In this episode of Behind the Deal, Thoma Bravo Partner Carl Press talks with Alex Berry, CEO of Applitools, and Adam Carmi, Co-Founder and CTO of Applitools.
AIR DATE:
May 22, 2025
LENGTH:
30:10
DISCLAIMER:
This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an advertisement. Views expressed are those of the individuals and not necessarily the views of Thoma Bravo or its affiliates. Thoma Bravo funds generally hold interest in the companies discussed. This podcast should not be construed as an offer to solicit the purchase of any interest of any Thoma Bravo fund.
Transcript
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Welcome to Thoma Bravo’s Behind the Deal. I’m Orlando Bravo, Founder and Managing Partner at Thoma Bravo. And that was Applitools CEO Alex Berry, who you’ll hear from shortly in conversation with Applitools Cofounder and CTO Adam Carmi and Thoma Bravo Partner Carl Press.
Co-founded by Adam Carmi, Applitools is yet another example of Thoma Bravo transitioning a venture-backed, AI-native technology innovator into a category-leading enterprise software business with profitable growth and best-in-class metrics. Applitools’ intelligent testing platform leverages computer vision and leading-edge AI models to address the critical challenge of autonomously testing code across platforms, such as web, mobile, and desktop applications.
As copilots accelerate the creation of software, Applitools is uniquely positioned to capitalize on the growing demand for testing. In this episode, we’ll dive into the story behind our investment in Applitools, exploring the evolution of the business as well as the market trends driving the adoption of intelligent testing. We’ll hear from Adam, who provides a technical overview of the AI products, and from Alex, who offers insights into the company’s growth strategy.
So today, we’ll unpack everything that went on “Behind the Deal’ with Thoma Bravo Partner Carl Press and his conversation with Applitools CEO Alex Berry, and Cofounder and CTO, Adam Carmi.
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CARL PRESS:
Hi, I’m Carl Press. I'm a partner at Thoma Bravo. I've been with the firm for almost exactly 10 years to the day, and today I co-head our explore funds, which are our series of funds focused on middle-market software businesses, what we like to call the emerging category leaders across software.
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Applitools is absolutely one of those category leaders. We met the company about four and a half years ago, but even before that, for years and years, we had looked into the software testing landscape. That is, companies that help developers test their software before it gets put into production. This is a category that had interested us for quite a while. And the category was undergoing a transition from what I would call more legacy solutions to solutions that were leveraging machine learning and AI.
And so we had a hypothesis that that category was poised to continue to grow. It was a huge market. It continues to be a huge market. And we knew we wanted to go find the absolute category leader or emerging category leader in that space. When we met Applitools, we felt like we found it.
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This was a beautiful infrastructure software company growing over 50 % a year with world-class retention, both gross and net, great gross margins, and a really, really impressive founding team that had been together for over a decade.
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CARL PRESS:
They pioneered the use of AI and computer vision in software testing. The core product of Applitools is a product called “Eyes”, which uses computer vision to test the software application by scanning and visually identifying errors in the user interface. So if you're a bank or an insurance company or really any company that builds customer-facing software, you need to make sure that your application looks and feels a consistent way for every customer in every corner of the world, in every language, across any number of browsers or devices that are being used to view that application.
That's what Applitools helps those customers do. They use computer vision to identify where bugs and defects might exist in the software and then can alert them, and then automatically remediate them, and do root cause analysis.
When Adam Carmi, Moshe Milman, and Gil Sever built this technology, it was truly a one of one business. Nobody else was doing this in the market. And even today, “Eyes” remains a revolutionary product in enterprise testing of software.
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We started doing diligence, we quickly realized how special of a company this was. For a company of its size, which at the time it was crossing 20 million of ARR. It had one of the most impressive rosters of customers that I'd ever seen, Fortune 50 and 100 companies across almost every category.
