Thoma Bravo Partner Adam Solomon walks listeners through the challenges of landing a transatlantic deal with Raptor Technologies, a cutting-edge school safety software company, at a time when schools were shut down all over the world due to COVID. Adam is joined by Raptor CEO Gray Hall, and together they discuss the importance of alignment on company culture, organic vs. inorganic growth, and the power of supercharging results with a mission-driven approach.
AIR DATE:
February 15, 2024
RUN TIME:
36:40
Transcript
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 Thoma Bravo partner Adam Solomon speaking with Gray Hall, CEO of Raptor Technologies. Even before we decided to do this deal, we were great admirers of Raptor Technologies mission to design systems K through 12 schools can use to keep their students safe. Raptor had already been working towards this goal for many years, and our deal with them also came with an acquisition of another company, CPOMS. The integration of the two was a huge step forward in enabling Raptor to provide schools a broader solution to address safety concerns as well as be proactive in their approach to student well-being. Every deal we do here at Thoma Bravo is exciting, but it's always specially rewarding to know that a partnership we created is affecting positive change in people's lives. We were and still are great admirers of their values, their culture and the management team that allowed these shared ideals to thrive.
At Thoma Bravo, we always say we bet on management, and this deal was no exception. As a case study, the Raptor deal involved partnering with a company using ingenious proprietary technology and providing them with the tools they need to reach even higher goals. It also aligned with one of our core values of being a positive force for change, as everything Raptor had done had done before and since the deal has been with one goal in mind, keeping students safe while they're at school. So today, you'll hear everything that went on behind the deal from Adam Solomon, the deal lead and partner at Thoma Bravo, followed by his conversation with Raptor CEO Gray Hall.
ADAM SOLOMON:
Hi. I'm Adam Solomon, and I'm a partner at Thoma Bravo as well as the co-head of our Explore fund. Today on Behind the Deal, we'll be going inside Thoma Bravo's partnership with Raptor Technologies. The story of our investment in Raptor is really about leveraging Thoma Bravo's existing knowledge in the K12 education market to identify a compelling investment idea, I should say a really compelling investment idea, and then being aggressive and creative and direct in making that idea into a reality. So this deal actually brought together two companies, Raptor and CPOMS. Raptor is the market leading provider of student safety software at K12 schools in the U.S. They've got a market leading products that encompasses visitor management, emergency management, and these are really important tools for a district to make sure that they're keeping their students safe, that they're making sure that people who aren't supposed to be on campus aren't on campus. If there is an emergency, that they are able to bond and reunify kids with their parents or caregivers, and so this is really absolutely mission critical software for school district, and Raptor is the clear market leader in the student safety market in the U.S.
CPOMS is a UK based company, actually in Skipton, which is in North Yorkshire of all places, and they are the market leading provider of what they call in the UK safeguarding software. So think of this as the system of record for everything that happens to a student outside of the classroom. So behavioral issues, suspected neglect and abuse, bullying, et cetera, all of that is captured in the CPOMS safeguarding system and then is used to drive interventions and to make sure that-that students are being taken care of outside of the classroom. And similar to Raptor, CPOMS is the very clear market leader in the UK in that product category. The whole idea behind bringing the two companies together is to take the terrific product that CPOMS has and bring it to the U.S., and in the U.S. it actually has a bit of a different application which we call behavioral threat assessment. So we basically have the same guts of the product, but in the U.S. it's designed to-to really make sure that you're intervening with students who are potentially going to commit self-harm, suicide, school shootings, God forbid, and having this system enables schools to intervene before there's actually an issue.
