's where where the action is. So when we were looking to significantly improve diversity and inclusion, I was really talking to a lot of the young people at the firm. And Veronica came up with that quote, and I thought it was extremely powerful. And it was extremely powerful for a whole team to get a lot of buy in to start including a lot of different people into our organization.
• 1:08:03
  Randall Kaplan: It's great to have mentors who proactively help you, you can call them and it's also great to observe people, I'm sure there's a lot of younger people in your firm, who love working with you.
• 1:08:11
  Randall Kaplan: You're in a conference room, and they're watching you on a phone call how you speak to people. J when trab, who you may know is now the CEO of oak tree was a former assistant to the chairman. He was the second Bruce Karsch, the founder of oak tree, the co founder was the first I was the fifth. And it was fun. Jay was a 37 year old vice chairman and CEO when I joined the company, and Jay was phenomenal. To watch him. He's very tough, very fair. Very funny. I remember we were working on a deal in Florida, we were in this horrible conference room with papers and boxes looking to buy the John Alden insurance company, and Jays there, I remember us being on a phone call, where serious phone call or banker from Morgan Stanley, the head of the financing services group is on the other end of the line, the CEO of a company we're looking at to buy, and there's Jay buting, the call drumming, you know, he's a drummer, making jokes, and then he would put the mute button off. And it's just great to see people like that he has people fairly and most important for me, he's very humble. He's had great success.
• 1:09:23
  Randall Kaplan: No one knows his name, unless you have worked with him in the past. And that's also been a great thing to watch.
• 1:09:29
  Orlando Bravo: That's phenomenal. You know, I want to go back to something that that I took a while answering is, would you mentor somebody that's not part of the total Bravo team?
• 1:09:38
  Orlando Bravo: And they said yes, but not on a daily basis. The benefit of having mentors that you work with, day in and day out in whatever organization it is, is that there's context to that mentorship. It's around a specific problem. It's and you can follow it. That's very different than getting a call once in a while from somebody that needs more theoretical, perhaps advice if they're asking for
• 1:10:02
  Randall Kaplan: I was 26 years old, on Happy lawyer and I had an idea I was going to write letters to CEOs asking you for informational job interviews, not jobs that goes in the waste paper basket. I got at meetings Sumner Redstone, CEO of Disney Marriott. And I remember meeting Strauss Zelnick, the CEO of Take Two Interactive, we just bought Zynga. Last week, I met Strauss he was the CEO. I wrote him a letter I met with him in their Los Angeles office, and I remember being there. I would always get there 30 minutes before LA traffic never be late.
• 1:10:43
  Randall Kaplan: And I walked up 10 minutes before I was sitting in the waiting room and I'll come Strauss he's got his headset on and goes like this, he said, I'm sorry, I'm late. I'll be there in three minutes. I don't know another CEO in the world, who's running a huge company that would have done that. And things like that are great role model to me. Strauss gives 10 to 15% of his time mentoring people, and I follow the path. When I'm late, I come out myself. And it's just so great to see people like that I have a summer intern program. We get 1000 applications a year. We hire 36 interns. We have lead interns the following summer, the best interns, they do all the hiring, they interview, they get the hiring, I see a stack of 36 resumes when they're finished, and one of the greatest joys in my life. But one of the reasons I do the podcast is to inspire and motivate these interns, and I'm in touch with over 100 of them today. Last year, I emailed David Solomon, CEO of Goldman, I met him at Sun America when he was at Bear Stearns. He was a junior Managing Director, then he had a cocktail party. I haven't seen him since I reminded him of that. This student, it was between her and one other person for an investment banking job at Goldman, which as you know, is the holy grail for a lot of people. She got the job, and it's so fun for me to mentor people and give back. I've had great mentors. I've had great role models, and I never forgot where I came from.
• 1:12:17
  Orlando Bravo: That's phenomenal. You see, it proves my point. That's why I mentioned you is mentors are all around, you just reach out.
• 1:12:26
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about success. What's your definition of success? And what are the three to five ingredients on our path to achieving excellence?
