Intel 471: From Bootstrapped Cyber Intel to Enterprise Leader

AIR DATE:

February 12, 2026

LENGTH:

34:55 minutes

ORLANDO BRAVO:

Welcome to Thoma Bravo's Behind The Deal. I'm Orlando Bravo, founder and managing partner here at Thoma Bravo. And today, Adam Solomon, a partner at Thoma Bravo, sits down with Jason Passwaters, CEO and co-founder of Intel 471, to discuss the company's growth following its acquisition by Thoma Bravo. But first, Adam is joined by Thoma Bravo SVP, Chandler Gay, to break down the history of the deal. Intel 471 was founded by Jason Passwaters and Mark Arena in 2014. Thoma Bravo made a strategic growth investment in the bootstrapped cybersecurity company in 2021 after observing its position in the market, its commitment to gross retention, and increasing profitability. You'll hear how we went about assessing the truly differentiated company, the lengths we went to to meet with our leadership team, and about the company's incredible growth trajectory. Intel 471 has nearly tripled in just four years. As cyber criminals up their game using AI tools, the intelligence and monitoring company's well positioned to provide best in class support to its users, and we are excited to be part of it. Listen along as Adam, Chandler, and Jason get down to it.

ADAM SOLOMON:

I am so excited we're here back on Thoma Bravo's Behind The Deal, and today we have the pleasure of talking about Intel 471. How the deal came about, how it's been doing, what comes from here and before we talk to Jason Passwaters, the CEO and founder, you and I get to do a little retrospective.

CHANDLER GAY:

Absolutely excited to be here today and discussing one of our best cybersecurity companies over the past four years and running. So maybe to start off, we can touch on quickly fundamentally what Intel 471 does and provides to its customers because it is a very technologically advanced and complex offering. But at its core, what Intel 471 is able to do is provide proactive threat intelligence indicators to primarily global enterprises on potential threat attacks on their infrastructure, on their financial accounts, on their security writ large, such that they are able to proactively prevent said cyber threat attacks and actually hunt them out in a manner with their internal threat intelligence teams.

ADAM SOLOMON:

We'll take you back to the beginning, not that you could ever forget this, but this would've been, what, four years ago, depths of COVID we're doing diligence on this company and because it's a global leadership team, we need to be in Paris, France, for a meeting coming all the way from SF and because it was the depths of COVID, we had to have a valid COVID test to get back into the country within 48 hours. So the only way to do this without risking being stuck in Paris is to take a test at SFO, fly to Paris, do the meeting, and immediately turn around and fly home so the test is still valid. Painful, awful. Why did we do such a thing?

CHANDLER GAY:

It was definitely the most important COVID test I ever took.

ADAM SOLOMON:

We did such a thing because it's a pretty special company. We would love to hear your kind of memories of what made it such a special company when we were first doing diligence four, four and a half years ago.

CHANDLER GAY:

Yeah, absolutely. This is a cybersecurity market that we'd spent a lot of time diligence-ing over years, frankly, evaluating all the various vendors in the space. It was always a space that we knew was hypercritical in terms of protecting global enterprises and governments against financially motivated cyber attacks, but it was a space where we hadn't found the perfect company as yet and Intel 471 is a business that had been on our radar for years and we'd actually had the opportunity to spend some time with the team the year prior, digging a bit into the business with the founders, Mark and Jason, albeit not at the time that they were ready to yet sell the business, but that early look at the company at least exposed what we quickly learned to be the case in terms of their kind of number one position in the cyber threat intelligence market and that gave us the time and ability to spend the next year really diligencing the company and coming up with our outside-in thesis, which then as we really got under the covers in 2021 and got to understand the business from a quantitative perspective, marrying the micro and the macro really started to come together for us and leading up to that trip to Paris, I think our conviction increased pretty substantially as to our desire to want to own this business.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah. And it's funny you mentioned the conviction increasing because one of my core memories of the deal process here, I tried to kill this thing, like, five different times because it's a complicated product to understand. I didn't really get it. It's like threat intelligence. We've looked at everything. All these companies, they're not so great in this market and every single time you and the team talked me off the ledge and persuaded me to keep going and boy, am I glad you did?

CHANDLER GAY:

Well, those are often some of the best deals, aren't they?

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah.