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And when we started talking to those customers on a blinded basis, each of them was describing how deeply embedded Applitools was in their software development life cycle. It was embedded into their CI/CD processes. It connected into every element of the software development life cycle at the company. It was being used by both developers and QA professionals in the company, and it would spread from team to team. So, there was this almost East-West expansion of Applitools across these accounts, and that was something that we weren't necessarily seeing with some of the other vendors in the category. There was a virality to this business that was so unique, and so to be doing that at such high-quality customers and logos with such high-quality customer testimonials led us to believe that this was absolutely the right company in the category.
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The biggest question in our minds at the time was, can we successfully transition this company from being venture-backed to being one that's private equity owned, that can grow profitably, that can be a platform for acquisitions?
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And that was a transition that we've made many times with many companies, but it takes the right leadership and the right approach to the partnership to be able to actually execute that successfully. And after we spent time with the three founders of the company, we developed some real conviction that this company could make the transition from venture-backed to being a Thoma Bravo portfolio company.
We put a four-year plan in front of the management team, they agreed to it, we shook hands on it, and now it was just time to win the deal. It was 2021. Deals were incredibly expensive. The market was white hot, particularly for an AI native company growing as quickly as Applitools was, with as strong of unit economics as Applitools had in a market as big as testing is and so we knew we were up against the challenge, but we moved quickly, and in the spring of 21 we were able to sign the transaction to acquire the business.
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I think it's important to reflect on how much has changed in this category since we made that investment.
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To start, the way that companies test software continues to evolve and change every day, there continues to be this so-called “shift left” where more and more of the testing moves into the hands of the developers, which in turn favors the way that we approach testing at Applitools. There was also the introduction of generative AI, which has completely changed everything about software, but also everything about how software is built. Now you're starting to have co-pilots working alongside developers, building software, software that's autonomously getting created by large language models, and all of that software still needs to be tested. It needs to be tested across different devices, across different browsers.
So, the need for testing has only grown, and we as a company we've evolved alongside these changes in the market. So when we first made the investment, we had one core offering, which was our “Eyes” solution, our visual testing solution, where we were the undisputed number one category leader. Today we have two. So, in addition to “Eyes”, we've introduced “Autonomous”, which is a truly end to end AI native solution that can author and execute tests on its own without any developer interaction. And that's revolutionary.
And we're now just rolling that out. We're really, really excited about what “Autonomous” could do in this category. We're already at about a couple dozen customers, and the feedback we're getting is just tremendous, and the interest we're getting is really, really encouraging. So, now with these two solutions, we feel like we have the most comprehensive testing and test automation platform in the market.
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In 2023, about two years into the journey, we went through the succession planning of moving from our founder CEO, Gil Sever, to our current CEO, Alex Berry, and that couldn't have gone smoother.
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It was a natural moment in the company's life to make that transition. It's something that you never necessarily planned for, but you suspect might be coming at some point. And I can tell you–you know, both of them did a phenomenal job throughout that process. We remain close to Gil as a co-founder and investor in the company, and Alex has just done a tremendous job embracing the culture of the business, getting deep in the product, and really, really understanding the customer.
One of the things that Alex does better than almost any CEO I work with is spending time with the customer, hearing the voice of the customer directly. So, that can inform how we innovate, how we lead gen, how we go to market.
What I may be most proud of in that transition is the relationship that Alex has built with the other two co-founders, Adam and Moshe. Alex really took time to understand their leadership styles, to understand how they lead their segments of the business, and to understand how they've built the culture such that he can carry that forward and build upon it and I think he struck that balance perfectly and I couldn't be more pleased with how that's all gone and the dynamic that Alex has with Adam today, Adam sitting in Tel Aviv, Alex sitting here in the U.S., you almost wouldn't know that they're half a world apart. They talk all the time, they're friends, they respect each other's opinions. It's a really, really healthy dynamic, and I think it sets us up for what will be a successful next few years of the company as we continue to evolve and innovate and become a leader in test automation.
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Up next, my conversation with Alex Berry and Adam Carmi.
CARL PRESS:
Alex, Adam, good to see you guys. Thanks for doing this.