So the story of how this transaction came together actually briefly predates my joining Thoma Bravo. I had 2 months of garden leave before I started at Thoma Bravo, which I had always been looking forward to as a chance to travel the world and have some stress-free fun and all that. It just so happens that my garden leaves occurred during the middle of COVID when I was living in San Francisco and when my wife was 3 months pregnant with our first kid, so I was sitting at home, you know, re-watching the last dance over and over again and really nothing to do and so I started making up kind of a list of-of folks I was going to call as soon as I joined Thoma Bravo to start looking for a new investment ideas. So I was able to hit the ground running and one of those calls I made in the first couple weeks of joining Thoma Bravo was to an investment banker who said, "We've got this company, CPOMS. It's over in the UK. It's a clear market leader. Unbelievable revenue quality. Great team that we think is a great fit for you guys. The issue is a lot of the growth for the very long term for this business is going to have to be in the U.S."
When I heard that, I knew having spent some time in K12 that distribution is king in K12 software. Selling to schools as a new vendor, selling to districts in the U.S. as a new vendor is very hard, very hard to break in, and so the key a little bit to unlocking this was who is the right partner for CPOMS to buy them and bring their product into the U.S.? And immediately Raptor jumped off the page. I had actually spent time with them, gee, to this point five or six years ago, and we actually as a firm knew Raptor quite well 'cause our flagship fund owned a company called Frontline Education that's a leader in the K12 market for HR and administrative software, and they had looked at Raptor and really liked what they saw. Raptor was owned by another firm called JMI. JMI is still our very close partners, and this is a little bit it's better to be lucky than good because the timing was perfect, where JMI and Raptor have been thinking about building or buying this kind of functionality, this behavioral threat assessment functionality, and when we were talking about potentially buying CPOMS, there was an immediate light bulb around the room saying, "Yeah. This is a super, super interesting idea."
The other thing I'll say about JMI is-is that from the very beginning through today have been just terrific partners and that's an important part of how this deal came together is we think about the world the same way. We saw the same opportunity. We saw the same quality in both Raptor and CPOMS. We saw the same opportunity to bring the companies together and what that could do in the U.S. market, and importantly we thought about the deal the same way, too, where we said, "This is such a compelling, unique opportunity. Let's not try to get too cute. Let's not try to squeeze the last cent out of each other. Let's just make this thing happen." And so that's exactly what we endeavor to do. We shook hands on pursuing this jointly, and it was at that point that I met Gray, who is the CEO of Raptor, and Gray was so instrumental in pulling this deal together. His leadership style I would say is he's not flashy. He's not a raw sales-y guy.
I actually remember on our first Zoom call with him, I asked a question and it was silent for a couple of seconds. I'm like, "Geez, is my internet?" Like, "What's happening here?" But no. Gray was just digesting, thinking, and then when he gave an answer, it was perfect. Just direct, thoughtful, collaborative, and that is how Gray is all the time. He is just a, an absolute pleasure to work with because of that and really commands a lot of respect and-and trust from his board, from his team, from counterparts, because he just is so thoughtful, so direct and he combines that all with a real urgency and bias for action that just fits so well with the way that we do business.
So we proceeded through diligence, which went really terrific. We knew we were going to like the business based on our experience through Frontline, but we were just even more pleased with what we heard. The customer feedback was exceptional. The opportunity to sell behavioral threat assessment in the U.S. outstripped our expectations coming in, a lot of that due to just regulatory tailwinds that are still in their early innings but we think are-are very much coming for this market where states increasingly are requiring schools to do something about this just given the=the epidemic of violence in American schools, and we were very impressed with the CPOMS management team as well, and CPOMS is and was run by a guy named John wild, who is the son of the founder, and is a terrific person. He actually was so excited about the combination with Raptor that he managed to convince the other shareholders to take our offer despite us not being the high bid on value, and that's how these two companies came together.
And it all sounds reasonably simple, but the fact of the matter is this was a cross-border merger with two PE firms, namely JMI and us, all in the depths of COVID, and the thing that really unlocked this deal is Gray's leadership. He was direct with CPOMS in terms of why we wanted to buy them. He was compelling in terms of what the vision was for their products, and the CPOMS management team continues to run our UK business today and have done just an absolutely terrific job. This deal is such a classic Thoma Bravo case study in-in a number of ways. It's in a market that we know well. We were able to leverage our existing knowledge to identify and have high conviction in a really special company, in a really special market. It involved putting together two companies, so a high degree of difficulty but with that conviction and speed with which we were able to move, we were able to do it seamlessly, and then it involved backing a very capable strong leader in Gray to lead the combined company. The company has performed just so well in the last two years. It's so gratifying to-to see that as we deliver more and more value to our customers.
