Transcription
We're gonna have Martin come up and give his talk just to break it up a little bit so it's not just me yammering away all day here. Um, feel free to ask Martin questions, ask me more questions later this afternoon to make sure we keep it interactive.
Um, but Martin is the head of a billion dollar plus tech family office. Um, and he's going to talk about how they operate in a way that should be helpful to everyone in the room. If you want to see how a billion-dollar plus family office um looks at deals, looks at opportunities, plans out their investments, this is a glimpse into how they think and operate. Um and I like it because it's a different focus uh from Chip and very different than Jody um since it's not as real estate focused. So, I hope everyone enjoys the talk. Let's welcome Martin up to the stage. Thank you, Martin. Thank you for being here. Appreciate it. I know that.
>> Okay. So, hi everybody. My name is Martin. Um, I'm from Germany. Maybe you can already tell from my accent. Uh, great to be here today. Uh, I only came the last 30 minutes, but the content is really great. Uh, it's sounds really interesting and I guess you get a lot of great input today and I think I can give you a little bit of our perspective. Um, so before I talk about our view on the market, maybe a little background on me.
I'm an entrepreneur myself. I founded my first company was when I was 18, bootstrapped, didn't have to raise. I sold it when I was 27. Um I did a then I worked for a big big corporate in Germany like Best Buy in Europe. I did a lot of transactions from the buyer side. And then I started a second startup in like four years ago, a food tech business. I raised around 15 million euros. That's in Europe. Pretty pretty tough, especially in food. Um and now I'm with a family office um that is investing in IT technology companies. Um and I want to share some insights how we look at companies that we invest in and what what focus we put on maybe to give you a different angle of of what could be important. Uh most of the stuff that I'm talking about is something that you probably will not be able to fake. You need to able to deliver because we we try to look very closely who we partner up with.
So the company I'm talking about is called Prime Pulse. Prime Pulse has been in the market for the last 10 years. It's we only invest our own money. So no external financing. We have 1 billion under management. We have been established in Europe uh 10 years ago and uh just September last year we opened up our office here in Fort Lauderdale. It's just across the street. Uh so if you ever close by um let's let's have a coffee. Coffee, not a coffee. Sorry. um and we try to find the first possibilities here in the United States and apparently look now for opportunities to invest our our money and to find great entrepreneurs where we can grow. So we are mainly focused on the IT tech space and over here everything is about real estate right but what we really we we have made our money in tech and so we want to invest in tech because we understand the technology business pretty good. So keep in mind we're looking for companies between 10 and 150 million. So everything I tell you today is focused on those kind of businesses. Uh most of them or they should be profitable. So have an existing business model that's working. We invest tickets up to 50 million50. Uh we want to take the majority. We are family office private equity investors. Right? We are not venturing. We do venture but today I talk about the other part and apparently we invest right now in the United States.
um being an entrepreneur, you invest different than maybe a typical um venture capital or a private equity guy because all of us we come out of an entrepreneurial work. So we know the problems, the opportunities and the pain you feel as an entrepreneur. Sometimes people who only have a financial background have a different view and it's not bad or good. It's just uh uh what we see. So that's the reason why we want to partner with real entrepreneurs same like we are that want to scale and build the business together with us to build a great company. That's our main goal. We don't come in and just look at the numbers. We want to really work with entrepreneurs and we will be a partner entrepreneurs. We support passionate people that really focus on their business and not only look at numbers but try to really do something different together with them. And we don't bet on founders, we build with them. So we don't just say here's the money run. We want to help them achieve our goals.
So the content you are looking for is coming now. What are we looking for when we invest into companies? And the main message here is we invest in people, not companies, right? Because companies come and go, but the people, the team that is building it, they are the key to making it successful or to make it fail. And this is an experience I've made over all of my years. I've been working with startups, big companies, small companies. It's always about the people because a good team can overcome problems and even pivot the business model. A bad team will even fail in a good environment. Right? So what are we looking for in the founding team or in the CEO in the managing partner whatever u you call it we don't just invest in tech we invest in unique perspectives maybe a founder that has deep insights and authentic understanding and knows somebody the rest in the industry does not does not know yet or is not able to execute at this matter of time because this gives him an unfair advantage. So we really look for people that really understand the industry. We don't like it if people just say, "Well, this is a great opportunity. Let's just do something and then hope somebody will buy this company." We would not invest, right? We need somebody who says, "Yes, I understand it. I live it. It's my passion and this is where I am and this is where I want to grow."
Today's world is faster than ever. Innovation is faster than ever before and global tectonic plates move faster than anyone of us could imagine. So being an entrepreneur, a founder or a manager, you can just sit there and say, "Okay, let's wait and hopefully nothing hits me." Or you can say, "I'm in it. I'm in it to win it and I will take fast decisions, whatever comes up." So you want entrepreneurs, founders that really take the lead, are able to take fast decisions. A decision can be wrong, but you can fix it the other day. But the worst thing you can do, not take a decision. So when we get into close relationships, we really see is it a leadership team or a leader that is able to execute, decide and then execute fast because this is what matters in this world. This might be the change of making it successful or of failing.
