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 in Thoma Bravo fund.
Thoma Bravo Partner Mike Hoffmann sits down with ConnectWise CEO Jason Magee to discuss their partnership and the importance of a shared vision when taking a founder-led business to the next level.
AIR DATE:
November 30, 2023
RUN TIME:
37:26
Transcript
JASON MAGEE:
Actually, what I remember most about the interactions and meeting was after that meeting. After that meeting was, you would call and you would say something like, "Hey, I'm in the area. Do you want to catch up? Do you want to go to dinner?" And then I come to find out down the road that in the area meant was, "Hey, I'm on the East Coast." And then one of those times you actually jumped on a plane and you came down to Tampa. Three hours later, you were in Tampa and we were going to dinner. So I remember that you were all about building the relationship and doing what it took to make sure that we saw that there was a lot of great alignment between the two orgs.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
Extremely persistent. We were across the street with binoculars, waiting to get it all set up.
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 in any Thoma Bravo fund.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Welcome to Thoma Bravo's Behind the Deal. I'm Thoma Bravo founder and managing partner, Orlando Bravo. And that was Jason Magee, CEO of ConnectWise, speaking with Thoma Bravo partner Mike Hoffmann. ConnectWise is a phenomenal company. It is an industry leader in providing IT and security solutions to managed service providers, enabling those managed service providers with the tools that they need to keep small and medium-sized businesses up and running. In 2019, ConnectWise was acquired by Thoma Bravo in a proprietary transaction with ConnectWise's founder, kicking off a new era of innovation and collaboration. In the first year of partnership alone, ConnectWise beat all of our metrics for the investment and acquired three other players in the IT services space.
Mike and Jay's conversation highlights the significance of cultivating long-term relationships. And the transaction is also a model of our Thoma Bravo partners with a founder-led company to continue to build it both through operational improvements and add-on acquisitions. ConnectWise is a great case study in being able to put together a mutually beneficial deal with a company's founder and owner. The process of buying a company is different. In the case of a take-private from a carve-out from buying a founder-led and founder-owned business, we as a private equity firm have to adjust to the seller's needs and their process.
Like in many founder-led acquisitions, succession planning is usually an element of the transaction. In the case of ConnectWise, we partnered with Jay, an existing leader at the company, as the successor to lead the company going forward. This allowed us to retain ConnectWise's core competencies and the culture that had served the company so well. At the same time, through our partnership, we were able to introduce to ConnectWise our operating approach and our methodologies towards building the company through strategic acquisitions. So today, you'll hear everything that went on behind the deal of this investment from Mike Hoffmann, our deal lead and partner on our flagship team, followed by his conversation with ConnectWise CEO, Jay Magee.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
My name's Mike Hoffmann. I've been with Thoma Bravo for a round a decade, and I sit in our Flagship Fund. And as we've had additional strategies like our Discover Fund, Explore, Growth, Credit, I've remained in Flagship and I cover infrastructure and a bit of security. So for us, infrastructure, it doesn't mean bridges and tunnels, that means some of the things sold to IT or data and analytics, developers, so on and so forth.
So I joined Thoma Bravo in the fall of 2014, and it was such a busy time. We were running after a number of large deals, was really kind of drinking through the fire hose. So on the other side of that, I'd say probably in early 2015, I took a sit down and thought about the space that I had given a purview over and basically kind of underwrote the different sectors and silos within IT companies that I thought would be really interesting investment opportunities for us. A lot of those things that we had done as a group before, but taking another set of eyes on it.
ConnectWise really came out of that exercise. So for us, one of the themes that we had been investing into, just broadly speaking, was IT software models with really good distribution. As you start to think about moving beyond just pure enterprise selling to blue chip Fortune 2000 type companies and you start to move to more of the mid-market or even to SMB, it really becomes a question of, do you have great products, of course, and do you service your customers well? But then it moves to, do you have a really good distribution model to be able to access all those customers in a really cost-effective way? The MSP model, selling software to managed service providers, basically think about that as the outsourced IT partner of an SMB business. And you can think about it as selling to one, to then sell to many.