CHANDLER GAY:

And this is one where exactly to your point, we were able, in the year prior to identify the two or three core business initiatives that we needed to see the company really improve upon and prove their ability to execute coming up upon our investment and that allowed us to identify quantitatively what we wanted to see and then ultimately validate that that was the case when it came time to put our money where our mouth was and make the investment but you're right that this one had its twists and turns from a diligence journey perspective.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Totally. And I remember what was always most convincing to me is we kept on coming back to the numbers and particularly in the early days like, boy, this seems like kind of like the rest of these other threat intel businesses, which we've always struggled with. You kept on pointing out unbelievably good gross retention, bootstrap business, very profitable, very high growth, just a financial profile that we don't often see and when we saw that, I think we were like, gee, there's got to be something here. We need to put in the time and the effort to really get under and understand what exactly this business does and we understand that it's special, it's gets got this financial profile, but we had to understand why it was a special company.

CHANDLER GAY:

That's exactly right and the validation from the market comes in the form of close to 30% of the largest 100 enterprises in the world, trust Intel 471 to protect them proactively from cyber attacks, but that also needs to resonate in the micro, in the form of gross retention north of 90%, gross margins, north of 80%, sales efficiency, as you mentioned, bootstrap nature. So doing so profitably, growing profitably, all micro characteristics that resonate in best in class businesses that we find and when you're able to really see that in both the qualitative and the quantitative, it's tough not to keep coming back to those.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Totally.

CHANDLER GAY:

And Intel 471 over the decades has been able to prove out their ability to collect the most proprietary data in the market and to the extent that their customers really speak to Intel 471 as their vendor of actionable intelligence. It's not thousands of indicators a day that a research team has to dig into each and every one. It's two to three a week on highly actionable potential attacks such that they're able to prevent the next potentially multimillion dollar liability for their business and Intel 471 does that for global enterprises, global governments, and fundamentally that's how they protect their customers and ultimately do right by the world and protect from risks in that manner.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah and there's a number of pieces of the special sauce, but probably the most important piece is exactly what you said around the proprietary actionable data and we had looked at so many companies in and around this market, our flagship fund, which does more cyber investing than anybody and more successful cyber investing than anybody had looked at a bunch of companies in the threat intel space and they all had the pretty similar profile. They've raised a ton of VC money, they've burned a ton of money, they're not profitable, they don't retain their customers, they're not that differentiated from one another and that is, I think, was at the core of what made this business different is they have this super unique, super valuable IP that only they have and because of that and because of the way that Mark and Jason, and the rest of the team ran the business and bootstrapped it and kind of ran in a very disciplined way, they were able to leverage that into this unbelievably attractive financial profile and a financial profile that kind of fits exactly what we're looking for.

CHANDLER GAY:

Exactly and a lot of it comes from Mark and Jason's expertise in the industry going back to their days of being boots on the ground and the company is very much so built in that spirit. We are the boots on the ground that you can trust and they built the company in a bootstrap manner and that resonated with us from the outset in terms of these are founders that we can really back. They're experts in their space and they also understand their market better than anyone else, but they're open to operational improvements that we can help them bring to the table and I would say that is one of the most exciting takeaways from our meeting in Paris, frankly, was they're leaning in to our operational caliber and openness to work with us to really take the business to yet the next level.

ADAM SOLOMON:

It's such a good point because I think that in order to be successful in running this business, it helps so much to be a practitioner, as you were saying, right? To be able to talk the language of your customers, to be able to make sure that, to be able to build the product the right way, you don't have to be a practitioner, but boy does it help and obviously Jason and the rest of the team are exactly that. They are longtime practitioners. They talk the talk. They're deep, deep, deep in the product. But to have that and then an also married up with just an open-mindedness to working with us, to working with the deal team, our operating team to drive best practices, to run the company as efficiently as possible, to drive for that profitable growth, that combination is kind of what has made this whole thing work.

CHANDLER GAY:

I'll never forget, we grabbed a bite to eat with David Weiss, who's our operating partner on the deal and has been fantastic on this immediately following the meeting and sat down and coalesced around the fact that this business isn't perfect, no business is, but these are founders who are phenomenal at what they do and who we can work with, so we should go do our best to own this business and create value with them going forward.