• 1:12:34
  Orlando Bravo: Success is doing things right. I don't think success is doing higher return deals and somebody else or building more wealth than somebody else or having a bigger firm is when you look back? Did you do your craft and your art the right way? And did you do so much with what you were given?
• 1:12:55
  Orlando Bravo: That, to me is success. I think the key characteristics of that are what drives that is optimism, work ethic and a balanced life. And by balanced life, it means in all aspects, you're consistent. You're a good person, you're humble, you're up front, you're vulnerable. And it's quite simple when you summarize it that way. And when you lift things consistently in everything you do, for example, I use the same principles on philanthropy, as I use in investing and in business. And in making decisions with management teams. It's all consistent. So it keeps things very real for me.
• 1:13:38
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about the value of preparation on our path to excellence. When I looked at my own career, and what got me to where I am today, there are a lot of things that contributed to it. I've always been the hardest worker, I've been creative, I've done unique things that people hadn't thought of before. I trusted my instincts, and I tuned out the noise and the doubters. And the many people who told me that what I was doing at the time, would never work or was even stupid. And of course, I was incredibly lucky. I think all successful people have some amount of luck to where they get to where they are today. But there's one thing above everything else that has allowed me to achieve certain things in my career at a significantly faster speed and is also resulted in me achieving results that without it would have never been possible. And that's being the most prepared person in the room. And as an example of that, when I interviewed with Eli Brode when I was 27 years old, he had created to Fortune 500 companies from scratch at the time, one of only three people in the United States who have done that. So what did I do I prepare for that meeting like it was a final exam. How many hours do we spend for tests in college studying for classes, we can't remember 1020 For what a good grade, which will lead to a good GPA which will open doors and theoretically improving your chances of getting a good job.
• 1:14:57
  Randall Kaplan: When you graduate. I didn't spend 10 hours preparing for my interview and I didn't spend 20 I spent 40 hours I read every article about Eli and son America I read the last five annual reports. The last 510 K's the last 2010 Q's and I made a 20 page single spaced outline.
• 1:15:18
  Randall Kaplan: And I prepared a list of 20 questions I memorized them not softballs like how did you do this? Or do that? These were questions about footnotes in the financial statements questions about acquisitions. That son America that son America had one time considered but didn't make due to arcane accounting rules rules from the Internal Revenue Code, which I knew nothing about at the time but learning and memorizing couldn't recite word for word. I went in there armed with more knowledge about him in the company than any person he had ever interviewed. And I worked on my 27th birthday he hired me as the assistant to the chairman of the great birthday for a guy who was incredibly unsuccessful lawyer, who had had three jobs and eight months after law school. And at the end of our meeting, he told me that I was the most prepared job candidate he had ever met. Can you tell us about the importance of preparation in everything we do, and tell us how being the most successful person in the room has contributed to some of your success.
• 1:16:21
  Orlando Bravo: So I love that story. Because as you are describing it, and before we talked about whether there's value or not in graduate school education, and you use the word, I read all this, and I've summarized that into an outline, I thought or law school, right, that's how you do a lawsuit, you take a whole case book, and you summarize it or try to distill it into an outline. And the more concise it is, the better you you understand the subject of it. So I I appreciate that. In terms of being so prepared, I have found that instead of maybe we look at the opposite of a of a job applicant, we look at a CEO. We're one of the ultimate leaders in leadership positions in businesses. And in board meetings, and an operational review meetings, when that CEO or leader comes in so prepared with details around the budget, what went right and what went wrong. Knowledge about headcount, direct reports, just complete command, their ability to move the business forward, both from getting the support of all the board, and from getting the the buy in, of all members of management, and direct reports is night and day, versus somebody that is very good and knowledgeable, but it's just not that prepared in that meeting at that time to do that. And the growth rate of the first company is going to way exceed the second because there's going to not be useless conversations, quantification, questioning further meetings, further analysis, further uncertainty, contests, we really have noticed, that is the level of precision and preparedness of of leaders is instrumental for me, especially early investing in software, my team and I would really have command of all the numbers to also get buy in from, from management that we were a good partner, not only because we needed to know it to make good decisions, but when you sometimes expose things about the business, that management may not have noticed over the year, so just operating and doing the day to day job, you can present yourselves as a very good partner. And as a partner that will actually close the deal. Because you've gone that far into analyzing every single detail. And summarizing into what's important, the two or three things that really, that really matter the effect of business.