The great thing is, if you're a multi-product software platform like ConnectWise is, then ultimately you can grow not just by signing up an MSP partner who then signs up end customers, but by selling them additional products. And if you bring that back to the go-to-market strategy of somebody like ConnectWise, you can really cost effectively touch a lot of SMB customers to that channel with the added benefit as well of when your partner makes a dollar, you make money as well. So you're kind of two legs into the potato sack, both making money together and doing the right thing by the end customers at the end of the day. But if you think about things at a 10,000-foot view, one of the prevalent themes that we see over and over again is the shortage of highly skilled labor in IT and security. So that IT and security skills gap, part of the way it gets solved is through the managed service provider, basically outsourced IT, to be able to go tackle those things.
Now, what's interesting about all this is, the managed service providers, the MSPs themselves, they have IT and security skills gap challenges as well because it's really hard to hire really, really talented labor. At the end of the day, IT and security professionals, I mean they are highly, highly, highly skilled, right? And that's really part of the business that ConnectWise is in, is helping those individuals just become that much more efficient and digitally transforming MSPs. It's a little ironic in the sense because you are taking highly sophisticated technology organizations and then using technology to help make them become even more sophisticated and efficient.
There are a number of things that I think sets ConnectWise apart from a lot of its competition. I would say, first and foremost, it is a company that has a deep-rooted history in the MSP ecosystem and has such an unbelievable channel and community presence. ConnectWise's origins, if you go back to Arnie Bellini and his brother founding the business, they actually operated in MSP themselves and their father came out of the technology industry as well. So they founded an MSP and started creating software products to help it run more efficiently. And just like many other professional services or other businesses that started to develop software for themselves, they realized, "Hey, you know what? This is a really good business model. In fact, instead of us signing up end customers to the MSP, why don't we carve this business out and start to sell to other MSPs?" So they continued to operate that MSP they had created, but they also created what then became ConnectWise.
Through that journey, they basically seeded the entire industry. I'd say ConnectWise was kind of the origin story for software provided into the MSP channel because they had this anchor product, a business management system, BMS, but through that they've been able to cultivate this amazing ecosystem and they've really done a good job of helping their end customers grow.
But part of customer success for ConnectWise is enabling them to be really well-run businesses, teaching them about aspects of lead generation, helping them train up on selling certain security products, so on and so forth. So through a ton of education programs, a ton of regionally-based community events, so think like conferences and other thought leadership things, and through something called the IT Nation, which this kind of thought leadership and instead of conferences and educational experiences has become, which culminate in a couple of really large conferences every year including this really big conference down in Orlando that happens every fall, they've done a really good job of touching their partners and helping them become successful. So I'd say that's the first thing, is that focus, that differentiated focus. When we looked at the business, I think we liked that, but we didn't fully appreciate it. I remember when we were under LOI in the company going down to Orlando to visit and seeing firsthand their big conference down there in Florida, and I was just completely blown away by the caliber of everybody I was exposed to and the programming and the fanfare.
The second thing though, and maybe arguably the most important, is the product experience. These solve really, really important problems for their customers. The second category of products they sell is remote monitoring and management, unified management. So those are agents that you put on devices to do everything from help provision them, inventory track, monitor exactly what's going on, backup and disaster recovery, so on and so forth. And then the third pillar being security. That's purpose built for the MSP space.
ConnectWise is a really large business now. Under our ownership, the company has roughly tripled in size and top line. We're not at a billion dollars yet, but I'd say well and swayed, just to give you a sense of scale. And then also in terms of the earnings of the business, that has also been really impressive growth as well and put the company in a really, really great position. From a customer perspective, the business is 30,000 plus customers. Those are our customers, those are our partners. But if you were to count the end customer count of who we service, I mean it's way bigger than that. It's way bigger than that. It's pretty incredible, the breadth of the platform.
Arnie, founder and CEO of ConnectWise, so if you're listening, Arnie, you're awesome, Arnie, reinvesting into the business with us. So we're still very much kind of business partners. Obviously, the partnership in getting this deal done was through him. So we're huge fans of him. If I were to go back to the first encounter, so I referenced early 2015 getting exposed to the space in a different way and thinking about where we wanted to spend time and coming across this just total jewel of a business, well, we didn't end up closing on ConnectWise until February of 2019. My first exposure to Arnie, as either a junior or mid-level investment professional, you're always trying to find ways to get angles. How do I get into this deal? If it's a private seller, you're saying, "Hey, how do I make sure when they think about selling, I'm front and center?" So we had previously never had contact with Arnie. Every private equity firm had probably had a ton of their associates every year of pinging Arnie or other people trying to get to know him. So I think he ignored most of my outreach. I think I tried calling his office, I sent him emails. I was like, I'm going to find the best way to approach him.