ALEX BERRY:
Thank you, of course.
ADAM CARMI:
Good to see you, Carl.
CARL PRESS:
Adam, maybe I'll start with you. You're one of the co-founders of Applitools. You've been there since the very, very beginning. Maybe talk about, at inception, what was the problem that you were trying to solve? How did you identify that problem? And then, how did you go about trying to solve it with what became the Applitools platform?
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ADAM CARMI:
Sure, a great question by the way. The Applitools story begins around 15 years ago, long time ago, I was running R&D at a security startup. So, just like any other security product, we had a lot of UI with a lot of dashboards and policies, and not only was there a lot of UI to test, this product was rebranded several times and localized to six different languages. And although we used test automation with the existing tools that were there at the time, these tools didn't really check the user experience and how the UI was laid out, and all the visual aspects of the UI, and we had a small army of testers that used to test these things manually.
And believe it or not, it would take them almost a week to go through a full regression testing cycle of the UI, a full week, and at the time, the cool thing was—that just came out –was doing agile software development. So everyone was talking about how we can shorten the release cycles and doing extreme programming and all of that, and we were excited about it as well. We decided that we want to go through with it, convince the business that it's good for the business, everyone, all the stakeholders were convinced, and we started working on shortening the release cycles, but we got stuck at three months. We couldn't get it any shorter than three months, and we wanted to release every week.
And this problem intrigued me, and I started getting into computer vision and trying to see if I can emulate the human tester to solve the problem. So, I played with it on weekends and late nights. At some point, the company was acquired, and then I started dedicating myself to this problem, started coming up with solutions, joined my coworkers, Moshe and Gil, and started a company with them, and here we are today.
CARL PRESS:
That's incredible. Maybe it's a good time to bring Alex into the conversation. Alex, you know, whereas Adam has been there since absolute day one or day zero, you joined a year and a half ago to replace Gil Sever, who was one of Adam's co-founders, to run the company and it was a very smooth and natural transition from a founder CEO to an outside CEO, but those are never straightforward, necessarily. So, maybe Alex, this is a good time to talk about what were some of your early impressions as you joined this organization? You had led many other companies in the past; how is this unique to those experiences?
ALEX BERRY:
Great question. I think it starts for me with the product and as I started talking with you and got to know the team and Adam in particular, you know, obviously there were history and legacy with visual testing and they created that market–just the product vision and his vision for the company was what drew me to the business. And then I think it's important, as you mentioned, the smooth transition, you know, that takes a lot of collaboration and willingness on the parts of the founders. I've actually stepped in for a couple of founders in my past lives, and it starts with a willingness and an enablement of whomever's coming in at the CEO level. And, you know, to Gil’s credit, to Adam's credit, and Moshe's credit, they welcomed me. I think they saw the value that I brought to the business and different skill sets than they had, and the collaboration really started from there, and that really made it an easy transition. It's not always easy, as you know.
CARL PRESS:
Yeah, it isn't, it isn't. And yet it's gone, I'd say, as smooth as it could have, all things considered. Adam, maybe this is a good time to pull up and just talk at a high level. What products encompass the Applitools platform?
ADAM CARMI:
So, just as an overview, Applitools provides a test automation platform that is used today by thousands of teams from small startups to the world's leading brands. By using this platform, teams can test just about any type of application, from web application, mobile application, and desktop application and the platform provides a premium solution to any testing need, whether it is adding the world's best visual testing capabilities to coded open source tests, to providing test automation infrastructure, and even allowing your teams to author tests in plain in English, leveraging LLMs through our autonomous testing product.
ALEX BERRY:
What Adam is talking about from a product perspective really encompasses what we refer to as our intelligent testing platform, and so when you talk about authoring, validating, executing, analyzing, to me, that was also what encouraged me to join because that's the panacea. This unified platform doesn't exist and traditional testing tools, and not to disparage on our competitors, but there's been folks that have been in this industry for a long time, and the traditional testing tools just can't keep up, right? There's poor test coverage, there are slow release cycles, there is expensive maintenance and so our vision and Adam's vision, is really to create that unified platform that you can go to to solve all of those needs and it's pretty exciting, and it's revolutionizing the way that people test and author, and validate their software.