Talking about people, right? One founder is not enough. A founder needs to be able to attract a players. So usually the first 10 to 15 hires the leader made show us is he able to attract talent that maybe was in a safe environment in a big corporate but gave it up to join his vision or her vision to build something really great. If we see this we can see that this founder or this person is able to build something really great with the right team. And you all know it's a very old saying, A people hire A people, B people hire C people. Right? This is very very important. So we really have a high focus on is he able to attract those players also to have a broader base of leadership in his company.
Intellectual humility. So as I told you earlier, we look for founders that know what they are doing. They're experts in their area of of business. But it doesn't help if you're not able to see that things change, right? Especially now there's so much new information, new data points every day. We need founders, entrepreneurs that are able to understand, okay, everything I knew until yesterday might not be true anymore because the world changed overnight. Especially AI, this is like more or less happening every day, right? So we need the right humility for them to say yes I'm an expert and I I was successful for the last maybe 20 years but now everything is different and we need to maybe reinvent re-evaluate redecide this is very very important we don't like to work with people say I know everything and I know how to do it well maybe yes but ma better do it on your own um master value drivers in economics. If you're not able to understand if you invest $1, how you get $5 out of it and really understand the key KPIs of your business, you're not able to scale. So I think Richard talked earlier a little bit about really understanding the business in detail. So we want founders that really understand the the key principles of their business, every detail. We don't want them to be there every day, but they need to understand to make the right decision. Because as you know, the bigger your organization gets, the more layers you have. And the more layers you have, the more you are being told on the way, right? So the better you understand what is happening, the better you can take the right decisions. And we also don't like entrepreneurs that give us any answer. If we ask a question, we want them to really give us the right answer and the insights of the company because otherwise all decisions that are being made afterwards are based on facts that we didn't even uh fully evaluate in the beginning.
Operational resilience. That's even more important today than ever because those of you who have built in the past or or building right now know that not everything works as planned. Actually, most of the time it doesn't. And if you're not really behind the idea, the vision and have the stamina and the power to stand up again. If you are rolled over by a train, that happens sometimes. and I I was a founder myself. You will not make it right. So you need to find the right balance between your work life balance. I don't want to call it that way but between your your resil resilience for the company and your personal life. And we look for founders that are able to deliver on that. Because if we found if we find somebody who's already very shortly close to his burnout, we'll probably not be able to scale, right? And there will be many many opportun not opportunities, many many situations in the future where this will get difficult. So this is a really important uh topic for us.
And last but not least, um the ability to own the narrative, right? So is he able to attract a players but is he also able to tell them where to go? Because the again the bigger it gets the more layers you have right so if you need to change course and those of you have seen it when big corporations big corporations sometimes are not able to shift at all no matter what the board the CEO whatever is saying because they just keep on going like a machine right so is the founder the MD the leader able to really hold the narrative and bring the people on board all the layers to really change maybe the focus of the company. We try to see is this something that happened in the past or how how capable how capable do we see him or her doing this because as I said earlier there's so many things that can change. So you need to be able to deliver on those.
So those are seven very important I would say uh topics that we look for when we decide if we want to invest. If all seven of those are a green check mark for usually we can solve everything else. We can solve cap table problems. We can solve financial obligations of the past. We can solve problems on technology. Everything can be solved, right? But it doesn't help if everything else is good. But we do not have a leadership team to execute on the future. But keep in mind, this is our view as an entrepreneur investor. We want to keep the founding team on board. We do not buy companies that just want to exit and say take it. We want to work with them. And this is our view. So I hope our perspective, my perspective, our experience gave you a little insights of what we would be looking for maybe helping you for for other investors you will be talking to in the future to family offices since we are a mix between a family office, a private equity and a venture capital. Uh I think we are pretty broad in our perspective. Um, so thanks for your for for listening today and uh hope I gave you some insights. I'm here for questions if you have any. Thanks so much.
>> Are you interested in a monopoly?
>> Uh, I know the game, but please explain. Oh, no. A monopoly in like in real life?
>> Yeah, regional monopoly.
>> Oh, so sorry. No, I I thought about the game. Uh, sorry. my first uh uh Yes.
>> I'll tell you later.
>> Okay. So, you have one?
>> I do.
>> That's great.
>> Okay. Anybody else has a monopoly? Yeah. So, that that's why we only invest in technology because we really understand the field and we know the impacts of AI. So the good thing is apparently technology IT service technology companies have been there for the last 30 will be there for the next 50 years probably because they will also facilitate bringing AI. So we always try to understand how AI will impact their business model >> and for opportunities and risks for their business model. Right? So we would not invest currently into companies with a high human factor because many of those things will be optimized. We right now we like companies that facilitate other companies to uh use AI apparently but but he has a very very important factor. We use AI also for our due diligence but the main reason is always how will AI impact this business and are we able to change course fast enough to adapt to the changes in AI. So we we we have we are entrepreneurs right we opportunistic. So what I presented is our main investment criteria. We are always looking for opportunities. So we are always open to look into into any any other thing. Uh but yes yes definitely since software with eyes is a very interesting field. We would never invest in an LLM approach because overnight a new deployment and you out. But if you're using it smartly we're very interested. Yes.
>> Thank you.
>> Please contact me on LinkedIn or uh just send me a note and we will have coffee, lunch, whatever. All right.
>> I'm I'm always here. So, and I also live in Fort Lauderdale. So,
>> enjoy to be in Florida.
>> Awesome. Thank you.
>> Thank you.
>> Let's give a round of applause. Thank you.