• 1:18:54
  Randall Kaplan: There are a lot of companies we looked at at Sun America, we couldn't buy them due to non GAAP pooling of interest, accounting rules that made an acquisition that would hit the earnings to the bottom line. And obviously, you got to keep the earnings and the growth rate. But I remember, I was assigned to look at Charles Schwab. And I did my research.
• 1:19:17
  Randall Kaplan: And a month later, I came back with a 200 page tab report. I handed it in to Eli gave it to his assistant. And then four days later, I get a call, Mr.
• 1:19:25
  Randall Kaplan: Brown would like to see you. So that's either a good call, or it's a bad call because he was brutally direct when you did something very good. He would tell you we did something very bad. And there were many of those moments. Those were not fun meetings, but he called me up. And he said he was holding it in his hand. He said, Did you write this all yourself? I said yes, of course. He said outstanding. And he nodded. And that was my cue to leave the office. Has anybody at your firm, totally blown you off your chair, by preparing something like that? And has it really advanced that person's career at your firm,
• 1:20:08
  Orlando Bravo: multiple times.
• 1:20:08
  Orlando Bravo: And not only has it advanced that person's career, but at times, it's been transformational. To us. There have been examples of really big deals, by our standards that we've done that have come that way. There have been examples of getting into cybersecurity, that industry that we get into as the third leg of enterprise software, where we do in 2009 2010. He also created a culture for us, where incredible ideas based on rigorous thought, we say go do them. Just go let's not think about it anymore. And if we have to redirect them or slow them down, we can do that later. But go as fast as you can,
• 1:20:53
  Randall Kaplan: let's talk about work life balance. You're married and you have three kids, you run a hugely successful company, you're served on many boards and spent a lot of time on philanthropy, which we're going to talk about in a minute.
• 1:21:06
  Randall Kaplan: How do you balance all of these?
• 1:21:06
  Randall Kaplan: And then how do you motivate your children to be successful and have the drive that you had as they grow up? So now I have four, congratulations.
• 1:21:20
  Orlando Bravo: Yeah, no, thank you very much. It was the new addition to the family, how old she is now nine months.
• 1:21:27
  Randall Kaplan: Congratulations, I have five kids. 20 year old twin girls, one at Wisconsin went to Cornell, a senior in high school who's going to Menlo College, which you probably know, and I have a five and a half year old, and a one and a half year old. And there's nothing in the world. I love more than my kids. I completely
• 1:21:47
  Orlando Bravo: agree with that.
• 1:21:47
  Orlando Bravo: The relationship and the memories and all the love and work that everybody puts in, in support of one another is, is truly special. And the older I get, the more I cherish that as well, the more meaningful that becomes, who probably like you that way, I am just super busy all the time. And I like being super busy. So I jump from one project to another at work, and one family event or situation or support from one to the other.
• 1:22:19
  Orlando Bravo: And I always like to be present, both with a family and at work.
• 1:22:24
  Orlando Bravo: I enjoy it. And I enjoy the chaos that way and it comes naturally to me. I don't need a lot of time to kind of relax by myself. I like being around people. That helps maybe that that balance. I do try to work out every morning, I never skip it. If I don't, I slow down things don't feel don't feel as great. It keeps me there mentally, emotionally. That's my alone time is about that hour in the morning. And then the day goes crazy. I think it's doable.
• 1:22:58
  Orlando Bravo: Sometimes we tell our colleagues, that they're working too hard. You mentioned these all nighters and investment banking. We don't do that in private equity. Unless there's a specific deal or big decision that happens very rarely. But people go home at 6pm 7pm. And they get into the office at eight or nine.
• 1:23:15
  Randall Kaplan: What about your kids? How do you motivate them?