So a guy named Tony Thomas, who headed up strategy for him, I was on LinkedIn and I noticed he used to work for one of our operating partners, a guy named David Weiss. And David actually spent time in the IT space and it turned out that they were going to come out here. So we kind of set up a meeting in Thoma Bravo's offices when we were back in Transamerica Pyramid. We just kind of kept in touch. As time went on, I got the sense Arnie maybe contemplating it being time to find the next business partner for his business, for his baby here. And we, on the back of that, figured out a way to get the company under LOI and ultimately acquire it. I would say our diligence period with Arnie and the team actually moved along pretty precipitously, so did our business planning. So this is a really important part of Thoma Bravo's style of investing, is we will partner with the management team to come up with a multi-year plan. Really simply put, you end up agreeing on a set of financial projections for the company in that you agree on the kind of the top, maybe three to five things you may go do operationally together.
But it was some of the other intricacies of buying a business from a founder. So one of those things was working through a leadership transition. So we think the world of Arnie, he told us he planned to retire. He, I think, a couple times changed his mind during that process, that he may want to in fact run the business some more so we had to kind of work through that. And ultimately, I think we got to the right spot, which is where Arnie ultimately started which is, "I want to sell the business to a great private equity firm who I'm aligned with and work through a leadership transition to promote my number two at the company." And that was Jay. And we thought he was the appropriate next leader for the company. He's going to go kick some butt. And that's exactly what he's done. He's done a fantastic job.
When we bought the business in February of 2019, Jay Magee was CEO effective day one. I have found Jay to be somebody who is unbelievably hardworking. He works around the clock. And it's not just busy work. He is just diving in. He is a extremely thoughtful strategist, just genuinely knows the problems of his customers because he talks to them so much. So he is just an encyclopedia of knowledge and he knows the entire ecosystem, just front and back. I mean, it's incredible. A really high integrity person who's collaborative, it's really important.
I've heard people say, "Hey, when private equity buys a company, it doesn't matter who the management team is because they can do whatever they want with it." That's not the style Thoma Bravo investing. We're looking to partner with management teams. So having someone like Jay is huge, right? Jay helped build the last decade of the business along with Arnie. Jay was really collaborative with us, because you don't just need a good manager who knows the business really well, you need somebody who also is going to treat the private equity sponsor like a partner. And Jay's done a really good job of threading that needle. Part of what I think has made it a really good professional working experience is I think we've had success together too. ConnectWise has been a really successful investment for us.
Here's my talk with Jay Magee, CEO of ConnectWise.
Jay, ya on?
JASON MAGEE:
I am.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
All right, this is a double whammy. We had a board update call earlier today.
JASON MAGEE:
We did.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
Two in a row.
JASON MAGEE:
Yeah, it's a Thoma Bravo kind of day.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
There we go. Why don’t you share a little bit about the history of the business before you joined and maybe bring us up to up to today through that experience?
JASON MAGEE:
Yeah, so, look, ConnectWise has been around for years and years and years, right? I mean, over 40 years from... The company’s journey in history and really where the business came around with the founders, they had their business. They were in the garage, small office, you know, at a later point in time…that’s kind of the early genesis and how we got to ConnectWise today is, you know, some of those big moves.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
How did you get to ConnectWise?
JASON MAGEE:
How did I get to ConnectWise? Well, I was at CA Technologies prior to coming over to ConnectWise. My time at CA, I met lots of really cool people. Actually, there are some other CEOs in the Thoma Bravo portfolio. But anyway, there was a person that landed here at ConnectWise that worked with me at CA and we kept in contact after they left. And it got to the point when they started to do these joint ventures, that there was a great opportunity for them to expand to different wines of business and routes to market through the channel. And I was a channel individual. Channel operations, channel strategy, channel sales, channel marketing, that's a lot of my background.
I was getting antsy with where I was and my opportunity there. And there was this new wave, this new aspect of channel forming, so call it the managed service provider channel. So they had a need, I had experience, they reached out to me through this individual that I knew from CA, and they thought they were bringing me in for the channel experience and knowledge, but it was a perfect match because I looked at ConnectWise and everything they did as being the future channel. So it was a perfect match, match made in heaven, whatever you want to call it. And then the rest is history.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
So first time I met Jay was at that meeting in Thoma Bravo's offices with part of the larger team when they came out here. You were out here for some conference, I just can't remember what it was. It must've been late 2015, early 2016.