ADAM SOLOMON:

That's exactly right. The background of this founding team is also just fascinating, right? They are not longtime software executives. Jason was a Marine for a very long time. Mark worked for the Australian Federal Police for a very long time. When we say they're practitioners, that's what we mean. They were actually on the ground in military and law enforcement and I'll ask Jason a bunch about this when I've got him live and I'm super excited to hear some stories that even I haven't heard about those days. But when you first meet them, it's very different than most founders, most CEOs that we meet because they're really not ... They haven't been doing this for 30 years. They're not steeped in software best practices and all that. What they know better than anybody is this product, this market, and their customers and the fact that they're so open-minded to learning more about how to ... And obviously they've been very, very successful in running a software company that to have that level of growth and profitability without having ever raised a cent is a testament to just how good of an operator they are, but also there's a lot they didn't know and the company, since we bought it, has almost tripled in size and obviously as you grow and that much, there's new challenges that they of course have never faced before and their open-mindedness to learning from us as much as we've learned from them, I think has been crucial.

CHANDLER GAY:

Totally and it proves the fact that when you build a business that's focused on your customers and that really nails the product market fit, the best in class software metrics follow, even if Jason was not focused on LTV to CAC or a customer level profitability metrics prior to our involvement. All those metrics nonetheless shone through when we did our diligence and that's all a function of them having built the business in a profitable, scalable manner, but designed with the customer first and ultimately that resonated in the market, but also in the metrics.

ADAM SOLOMON:

That's it and that's also what's enabled Jason to scale, right? As the company's almost tripled in size, we've done our first ever M&A. Jason has kind of scaled through all of that and continues to be an extremely effective leader today.

CHANDLER GAY:

That's right and you touch on the M&A we've done, which has been really exciting to work with Jason in terms of identifying the outside-in strategic lens through which we want to go acquire interesting businesses to tuck in alongside Intel 471 and the two acquisitions that we've done were very much so through that lens. We aren't ever going to do M&A for the sake of doing M&A, but if there is really interesting product adjacency or strategic incremental functionality that we can add to the existing suite, which both of Spiderfoot and Cyborg have done, then we should act with conviction and go help the team to both acquire those businesses and then effectuate integration and operationalization of the cross-sell and all the good that follows.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Agreed. So I've got to ask you, this is the first deal we'd ever done together, the first of many, by this point. This was the first deal you and I did together. Would love for your retrospective, how have things gone? What are you most excited about for the future? How we set up?

CHANDLER GAY:

Absolutely. It was the most nerve-wracking underwrite we'd done together given it was our first and good thing is we nailed it and the company has performed incredibly well over the past four years and continues to turn out really nice, consistent organic growth, but there is a lot more that we can continue to evaluate both from an M&A perspective, but also frankly, from an organic product set opportunity perspective, particularly in context of AI where there's not only opportunity to continue to improve the underlying efficacy of the product set and identifying threats that surface through our proprietary networks and even more efficient and quicker manner, but also frankly, the opportunity to detect more in other cyber threat landscape areas, AI is increasing the number of threats on a daily basis and the threat actors from which those arise and that only continues to increase the set of data that the company's able to gather and pass through to their end customers and so there's both organic and inorganic opportunities that we continue to evaluate with the business as it grows nicely on an organic basis underneath.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Well said.

ORLANDO BRAVO:

And now, Adam's discussion with Intel 471 CEO and co-founder, Jason Passwaters.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Man, good to see you. Fun to be doing this in person. I'm glad that that worked out.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yeah.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Welcome to beautiful Miami.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Been looking forward to this for a while.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah. I would say that one of the last times I saw you in Miami, you were wired but for the F1 race, watching that here so feels like every time I see you, you've got some sort of AV equipment, every time I see you in Miami. Thanks for doing this. It'll be really fun to be doing this in person. Super excited to be talking about Intel 471, and we're saying that in many ways you do not have the typical background of a Thoma Bravo software CEO. I would love just if you could tell our listeners a little about your history before Intel 471, including your time in the Marines.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yeah. So I spent just under 12 years in the Marine Corps, went in right after high school, was an infantry guy, and then did a lateral move into counterintelligence and human intelligence, so that was my first move into the intelligence community, really. Very tactical level stuff on the battlefield type stuff, not really 007 type of intel work and from there, I've kind of left because I wanted to get into the cyber side, self-taught on a lot of the cyber stuff in my free time, and ended up at the FBI actually, tracking down cybercriminals. I was a network forensics analyst there. I got involved in a case where we were tracking probably about the 100 or 150 top Eastern European Russian cyber criminals and now my Intel background kind of merged at that point because I started to really immerse myself into the human element of the threat and I met Mark Arena, my co-founder, and we saw the world very similar in that nobody was attacking that. A lot of people were more oriented towards an incident response type of mindset, which is very reactive and we saw applying an intel model to this kind of underground, underlying world that supported cybercrime. There's an opportunity there to compliment that reactive mindset with a more proactive mindset.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah and so then you guys started the company. Well, I guess that's not exactly right. You guys worked together for a little bit right before starting the company.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yeah so Mark was in the Australian Federal Police and I was at the FBI as a contractor and I supported cyber agents and we've kind of came together, our units, our respective units did a bit of a boondoggle, I call it, where we did this tech exchange, and that's where I met Mark and that's where we kind of saw that, hey, we see things the same and we see an opportunity here and then we went to another company, which was, I would say, the first traditional threat intelligence company. It's now the basis for Google threat intelligence and we built out a team around the world, a department of about 75 or so people, 15, 16 countries, and it was really to build out a capability to attack that cyber threat from a more intelligence mindset and methodology and we found that we were good at the research side too, but we were really good at building these teams around the world, instilling a culture that aligns them and a mission that everybody can get behind and then executing on that.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah and so when you guys started the company, this is always something that kind of blows me away a little bit. It was that it was in a market where there's been a ton of venture capital investment. It was at a time where it had been super easy to go raise venture capital money, but you guys didn't.

JASON PASSWATERS:

No.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Talk me through that decision because it ended up being a great one, but at the time it must have been pretty non-obvious.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Well, I think us being practitioners at heart, we didn't know what the alternative ... We didn't come from Silicon Valley. I didn't know what an A round looked like or a seed round.

ADAM SOLOMON:

This is just how you build a business.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yeah and so the other thing is I think it's just kind of how we're wired. We've always been against, to some extent, selling some part of the soul or the control over the vision and the strategy. So we're wired like that and we didn't want to do that over the years. We did get some advice early on. I think we were just sub maybe one million in ARR just below and a CEO gave us some good advice and said, hey, and he had exited a company to, I think it was Sophos in 2017 or so.

He said, "Hey, look, don't take any VC money until you hit two million in ARR. And if you get to two million and you don't need to do it, don't do it at all/." and we kind of adhere to that, I think and it was tough. I mean, there was some hard times and stuff being kind of ... We've always been profitable since day one, but there were times early when we were at the mercy of long procurement cycles and explaining to the wife, while we're not getting paid this month, that was challenging, but we got through it and everything worked out in the end.

ADAM SOLOMON:

And how did you guys do that? Because it sounds like you get to two million of ARR and then gee, that's not easy. Most companies can't do that without any funding. What was it about it the way that you guys ran the business that enabled you to be bootstrapped from day one?

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yeah. I mean, at first it was if there's anything that we're good at, it's hiring and building teams, hiring the right people and building out teams and getting everybody aligned to a mission. So that's first and foremost, and then just being efficient and passionate about what we do. We were always very strict on where we spent our money, making sure we get the most bang for a buck. All the money we made went back into investing into the company based on what our customer feedback was or what our vision was and that really just led to a very, I guess, efficient and model that worked.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yep and so we obviously partnered in 2021. I'm sure you had folks calling on you well before then and how did you ultimately make the decision that now is the right time to bring on a partner and then a majority partner and then Thoma Bravo?

JASON PASSWATERS:

Well, surprisingly, we didn't have a lot of people knocking on our door before we did the process. During the process, we did, but I think we were under a lot of people's radar because there were folks in the beginning of the company when we started it that said, "Hey, you guys are great researchers. You're never going to build a big business or a successful business." Which drove me because it put a chip on my shoulder, and I said, "Okay, let's prove everybody wrong."