• 1:23:18
  Orlando Bravo: That hasn't been that hard? Because everybody makes fun of me at the dinner table, they take me the opposite of seriously, it's kind of kind of like pure comedy, I don't know what I've done to deserve that. So I take myself very lightly, I let others make a lot of fun of me. And every one of my kids now have really young ones, like you do so literally.
• 1:23:40
  Orlando Bravo: But my older kids, they've chosen their own paths. And I support them in those paths.
• 1:23:44
  Orlando Bravo: There's no expectation there, that there'll be anywhere near the field that I've been in, or maybe they will maybe they won't. But I hope that working hard and the dinner conversations and what we value has served as a good role model for being a super good productive citizen and working hard and finding your dream and what you really want to pursue.
• 1:24:11
  Randall Kaplan: One of the great advantages and lucky unfortunate things in my life that I cherish was to have made money at a fairly young age, and I decided I would never miss a meal with my kids. And for some long amount of time I never did. I got divorced when my kids were six and for their private schools right down the street from my office, it's about two miles, I would pick them up at 230. I wanted them to feel safe.
• 1:24:42
  Randall Kaplan: I drive them back here we get here at 10 to three, they would crack their books open on the kitchen table. My two girls would not my son, and we would have dinner every night. And it's something that I cherish similar to you. My kids make fun of me all the time. I'm not cool. My jokes are corny. And they take every opportunity to rag on me, which I also enjoy. I don't mind it. It's fun for me to learn a lot of the lingo. I'm way out of the loop on that. And I'm way out of the loop on the popular songs today and the type of music but it's a great way to learn.
• 1:25:20
  Orlando Bravo: Well, Randy, you're not that way out of the lingo. You're one of the original gangsters. The Oh geez.
• 1:25:27
  Orlando Bravo: So we can we can talk about that. But what you describe sounds very familiar to my life with my now two old kids now. My two young ones and dinners are super important. That's the time to just sit down for half an hour 45 minutes and now I have to do it at 545 for my four year old and then my 730 my older kids when they're visiting which is which is really cool.
• 1:25:52
  Randall Kaplan: I love spending alone time with my kids, which is very hard to do. I mean, at 14 years old that's kind of finished. But I've taken each of my kids on a solo trip each year, starting when they were four. And when my girls who are best friends and twins when they were 15 years old, I would take them on a trip and sometimes their friends on the trip, just me. And as we get older now, it's just us and I do it every year. And it's a great opportunity with no competition from their friends making plans.
• 1:26:21
  Randall Kaplan: I remind them all the time, no phones at dinner, they still try to do it. But I will essentially this is the wrong word. But bribe my kids by taking them on very nice vacations, which is really, really fun for me. My son just turned 18 years old. He wanted to go to Las Vegas. I brought two of his friends. We stayed at the when we did things like go to a gun range. We raised Ferraris, and those are memories we're going to cherish forever. But he did say to me, Dad, I'm not coming back here until I'm 21 years old. I said why Charlie? And he said, it's like a kid being in a candy store and you can't taste the candy.
• 1:27:02
  Orlando Bravo: I love that. And that's great. You do that. My trips when my oldest ones with my 19 year old is going to New York, who did that one on one had a great time for just two to three nights. And with my 17 year old boy who's a tennis player, we will go to the French Open for three days, maybe four.
• 1:27:21
  Orlando Bravo: And the memories that we remember every match we saw talked about it the other day, remember four years ago, what Rinka that match and that fifth set. It's it's a it's very cool.
• 1:27:33
  Randall Kaplan: Let's talk about philanthropy and the amazing amazing things you've done to give back you serve on a lot of boards. You've given a large amount of money to brown, Stanford and a lot of other organizations but I want to focus on what you've done for Puerto Rico, and specifically what you did after Hurricane Maria for those who don't know the details, Hurricane Maria was a category five hurricane, which hit Puerto Rico on September 20 2017. It killed 2982 people and it caused $91 billion in property damage, which made it the third costliest hurricane in the United States and the costliest hurricane in Puerto Rico. History it completely destroyed neighborhoods, took out the island's power grid and wreaked havoc on nearly all of Puerto Rico's 3 million people.