JASON MAGEE:
The conference, I do remember it. It was a Goldman Sachs annual private company conference. But actually, what I remember most about the interactions and meeting was after that meeting. After that meeting was, you would call whether it was Arnie or myself, and you would say something like, "Hey, I'm in the area. Do you want to catch up? Do you want to go to dinner?" Or whatever it may be. And then I come to find out down the road that in the area meant was, "Hey, I'm on the East Coast." And then one of those times, you actually jumped on a plane and you came down to Tampa. Three hours later, you were in Tampa and we were going to dinner. So I remember that you were all about building the relationship and doing what it took to make sure that we saw that there was a lot of great alignment between the two orgs.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
Extremely persistent. We were across the street with binoculars, waiting to get it all set up. I think part of what made that transition really special and great to us was not only partnering with you and working through that and the business planning aspect of it, but being able to do that in partnership with you. I think we obviously paid a fair value for the company, but we were able to have this kind of proprietary dialogue and do it in a way that I think every investor hopes to have a proprietary set of deals that they're able to do. If you could talk a little bit about how you guys thought about it from the other side. Because look, you had other private equity firms probably pinging you on a weekly basis, and at one point you had considered an IPO as well. So if you could just walk through a little bit of how you as a management team or in your conversations with the Bellinis thought about some of the exit alternatives in front of the company and as that ultimately culminated into that being a partnership with Thoma Bravo.
JASON MAGEE:
Back then, we were the best kept secret in probably the software technology world. Company based out of Tampa, there were 11 founders ultimately in the business, and again, fully bootstrapped this entire time, whether bootstrapped or creative deal making between the original ConnectWise founders with the other founders through our acquisitions that we went and did. But we did get to the point where the founders were looking for some liquidity themselves. Many of them had exited the business, so they were still major shareholders that weren't in the operations.
And then it just got to the point in time where Arnie said, "Hey, I think it's that time." It was time for the next wave of ConnectWise. He knew that he wasn't going to want to probably do what it took for putting the company in dead and siphon off pieces to outsiders. His thought process was, "Hey, let's go find the right financial partner to take ConnectWise on the next leg of the journey." We could have went IPO, we could have looked at selling to strategic or PVC, and we went down the path based on where Arnie's mind and thinking was, was to ultimately to sell to private equity. And again, how we wound up with Thoma Bravo is, we joked a little bit about the interactions and the relationships, first meeting and this and that earlier, but with that said, the relationship and the alignment of cultures is what really made this partnership a possibility.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
So Jay, if you think back when you took over the CEO helm, what were some of the top priorities and objectives that you were facing at the time and how did you shepherd through them?
JASON MAGEE:
Remember that we were a founder-led company since the inception of the company. So one of the key areas and priorities were obviously lead the team through the change of ownership, change of control process. It was looking at evaluating and building out the team. You'll recall I had some vacant executive positions that I had to fill. So we had to do that pretty quick. It was about making sure that we were operationally ready from, call it back office, any operational improvements that would be needed so we could look at what acquisitions would make sense and we could bolt them on top of a pretty solid foundation. And then it was about how do we deliver on the investment pieces, near term numbers and creating that enterprise value over the next few years.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
As I think back against those objectives, I think you and the team did a really nice job of succeeding against those. Can you talk a little bit about how those objectives and goals and just really the top priorities of the company shifted as you sunsetted past your first year in the investment and as CEO of the business and as you think about the last couple of years?
JASON MAGEE:
Yeah. Well, I mean, if you just think over the last four and a half years, things were bound to change and shift, right? So Thoma Bravo acquired ConnectWise. Shortly thereafter, and by shortly thereafter, I think within three months, we started to go down the path of looking at and doing due diligence and participating in the acquisition of Continuum. As we're doing that, things already start to shift. Fast-forward later that year, we pull off the acquisition which, again, Continuum was one of our top targets in terms of what we're looking to do.
And then we started to integrate Continuum and ConnectWise into one organization, one company, and the pandemic happened. Pandemic happened, wars broke out, great resignation. So to some extent, it was balancing delivering the near-term numbers of every calendar year, fiscal year with, all right, what does this change for the longer term? And then you throw in, all right, well, technology is ever-changing and it's speeding up and new things emerge and things become more important. So we entered new markets, or we entered new areas like cybersecurity along the way. Now it's about hyper automation. So it's shifted, yet the mission and vision have remained intact of delivering on the numbers, creating long-term enterprise value, and delivering on the vision and mission for the technology system providers globally.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
Jay, community is such an important aspect of the value proposition ConnectWise has for its partners, and I think it's something that you've invested really heavily into having such a big presence, an educational presence, really helping these businesses transform themselves to become as effective as possible. Can you talk a bit about just the IT Nation experience, how that weaves through the value proposition you provide to your partners?