CARL PRESS:
Alex, one of the things you're so good at is spending time with customers and really understanding their pain points and how they perceive ROI from our solutions, and how we can get into these accounts with the so-called thin edge of the wedge of our solution. Maybe talk about the conversations you've been having, even recently, on your trip to Asia, you've met with so many of our customers and prospective customers. Talk about what are those customers and perspectives saying about Applitools and about the ROI on our solution?
ALEX BERRY:
No, absolutely. So what's really different is, and Adam mentioned this before, is our proprietary large language model for test execution that separates us. And then the opportunity really on the interactive flexible test authoring as we shared, and that's really what we view as our difference. And so I wanted to test this with our customers. So, we had just recently gone through and really finalized and enhanced our product roadmap, and so I sat down with customers and went over it with them. And, you know, if you look at it from an Applitools perspective, you know, where do we win and who do we go after?
A lot of it is the B2B tech. So, companies that have complex web applications, SaaS platforms of the like, we–also financial services and regulated industries are areas of opportunity for us that we tend to do very well. And then retail is another key area for us, and so some of those early customers in those we spoke to, and one case in point was I met with Suncorp, which is a large customer in the insurance space and reinsurer in Sydney. And they were one of the first early adopters of “Autonomous,” and one of the things that they were really looking to do was to integrate “Autonomous” into their SDLC and then embed it into their CI/CD pipeline. And they really wanted from their QA testing perspective, they were doing a lot of manual testing and it was taking them a lot of time to get releases out and they've implemented that and they've seen dramatic reduction from, you know, going from weeks of development time and getting product out the door to days.
And it took them a while to embed that throughout the ecosystem, but we partnered with them, we listened to them, they were, as I mentioned, early access customer and have now implemented that across the continuum. And we asked them, “What are some of the things that we do better than anyone else?” And so they talked about the Applitools value proposition and difference, but they also talked about how we–the care and free, and the knowledge of our team and our customer support and success, which really stands apart as far as getting people onto the system.
CARL PRESS:
Our thesis when we made the investment four years ago, as you know, Adam, is that test automation was going to become increasingly important as the proliferation of both cloud software and also AI began to take flight. What we didn't predict is that AI would soon be authoring code as quickly and as robustly as it is today; that is something that we didn't have in our Bingo card.
ALEX BERRY:
Well, even when, you know, go back a year and a half, when we were talking, the pace of innovation within AI has been, you know, that year and a half might as well be 10 years and so that's – it's just, it’s changed and I think it's something that we're all dealing with as far as the latest releases, the latest buzz, and excitement around AI and I think that's part of the challenge that we're trying to overcome within the industry is there's just a lot of noise. So, how do we differentiate ourselves and what Adam was talking about in the intelligent testing platform and solving those problems, putting ourselves ahead of the competition with a unique way and revolutionizing the test automation through AI, but it's very fast paced right now.
ADAM CARMI:
And I have to say that beyond the challenges that Alex mentioned, that are probably felt across all industries, right? There is LLMs influencing and disrupting all markets now. On the other hand, it's an amazing accelerator and opportunity. So first of all, businesses are looking to spend on AI and looking to embrace AI and bring that into the workflows, which we do as a company. This is what we provide. But second, if you look at the long-term play here, I mean, what AI is doing to software development is basically lowering the bar, allowing anyone to write software. And the result of that is that you'll have less capable engineers writing much, much more code, which means that the need to test and validate the result will only increase and the traditional approach is where you need to write code or test manually, just cannot scale. And you have to use AI, and you have to use tools like the ones that we provide to be able to accommodate that.
CARL PRESS:
And so, going forward, as it requires less and less capability to actually author code and applications, will testing become entirely automated? Will there be some developer interaction with testing? Like, what is the future state of testing application software?