• 1:28:20
  Randall Kaplan: You were in Japan raising money when it happened and frantically called your parents who were in San Juan and thankfully, they were okay. So what did you do?
• 1:28:26
  Randall Kaplan: You came back to the States. And five days later, you flew your Gulfstream jet and brought 1000 pounds of supplies, things like water, granola bars, milk, kids, satellite phones, diapers, IVs, hydration pills, and a lot more.
• 1:28:41
  Randall Kaplan: You packed a lot of those supplies yourself. Two weeks later, you charted a DC 10 cargo plane with 7000 pounds of supplies and van, you charged it to container ships that carried 600,000 pounds of supplies. And after that you donated $10 million for hurricane relief efforts. That's just amazing.
• 1:29:01
  Randall Kaplan: Can you tell us what an airport worker said to you? And how he looked when he opened the door of your plane? And then what you did for there? And post Maria, can you tell us what you're doing for aspiring entrepreneurs in Puerto Rico, in the 44% of the population who live below the poverty line?
• 1:29:19
  Orlando Bravo: We landed in Edworthy, which is on the west coast of Puerto Rico next on my list, because there's an old military base there. Now they're flying some commercial flights.
• 1:29:29
  Orlando Bravo: I think JetBlue flies out of there, but it's mostly an airport that you can use with very low commercial flights. And that's the area of the island that was not getting as much relief because most of those flights were in San Juan. When we're about to land, I'm there with my brother. And I asked him what what are we about to see who's going to meet us here? And he goes, I don't know. We'll just see if they show up or not.
• 1:29:53
  Orlando Bravo: And that's the pain got closer, right? You just see. Puerto Rico is very green. And it was 100%, gray, even the sea on the beach, everything was great. And we land. And when the plane door opened, there was a person that worked at the at the airport.
• 1:30:08
  Orlando Bravo: And he didn't say anything. He was the look of fear, complete fear. And you think about it.
• 1:30:14
  Orlando Bravo: That's a person that has worked at the airport for many years that is well trained that has seen things happen. It was like wow, we're about to enter into a really, really tough, difficult place that luck was it will always stay with me. It was very, very hard. The one thing that came out of that, that I always mentioned to young people that are looking at starting from Anthropy. If you don't do anything about it, nobody else will do anything about something that you're very passionate about and that you care about.
• 1:30:47
  Orlando Bravo: I've been in San Francisco at the time before I moved to Miami for so long. That I was I removed from Puerto Rico, from my high school friendships kept in touch online, or what have you, I didn't visit the island very much except to see my parents maybe once every 18 months. And this brought me back, because I saw what was happening. And nobody was doing anything about it. Because you needed local people that felt a sense of belonging there to be able to help from the outside.
• 1:31:18
  Orlando Bravo: What then happened is, I got reconnected, not to former friends, but to a culture and an environment that reminded me of how much I'd like to that really good feeling of Puerto Rico, lots of talent that lacked opportunity, very open, loving, welcoming people. And it also woke me up to the poverty that exists in the island. Living in Maya West, even though I grew up privileged, I would drive around or my parents it is kind of where you lived. But when you went back, especially after the hurricane, and you visited some of these towns, it then became very real, how 60% of the kids live below the poverty line. And I'm from there. Now, I'm going to leave after hurricane relief.
• 1:32:06
  Orlando Bravo: So the mission that we established in the foundation is a really big one. Puerto Rico has a big problem. And it's a cultural problem, actually, as a society. It is one of the most unequal places in the world.
• 1:32:17
  Orlando Bravo: There was one study done about five years ago, that looked at places and they characterize Puerto Rico as a country, which is not, but they looked at the most unequal countries in terms of wealth, and Puerto Rico ranked fourth, after three African nations. And what's happening is it's a very divided society. It's a very polarized society. And we developed a mission where we would like to provide meaningful opportunities for both personal and professional growth to all talented young people that live in the island. We have three programs that do that. And one of them is this racing and preparedness program that we're, we're really involved with that I think we're making incredible progress. You have to be humble about this. I didn't know anything about this. When we started it. I didn't know anything about hurricane relief.