But we kind of were under the radar and I think when you don't take VC money sometimes, you're not doing the big marketing events, you're not doing the big spend that gets you the visibility all the time, but that worked in our favor, I think and then fast forward to mid 21 or in 2021, when we started to entertain a process, everybody I think was very surprised when they started looking at the company we had built, fundamentally sound, all the metrics were right and everybody's super surprised. I distinctly remember our GC now who was with, he represented us in the deal with a law firm, he could not believe that we didn't even have credit card debt. He said, "I've never seen this in all the deals that I've done." So I think that helped us out.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah. Well, it's funny, I was actually saying this to Chandler, I'm not sure if even you know this, I tried to kill the deal five or six times in the summer of 2021 because I think you noticed, we'd looked at so many things in threat intel, we never got excited about any of them, and he and the rest of the team kind of convinced me to not kill it and boy, am I glad I did. But to your point, if you look at the business system, the fundamentals of it are so, so, so compelling. They're so, so, so strong, and it's in a market where that's really, really hard to do. What has enabled Intel 471, what's the how behind those great numbers and great performance?

JASON PASSWATERS:

Well, I think we have had a very disciplined approach to growth. It's never been a growth at all cost. It's very disciplined in the sense that we know where our product aligns with the market and who's buying it and who can get the value out of it and we expand that over time, which ultimately expands our attainable market and we just stick to that. We stick to what we're good at, what we know and that's really helped us bring in the right customers over the years and then just incrementally build a business in a very disciplined way.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yep and you mentioned this earlier, but it is, I think from pretty early on, has been a pretty global business, both in terms of employees and customers and all of that. How did you guys manage such a, again, particularly at a pretty modest scale, top line scale, how did you guys manage a global organization?

JASON PASSWATERS:

Pure just brute force and just grit to some extent. I mean, that's just the nature of the beast when you're bootstrapping as a company, and especially when it's global. You hear a lot of debate about work-life balance and all of that, which is a good debate to have. But if you're going to build a business, especially bootstrap, this is your life, this is what you do, there's really nothing else outside of it and the unsung here is for me are all the families and the spouses that support that as well. So that's all been integral to it and then just really it's about hiring the right people. It cannot be overstated about the importance of making sure you're bringing in the right people to the business because they're the ones that will carry the torch, whether it's locally, but most importantly, when it's global like that.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah and to get maybe back to the deal, what did change in your thinking to say, we've been bootstrapped for a while, and we won't have a board, we have any of that, that now is the right time to do it, and not just to do a transaction, but to do a majority control transaction.

JASON PASSWATERS:

So we had hit a point, a bit of an inflection point. I think Mark and I have always been very self-aware and just honest with ourselves about what skills we have and don't and we felt we kind of hit a point where we needed a partner to go to the next level, or we'd continue it and just run our lifestyle business, which is neither of us wanted to do that. We wanted to take it to the next level and so that was the big driving force behind, let's figure this out. Let's find a partner in taking this to the next level.

ADAM SOLOMON:

We're thrilled that we ended up being that partner. During the deal process, you guys had a lot of options. How did you view Thoma Bravo? How did you view us as the right next partner for the business?

JASON PASSWATERS:

So there's a lot of evident things right away. Just we aligned, I think, on culture in terms of how we ran the business, like lean, mean, very focused on the fundamentals and what we do best. But as we went through, we had a number of options. As you said, I think we had six or seven options. We got that down to a handful and really it ended up with two options. On one hand, I think frankly, the bigger offer by a little bit was another firm that would've been more hands off. We could tell just by the culture and the way they were, it would've been more of a hands-off partnership and then there was the Thoma Bravo side, which we felt would be very hands-on and figuratively and literally will be all up in our business. So there was an intense debate internally with the execs, really just three of us at the time. And my point of view is that, hey, we're here to basically realize the full potential of us individually, but also the company itself, most importantly and we felt that going with Toma Bravo would be what allows us to do that.

ADAM SOLOMON:

So a huge part of our strategy is we love backing the existing team, particularly when it's a founding team with the idea being, I think it's played out exactly here, that as a practitioner, the knowledge that you have of the product, the market, the customers, that's what's really valuable and irreplaceable and as long as you're self-aware and open-minded, we can partner with you to help you learn all this stuff required to run a much bigger business and this is kind of a great case study of that. The company's almost tripled in size. We've done the first two acquisitions ever in the company's history. The company's a much more mature organization now than it was four years ago. But I'm curious from your point of view, how that experience has been for you in terms of just scaling with the company and basically learning a bunch of new motions, new skills.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yeah. I mean, this is one of the reasons that we really felt that Thoma Bravo was the right partner for us. We had built a really good business by all measures, but it needed some more resiliency, it needed the ability to scale. and that's initially what you guys brought in. We didn't even have quotas...