ADAM CARMI:
Okay, so first of all, we need to understand a very, at least from the way that we look at it and what we talk with customers about is, because you know, this thing is new for everyone so, it's very interesting to understand how everyone is thinking about it, as not just us. There is one thing that is very disturbing about using the new generation of what we call AI now, which is the large language models for testing. Is the problem, that it is not accurate, and it can hallucinate. Now testing, it's very important for in terms of quality that you know exactly what it is that you're testing and you know that it works exactly that way. Okay, it's very important.
Now, if you just trust an LLM to go through a workflow, and maybe it sees a bug and it finds a way to work around it in order to just succeed in the goal that you gave it to do some action. It just won't report the bug, or maybe it will hallucinate some different workflow that you didn't intend, and it will tell you that the test has passed, right? These are fundamental problems. Now, because of that, people, meaning the customers, still want to know that there is, that tests are deterministic in the sense that they know what coverage that they are getting, and they know for sure that if the test passed, they don't need to test it in any other way.
So, for that matter, there are two ways for automation. First of all, there could be specific use cases that you can test completely deterministically, like scrolling a website, finding any differences from a previous scroll, whether they're in the UI or in the logic.
This is something that is complete and won't require any interference, just letting you know that there is a difference and you should look at it and decide whether it's okay or not okay. On the other hand, when it comes to authoring tests, coming up with the test cases, it's okay for the tool to suggest the test for you. It's okay for it to tell you what it's going to do.
Customers expect to look at it, approve it, and then they expect this thing to run exactly as it is all the time, and not deviate from that, because then they have a basis that they can rely on, on what gets tested. I hope it answered your question. So, it will require involvement, yes. With the technology that we have today, it does require involvement, but much less involvement than it used to.
ALEX BERRY:
Yeah. I'm not as smart as Adam, but here's how I look at it.
CARL PRESS:
Few are, Alex.
ALEX BERRY:
[laughs] Yes. It’s hard to be on the same screen with him. But I think I look at it, obviously, how he explains it, but from a practical business perspective, they're talking about folks are saying “well we're not gonna need as many developers” or this, that, the other. I think the key thing is there's going to be more need for testing because there's gonna be more code developed and so, when I look at like where we are in that hype cycle, I think from an automated, autonomous AI testing, it's one of the first real tangible use cases that are going to solve business problems for our clients and do it in a way that they can get away from a manual testing, automate that testing.
In fact, I was in Australia this past week and met with one of our banking customers who had just rolled out “Autonomous” to a small team and had such success that they had reduced their cycle times from fifty hours to five, and this is getting products out the door. And they were then and asking us to help them package up business case and ROI, and then go take to the CIO to roll this out over the entire company. Tangible ROI, utilizing “Autonomous” and utilizing AI is something that if you can prove it, because there's a lot of noise and a lot of hype, you're gonna be well ahead of the curve and I think from a testing perspective, it's one of the early applications or use cases that's really gonna bear fruit.
CARL PRESS:
Alex, maybe switching gears a little bit, throughout your career in software, you've now worked with a handful of other private equity sponsors. Maybe talk about your experience so far with Thoma Bravo, how it's been different, and why it's obviously, without question, your favorite experience so far.
ALEX BERRY:
Yes, no question. You know, I often say that no private equity firm and private equity firms are not created equal, and they all have their positives and they all have their challenges. And I don't say this because working for Thoma Bravo or you, but my experience with TB is that we are the best of both.
So there's the engagement and collaboration that I seek with yourself and other members of the TV portfolio I have great mentors within different CEOs that I reach into to get access and information and help but the team that we're working with has that balance and I think that's the best way to describe it and I think the the team that that you've accumulated for us to work with are great CEOs that have been there, done that, have the credibility, and just do great work. So, I would say TB is the best of all those worlds, kind of the balance between here's a prescription, here's the experience that we've done, but also letting the management team run the business and own the outcomes.