JASON MAGEE:
Community is a lot of what we do. It's actually one of the benefits that our partners, and we call our customers partners, get from partnering up with ConnectWise in our platform and solutions that we go to market with our TSPs with. Look, if you look back in a traditional, call it a franchise model, you got franchisees who buy into a franchise and they get all these best practices and how to go to market and how to acquire new customers and what's the best in class for that franchise business.
Fast-forward to ConnectWise, and community is part of, call it a franchise model. So we bring to them thought leadership, best practices, the community aspect through the IT Nation, all things IT Nation. So whether it's peer groups, learning from each other, holding each other accountable, whether it's user groups and learning how to use the platform to optimize the business, become more productive, more efficient, whether it is big industry events where everyone comes together like IT Nation Connect, IT Nation secure, which is about learning from each other. It's about learning from the community as a whole, which it's not just our partners, it's vendors and it's implementation partners and consultants and everyone in between, to really align behind making the managed service provider and TSP better and more successful, making them more operationally efficient, making them more productive, therefore increase in their bottom line margins, right?
So again, think franchise model, community, all things IT Nation is a part of what we bring. No different than what a franchise would do in terms of bringing all their locations together, learning from each other and building great businesses. And I would say it's part of what we give back. We're big on helping our partners. The more we teach them, the more we train them, the more we make them successful, it directly is tied to ConnectWise's success as well. So as they grow, as they're successful, we grow and we're successful.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
I know all companies of any scale typically have user conferences and they, of course, educate their customers, but this really is a bit different. I'd encourage anybody listening here who's remotely interested in the space to go to one of your conferences. Can you just articulate to everybody what it means from kind of a size perspective, what you'd see at one of these events?
JASON MAGEE:
So there are thousands of attendees that attend, right? I would say four to 5,000 is what we're expecting total attendees at this upcoming IT Nation Connect. Big portion of that are the MSPs and TSPs from a global standpoint. There's sessions that are hosted from ConnectWise experts, sessions that are hosted from called third-party experts, whether it's cybersecurity, business operation and maturity. So it's really cool to see how everyone comes together and really culminates that, whether it's IT Nation Connect, which is November, and then IT Nation Secure, which is more cybersecurity specific for TSPs and MSPs globally in terms of what we do there.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
Jay, one of the key tenets that our investors and our funds have when they invest in Thoma Bravo is knowing that the operational stewardship of the businesses is really tight and best in class. I'd love to get your perspective of how we've helped support you. And then also as part of that, maybe you can talk about your relationship with David Weiss, who's the chair of the business and also was pretty critical in helping make the introduction and getting that relationship with Arnie going early on.
JASON MAGEE:
It's a relationship that means a lot to not only myself as the CEO and my team, but the company as well. It's nice to have the financial partner like Thoma Bravo along our side that not only there to help from the financial metric side of things, but also a partner that understands the business and what our mission is. It means that it's not just my team and I as well, we have access to you all. We have access to your vast network of connections that have been there and done that. Think of it as I've got access to several backbones.
A great example of this is my access to and the relationship I have with the chairman of the board, David Weiss, as you said. We have the ability to engage David and other board members and connections that may be able to help us through something that we may not have seen prior or encountered, or we just want to bounce ideas off. It's a bad phone. I could call David up anytime that I want. I could ask him a question, have him walk me through how he may have handled something in the past, or I could run my ideas and get feedback and see if I'm going in the right direction. It's a great collaborative relationship between not only myself and my team, but with Thoma Bravo and you all, and then having the access to David Weiss, the other board members, and the connections that you all provide.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
That's great. So as we're talking about David Weiss, as I think back on ConnectWise's history, I think you guys do go back a little bit longer. I think there's kind of a funny story about Arnie potentially trying to poach some employees from a IT software business that David used to run in Tampa, maybe going back two decades now.