We've done another M&A transaction, a company called SchoolPass. There's much more to do there as we continue to build out our product suite and really try to be the full end-to-end provider of everything that touches student safety and well-being for schools in the U.S. and globally. This was an interesting time to be making an investment in a K12 software business because schools were shut down. This software is really only used when schools are in session, and what was striking is despite the fact that schools were shut down, no customers left. That just goes to show how mission critical this software is. As I was thinking about that, and at this time my wife was pregnant with our first kid, I was thinking about how is that possible that this is so crucial, and I thought about it from the point of view of-of parents. I thought about from the point of view of a superintendent who's a decision maker, and this is just the number one thing that a school has to do is to keep their students safe, and this does that very effectively, and then when-when you think about that way, it makes total sense that even when schools are shut down they would remain a customer of Raptor, 'cause schools are going to come back, and when they come back they absolutely need this software.
When we talked about this deal in investment committee, one thing that was striking is that the partners who-who had kids said, "Yeah, we use something like this," or, "Yeah, I get why this is so important." It's just one of those things where when you're a parent and you're worried about your kid's safety in school, it's very comforting to know that there's something like Raptor that really just works, and again, the deal stands up on the merits of the industrial logic and how compelling the market growth is and how high quality both businesses are, but the fact that it has such a compelling mission makes it extra special and makes it my favorite topic to talk about. And now here's my conversation with Gray Hall, CEO of Raptor Technologies. Hey, Gray. Thanks for joining us today. Happy Friday. Hope you got your morning run in, as per usual.
GRAY HALL:
I did. Thanks for asking.
ADAM SOLOMON:
So, great to have you. Great to see you. Would love it if you could give us a short elevator pitch on Raptor and its mission.
GRAY HALL:
Raptor is the leader in school safety software for the K through 12 education market. 60,000 schools in the U.S. and United Kingdom combined use Raptor software to automate key school safety business processes. Things like managing who's allowed to enter a school campus. Managing emergency response, emergency preparation, student dismissal collecting student safeguarding data, and many other safety operations workflows. We do all this for schools ranging the entire spectrum from the very largest public school districts to individual schools and private schools. I joined Raptor a little over three years ago. Raptor's now my third business to run as CEO. The first two, most recently a cybersecurity company called Alert Logic where I was CEO for nine years, and before that I was co-founder and CEO for 8 years of a company called Vera Center. Vera Center was one of the small number of companies that were the first generation of managed hosting providers back in the day.
Before Vera Center, I started my career with IBM. I left IBM after seven years because I thought I wanted to be a venture capitalist. I joined a small VC firm and wound up riding the Vera Center business plan, recruiting the founding team, getting the company funded and launched, and away we went. That adventure really got me hooked on the challenge of building and growing early stage and growth stage tech companies. I've been doing that ever since.
ADAM SOLOMON:
Great. And it's fascinating just because you've done so many things over a long and very successful career as a founder at a big company, running companies in a bunch of different end markets. Curious, what made you decide Raptor was the right fit? What made you decide school safety was a market that you wanted to devote a good chunk of your career to?
GRAY HALL:
I made the decision to join Raptor in 2020, and at that point in time the school safety market had three characteristics that were really important to me. One was the mission, and I can't imagine a more noble mission than keeping schools safe and protecting school children, and being now in the back half of my career, the mission's more important to me now than it's ever been. The second, even in 2020 school safety concerns were very prominent, but my view at the time was that those concerns would continue to grow for many years and that those responsible for school safety would continue to need more and more help from technology, and specifically from software.