CARL PRESS:
Yeah, that's very kind of you to say. I bet you say that to all the private equity sponsors, don't you, Alex?
ALEX BERRY:
Not all of them, and I'll leave those ones out, but yes.
CARL PRESS:
I appreciate that. I'll ask the same question to you, Adam, but in a slightly different way because, you know, part of the story of this transaction, of this investment, is that we transitioned Applitools from a venture-backed company to a sponsor-owned company. And that's a meaningful transition. We've done it many times in the past, it's never particularly easy. The objectives of each ownership structure are a little bit different from one another. So maybe talk a little bit about that transition that we went through a number of years ago, and what you see as the benefits of now working under a private equity ownership structure like ours, relative to what maybe you had before with the early VC investors.
ADAM CARMI:
So, first of all, maybe I'll start with why initially we chose to partner with you guys. So back when we made the deal, we were coming out of COVID, the business was doing very well, and we got a lot of inbound offers and at that time, we were already in the company for seven years, and it made sense for us, we felt like it's good to entertain those offers and listen to what people have to offer. The idea of transitioning to a PE was especially appealing to us because we still knew that the company has huge potential and can grow much more, and it didn't feel like the time to stop.
And getting back to the last part of your question that I think that it is important for other entrepreneurs that are considering a move like that. I actually feel that working with a PE or Thoma Bravo, specifically, because this is my experience, I'm more aligned with the board and the fund than I was with the venture capital investors because for the simple fact that the level everyone wants the same thing for this company to succeed and it's not like there are 10 companies where one needs to succeed, which is the model with VCs. So I know that although everyone always wants the company to succeed, everyone is aligned on the level of risk versus expectation for my–your specific company. And this is something that has constantly been bothering me, interacting with the previous boards and investors, and also the fact that there is one owner that is driving and making all the decisions removes a lot of noise and conflicts from the process as well.
CARL PRESS:
Right, right. We don't have the so-called power rule in our portfolio. Every one of our investments is equally important and gets a considerable amount of our attention, and so you're exactly right. And by the way, I think it's important to note that when you and Moshe and and Gil did the deal, each of you rolled a meaningful amount of the proceeds of the deal into the Thoma Bravo transaction, which equated to a meaningful large chunk of your personal net worth, which we genuinely appreciated and we saw as a sign of commitment to the journey ahead, and we think is a symbol of a committed, strong team that really wants to build something special with us.
I want to hit on culture really quick because so much has been said and written about the success of the Israeli technology ecosystem over the last two-plus decades, and all the ingredients that go into making it successful. And I'll just, as a quick anecdote, after we made the investment, about nine months later, we flew out to Israel – Adam, you remember this really well – and we were so well received. The team there was incredibly warm, generous with their time, we had a great time visiting the office, spending time with the employees, spending time in Tel Aviv. We did a trip to Jerusalem, which was fantastic.
So we really got to experience the company culture and Israeli culture more broadly, and it was a testament to how special of a company we invested in. That was in 2022. Fast forward to October 2023, we all know what happened on October 7th of that year, and then Alex joins a month later, and now the world is completely different. And so maybe either of you can talk to that experience, living through that experience, and keeping the company focused, keeping that culture as special and unique as it was prior to that event, and how that's evolved over the last, now year and a half?
ALEX BERRY:
I’ll start, and I think Adam has played a tremendous role in that. But I did start a month after, but I signed my offer October 5th, and then October 7th happened. And, you know, we've all been through a lot of challenges and upheaval and COVID and disruption in businesses and business downturns and etc. This was different, and it was different because A, it was personal. Every employee was impacted by it, not only the folks that were in Israel, but all of us who cared about our colleagues and teammates in Tel Aviv. And I didn't know really what to expect. And to your point, I've been an admirer of Israeli technology companies, and you can go down the list of just the billion-dollar-plus success stories and so I was always engaged and impressed with the quality of the engineering talent and had never really run an Israeli development team before and so I didn't know what to expect, I was really excited about doing that.