JASON MAGEE:
I know the story that you're talking about, obviously it predates me a little bit. So what I'll say is what I've been told, long story short, tech talent in the Tampa area 15, 20 plus years ago were probably hard to come by, right? Tampa wasn't an area known for technology necessarily. So at one point, I think the founders of ConnectWise thought they'd get creative and they'd post I think a mobile billboard on the outside of the office that David and his company resided at basically saying, "Hey, come work for ConnectWise". There's a talent shortage. You do what you do to go and win and get some good talent. So funny story, I think David and Arnie to this day probably joke about it whenever they come across each other with paths.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
Scrappy. I love it. Maybe David feels like he has last laugh here being chair of the business, but that's great. Jay, you've had a lot of success leading ConnectWise through this kind of next phase, and so we're four plus years into the investment. We've more than tripled the top line of the business. From a profitability level, it's super, super impressive as well. Even more than that, we've diversified the business. Security is a massive growth driver. I think this is a business that has almost unlimited tailwinds given the IT and security skills gap kind of theme and the distribution model that you have coupled with the best-in-class products. So we're really excited. But really, where do you see the future of the business from here relative to maybe the last couple of years? Where are you focused from a strategy and operations perspective on building the business to over the next four or five years?
JASON MAGEE:
Great question. So I'm going to keep it pretty short though. So it comes down to, we're going to continue to focus on our partners, the TSPs and MSPs globally. We're going to continue to deliver against our vision and mission for the TSPs and small businesses globally. It's about, all right, we've been on a four plus year journey, been through a lot, we've pulled a whole bunch of things together through organic development and M&A. It's about bringing that all together in the cohesive story, supporting the strategy to deliver on the vision and mission with that.
So we're going to be focused on operational excellence, get a lot better for ConnectWise and for our partners to be able to consume and absorb and just improve that overall experience. But then it's doubled down on everything that we have. So it's what I would say business management, unified management, continue to accelerate cybersecurity. And then we laid the groundwork a couple of years ago around the Asio platform and what that will bring to the table for not just the TSPs but the industry as a whole, because the platform is about bringing not only vendors and being able to integrate into the platform and truly delivering on that single pane of glass for TSPs. It does a whole lot more, right? So we're going to double down in those areas, all the stuff that we've been working on for the last few years.
But then to segue off of that, it will be about hyper automation and how we can help our customers, our partners be a lot more productive, therefore translating into better EBITDA margins and operational maturity for the TSPs globally. So think about a best in class, they're at 18% based on service leadership benchmark index, and we could get them into the 20s and 30s through collaborative effort with not only what we bring to the table, but what TSPs are going to do from a maturity standpoint over the next few years as well. So I would say that's kind of what's in store for the next couple of years, Mike.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
I'm excited. I love it. Jay, I really wanted to thank you for spending the time with us here, going through the ConnectWise story, going through really your story and taking over. I think more than anything, also wanted to thank you for your friendship. Investing I think is a lot of fun. There are certainly some times where it's a lot of fun and some times where it's really exhausting, or sometimes can be tough in situations. But I think working with you on this, it's just been a professional highlight of mine, and really, really excited about where we can bring the business from here.
JASON MAGEE:
I appreciate the opportunity to participate and to educate a lot of people on ConnectWise as a whole. Look, it's been an exciting story and it's only going to get more exciting as time goes on, and the continued support and partnership with Thoma Bravo. So thank you.
MIKE HOFFMANN:
My thanks to Jay Magee at ConnectWise. You can learn more about ConnectWise by visiting connectwise.com. And for more stories behind the deal, check out all of our episodes from season one wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe to Behind the Deal for new episodes in season two. If you like this episode, be sure to listen to our new miniseries Beyond the Deal with bonus content that we didn't have time to share with you here from me and Jay Magee. Dropping on this feed soon, I'm Mike Hoffmann. Thanks for listening.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Thoma Bravo's Behind the Deal is produced by Thoma Bravo in partnership with Pod People. Stay tuned for more stories behind the deal. I'm Orlando Bravo. Thanks for listening.
DISCLAIMER:
Certain statements about Thoma Bravo made by portfolio company executives are intended to illustrate Thoma Bravo's business relationship with such persons, rather than Thoma Bravo's capabilities or expertise with respect to investment advisory services. Portfolio company executives were not compensated in connection with their podcast participation, although they generally receive compensation and investment opportunities in connection with their portfolio company roles, and in certain cases, are also owners of portfolio company securities and/or investors in Thoma Bravo funds. Such compensation and investments subject podcast participants to potential conflicts of interest.