ADAM SOLOMON:

I remember that...

JASON PASSWATERS:

...in the beginning. A quota attainment model, we had no idea what that was.
Our budgeting was obviously way different than it is now. The long-term forecasting. All of this stuff is just, I guess, the silent stuff that people don't see that really is where the scalability and the resilience is baked into a business and so now we have that. I say it's like the plumbing and the electrical work of the company. So I think that's worked out very, very well. What's really good too is that you talk about self-awareness and when we hire from the executive level on down, we really kind of preach self-awareness, humility, quiet professionals. These are all cultural expectations and when we've built our exec team, we've all got gaps, but we all kind of fill each other's gaps. So we're just a really good cohesive team and that's helped us as well grow together as a team to scale with the company and at times, not everybody can do it, but I think we've done a really good job at keeping that core team together.
Because you're right, at the end of the day, we know the customer, we know the industry, we know the offering more and better than anybody. So just to plug somebody external in, that's a tough challenge.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah. It's been a phenomenal four years. The company's performed great. It's been a pleasure partnering with you. It's been an absolute joy. From your view, I think our listeners would love to hear what's next for the company. We're obviously in a very different world in a lot of ways now than we were four years ago when you think about AI and the impact that's having on everything. Yeah. So I think what next goes back a ways if you look at some of the acquisitions we've done. Our first acquisition was a small tuck-in. Our second one though, Cyborg was threat hunting and that really kicked off what I think is the bigger vision for Intel 471. You're seeing a convergence of capabilities within threat operations or within security operations where what's required now is the external visibility over the threat. That's where we come into play. That's kind of the nexus of our company. But now what's required also is the ability, what I call operationalization, the ability to do something with that out of the box. Not everybody has massive teams of analysts and whatnot that can do that. So now you need technology that can do it. So Cyborg, threat hunting, that was our first acquisition. Takes intel. You can create hunt packages, you can then deploy those hunt packages across your environment.

Next would be things such as threat emulation, detection engineering. These are all things where intel is the fuel and these things can then go and operationalize that intel. Where AI fits in, when it comes to the intel space, I'm not a believer that it's going to take away the need to have humans. I think what it's going to do is make things quicker, more efficient and faster, and it's going to really allow analysts to focus on things that matter most and then the day-to-day kind of tactical things you can kind of automate away to some extent and let AI handle that. But I just don't think that intel specifically is going to have a time where you cannot have analysts or intel professionals doing the work.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yeah. But I think one other thing we've seen on the AI front across a lot of things in cyber is it just makes the bad guys better at their job too. In terms of the threat environment, it's more dynamic and ...

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yeah, it absolutely does. I mean, they're using it very much how all of us are using it. I can tell you right now, I QC a lot of my comms with AI just to make sure I'm saying the right things the right way and the bad guys are doing the same thing, whether it's with phishing or whatnot. So yeah, they're going to be more efficient, they're going to be faster, and it's already tough enough because they're already faster than most defenders can be.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Yep snd this has been so much fun. One last question from me. What is the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

JASON PASSWATERS:

I'll give you two. One comes from the Marine Corps. I remember distinctly, I had a gunnery sergeant in Counterintelligence Agents course it was, and he used to always say he had a Minnesotan accent. He used to always say, "Know yourself and seek self-improvement." I'm not going to try to do the accent. I wouldn't do it any justice.

ADAM SOLOMON:

I was excited for hearing that.

JASON PASSWATERS:

But I've always taken that to heart snd I think that is something that I believe in. The other one would be, what I mentioned earlier. When Anup had told us, I think it was at RSA, he said, "Guys, you're toying with the idea of do I take VC money or not? Wait until you hit $2 million in ARR and then decide if you need to. If you don't need to, don't do it. " And I think that was really good advice. I mean, I think one of the highlights of my career was to see the life-changing outcomes at a bootstrap company that goes through and does a majority deal with, say, Thoma Bravo to see how many people have life-changing kind of outcomes. That's a highlight of my career.

ADAM SOLOMON:

Thanks again, man. This has been awesome. Great to do this, appreciate you taking the time.

JASON PASSWATERS:

Yep. Thank you for having me.

ORLANDO BRAVO:

Listen to Thoma Bravo's Behind the Deal Season 4 on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.