And so when the war happened, Adam jumped right in, and for folks that don't know, theres, you know, everyone is on reserve duty. And so immediately as people were called up, we lost probably 15 people that went literally to the front lines. And what keeps inspiring me daily is the grit, the determination, and the attitude that every single employee has in spite of the challenges that they face on a daily basis and it was my, I think, third day and it was no surprise to anyone having some computer problems and I couldn't get my Zoom working, Google was a problem and so they said, “Well, why don't you talk to Dennis?” and Dennis is our CIO, head of IT and I said, “That'd be great”. So, set up a call, I come on a screen, and there's a black screen. I'm like looking around, I'm like, “Where's Dennis?” He literally pulls like a poncho over and shows what's behind him and I said, “Dennis, where are you?” And he said, “I'm on the front lines and Lebanon is right there” and he points.
Obviously, I was embarrassed that I was taking him off this, and he said, “No, don't be embarrassed. This is what we do, because what are we going to do? We fight for 12 hours. We're on front lines, and then we have 12 hours off, and we're going to sit and just”
And so he introduced me to other professionals that were fighting, but that were IT for other companies within Israel, and that was really my first experience. And so we didn't miss a delivery cycle, we didn't miss any deliverables or KPIs during that time, even with all of the challenges that we’re facing, the employees there. And every day they come in with a spirit, they come in with a grit and a determination and a positive attitude, and candidly, I think they focus on what matters. One of our core values is focusing on what matters and they do. They don't get built up and gossip or innuendo; they just go to work, and they do it with enthusiasm and a perspective that I think is great for all of us. So culturally, we take a lot from that, and we get a lot of inspiration from the team and what they're doing, and to throw it to Adam, that starts with Adam. Adam's leadership and what he's done for the company, but also for the team there is remarkable, and I'll let him share some of his thoughts.
ADAM CARMI:
Thanks, Alex. So, October 7th was really a disruptive day. It's not something that anyone could just shrug and go back to work, and even after we got things under control, as Alex said, we had a lot of people doing military service from the company. Almost every family had some friend or family member that was at the front lines. And it was very difficult to focus on work when every — what everyone really wanted to do was just go and help. Go and fight, go and help the soldiers, go and help the families of the soldiers in reserve duty, get food over there, help in any way possible.
This was one challenge that we had. The second challenge was to communicate what's going on to the rest of the company and to the board because it was very important, at least for me as a manager, to make sure that you know that things are under control and that work is getting done and we didnt, that the company didn't come to a halt because of that. So the two important things that were done was first clearly communicate what's going on to the board and the entire company in town halls or letters or emails that I've sent to everyone. That was very important. The second one was to make sure the company actively contributes and spends time and money, and effort to help whatever it is that's going on in Israel, and let the employees know so they feel that the company is doing their part and they can focus on work. So, you know they will keep their jobs, the Israeli economy will continue to thrive, etc. So, those were very important, two very important things that were done and helped us overcome this.
CARL PRESS:
That's incredible, Adam. Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. And guys, thank you for doing this. It's a joy to work with both of you. Adam, thank you for trusting us with your company, you know, four years ago. It's a joy to get to work with you and learn from you. I've probably learned more about building enterprise software from you than I have from almost anybody, and so I really appreciate all that you've done for us and in our partnership, and I know the journey continues, and it's going to be a great one.
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And Alex, thank you for joining us on this journey, and we were very lucky to get you. You've instituted a lot of amazing changes in the business so far, and I know that will only continue. I have a ton of fun working with you, really appreciate the partnership.
ALEX BERRY:
My pleasure, love it.
ADAM CARMI:
Thank you, Carl.
CARL PRESS:
Huge thanks to Alex and Adam for coming on today. If you like this episode, be sure to watch our next week's episode of “Beyond the Deal,” our mini-series where we get to ask them literally anything. I’m Carl Press. Thanks for joining.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Behind the Deal is brought to you by Thoma Bravo in partnership with Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios. Join us next week for more stories Behind The Deal. Thanks for listening.
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