• 1:33:04
  Orlando Bravo: The only things I drew upon were how did they teach me to do business at Thoma Bravo, we back existing management, we go straight to the source. So what we did is we started back in community leaders to small communities that really know that that had the following other people, and that are always going to be their own the problem. And then we've made a lot of mistakes and had some successes, and some not so good.
• 1:33:27
  Orlando Bravo: And little by little we've been, we've been figuring it out with a rising Entrepreneurs Program, we have been, I feel selecting better generations of teams, not necessarily the ones that are going to make the most money.
• 1:33:42
  Orlando Bravo: But the ones that you should really mentor that maybe are 25 years old, and maybe that business will work. But that's somebody that the foundation really wants to invest in for a number of reasons. Now, what we're seeing is the development of an ecosystem within our program where some of the board members in these young companies are rising entrepreneurs that we back three years ago, and how they're helping each other and how they're bringing each other up. And that's just great.
• 1:34:09
  Randall Kaplan: What you've done, there is amazing and I also want to mention, you actually donate $100 million to your foundation. I also want to mention that Jose Andres has done amazing things. And he's going to be a future guest on my podcast as well. So I'm super excited to talk to him. Before we finish today, I want to go ahead and ask them open ended questions. I call this part of my podcast, fill in the blank to excellence, you're ready to play.
• 1:34:32
  Orlando Bravo: I'm ready to play. Let's do this.
• 1:34:35
  Randall Kaplan: Let's do it.
• 1:34:35
  Randall Kaplan: When I started my career, I wish I had known that everything would work out. The biggest lesson I've learned in my life is let go. Going forward, my professional goal is get to 500 billion under management. You're on your way there. My biggest personal goal is
• 1:34:58
  Orlando Bravo: make a huge difference in Puerto Rico. If President
• 1:35:01
  Randall Kaplan: Biden were standing in front of me, I would tell him,
• 1:35:05
  Orlando Bravo: private equity is not what it used to be. Private equity is about growth. It's about job creation. It's about making American companies the best. It's about good corporate governance is about doing things right. It has nothing to do with big leverage and big risks and big layoffs and fighting off unions. That was in the 1980s.
• 1:35:26
  Randall Kaplan: The person in the world that I admire the most is my grandfather. My favorite thing to do for fun is be on a boat in the water. The one question you wish I had asked you is
• 1:35:41
  Orlando Bravo: did you ever beat Jim curry?
• 1:35:43
  Randall Kaplan: Did you know what what was the closest score?
• 1:35:47
  Orlando Bravo: I lost to him?
• 1:35:47
  Orlando Bravo: When I met him we played in the finals of this 12 And under tournament Florida, pretty big tournament. Last one and two.
• 1:35:55
  Randall Kaplan: That was the closest he, it was blank to the other times,
• 1:36:00
  Orlando Bravo: pretty much.
• 1:36:01
  Randall Kaplan: Before we sign off today, I want to tell everyone how we met you were speaking at the Milken conference in front of a group of roughly 600 people. You got off the stage, I walked up to you, I gave you a 10 second history of my background and my podcast, I asked you to be on it. And you said yes, you didn't even hesitate. So that's awesome. Super nice guy. No hesitation. So thank you for that. As we finish, do you have any other advice for those listening and watching today to go about how to go about how to achieve their dreams? And do you have anything else you'd like to relay to our listeners and viewers, including something you would like to promote?
• 1:36:40
  Orlando Bravo: Stay positive, can understand that's very hard to do. Stay positive, and take really, really good risks. Those are the two things that I like to underscore. And I think we spoke about that, and nothing to promote. We're always here. Call me. Thanks, me. I'm on Twitter.
• 1:36:56
  Orlando Bravo: And that's it.
• 1:37:01
  Randall Kaplan: Orlando, you're a great role model and incredible inspiration to 1000s of people. You made a huge difference in the lives of millions and people. I'm very grateful for you to be here today. And thanks for sharing your story.
• 1:37:13
  Orlando Bravo: Randy, thank you so much for having me on. The same thing applies to you. It's been a pleasure. Thanks.