60% Concentration That Killed an Exit

Well, but still by this point, 2014, 15 SaaS was well on its way and it was just about to hit the kind of inflection point of being the hottest category. But it was not, it was hardly a novel business model. And so on prem software, even in 2014, 15 would have seen, would have seemed a little bit old.

And so were you thinking that one of your plays here would be to convert it to fully cloud?

So you know, and then we started saying, okay, well let's start moving some of this stuff to the cloud. What can we move, what can we keep? You know, that sort of stuff.

So that took a lot longer. That was a bigger lift than I was expecting. But that was, that was one of the early tenants of like how we were going to create a go forward company.

Okay. And, but just, and then going back to the transaction. So as I just said, this was I guess before SaaS got super hot. So you were able to, or software broadly, you were able to get your hands on it a few years later if you, you probably wouldn't have been able to.

So you're correct. I mean this wasn't. Yeah.

I mean back then we bought on an EBITDA multiple. So you, you bought on profitability. So four years, five years later, the profitability was a nice to have, not a need to have.

It was all about recurring revenue, you know. Right.

And so what to just double click on that, what that means for the listener is that SaaS businesses were often bought on ARR. Annual recurring revenue. So purchase based on a multiple of top line as opposed to profitability, which is of course, whatever.

It's.

I think we, we, we may return here to a world where software companies are bought on ebitda. Right.