And the third thing was when I looked at the vendor landscape, in other words companies that were trying to help schools achieve and solve the school safety problem, that landscape was incredibly fragmented, and one thing I had learned from my previous two companies was that when organizations are faced with a really broad challenge like school safety is, they don't want to be put in a position of having to stitch together narrow solutions that only solve a slice of the problem, that what they're really looking for is for vendors to step up and provide a broader solution, a platform, an integrated product suite, something that gives them a better foundation to tackle this broader problem, and I really thought that was what Raptor's opportunity was in this fragmented landscape
ADAM SOLOMON:
And curious about Raptor. You mentioned that it was the leading platform in-in a fragmented landscape. What do you think enabled them to be that? How do you think they got there? What-what were they doing that other folks at that time weren't?
GRAY HALL:
Well, visitor management was the product category within the broader school safety landscape that was most mature, and Raptor was the number one provider in visitor management. In my view, that position was a great vantage point to start to take on a broader piece of the overall school safety challenge, and-and to build a company that could change the conversation from being about narrow product categories into being about school safety as a broad solution set. Just to give you a view into I'm thinking about that, the... I think if we kind of anchor on the point that customers want a vendor who's going to step up to approaching the school safety challenge from a broader perspective, you can get there both organically and by business combination, and-and the focus is on adding value to customers in the way that they want it.
ADAM SOLOMON:
So one aspect that's great I think is super interesting that you mentioned is Raptor really started as a single product company, really was visitor management for a very long time, and the opportunity that you saw and certainly that-that we saw a little bit later on was there's a, there's an opportunity to make this a broader platform that really is student safety, and really student safety and well-being, and you've been very successful in building that out both organically and inorganically, so just love a little bit of your perspective on the history of that and how you took something that was so focused on-on one part, a very important part of the student safety product suite, and made it broader, better both organically and inorganically.
GRAY HALL:
Adam, as you said, our growth over the past few years has been both organic and inorganic, and as we've broadened our product suite from a single product to now six product lines in the U.S. and three product lines in the UK, there have been great examples of those organic product additions and inorganic additions. Emergency management, Raptor emergency management was the first organic product to be added to Raptor visitor management and has solved an important, or addressed an important need in the school safety market for capabilities like emergency preparation, emergency response, emergency recovery, and an inorganic example is Raptor's acquisition of CPOMS, which at the time we acquired CPOMS was the market leader in safeguarding in the United Kingdom, and in many ways was a mirror image in the UK of what Raptor visitor management was in the U.S., and we were excited about that in its own right, but we were also excited about the opportunity to take what CPOMS had done in the UK and introduce that product into the U.S. market to address a new need that our customers were telling us they wanted help with from software.
ADAM SOLOMON:
A big thing that is in this market is increased regulatory tailwinds, policies, mandates, whether that's at state level or otherwise, that we feel are a big driver of adoption and growth. Can you maybe say a little bit more about how those policies and mandates are evolving, have evolved, and how Raptor can help districts address that and fit into that?
GRAY HALL:
In-in both the U.S. and the UK, legislative mandates and rulemaking from state governments and federal governments do impact customer demand and what school districts are asking us to do. In the U.S. it tends to be state specific, and two of the biggest trends we've seen over the past few years have been states mandating that school districts implement things like panic alert systems and form things like threat assessment teams in order to try to proactively get out in front of some of the risks to school safety. Many years ago the UK government started to require schools to collect safeguarding data on students to get out in front of mental health concerns and other concerns about student well-being, and that trend in the UK has now started to appear also in the U.S.
ADAM SOLOMON:
And we've talked a lot about how important Raptor's software is to schools, how big of a difference it can make. Could you give us some touch and feel for what does that really mean in terms of the impact that Raptor's having on its customers?
GRAY HALL:
I think the best way to look at the impact we're having on customers is to look at the aggregate data. For example, in the last 12 months across 60,000 schools in-in the U.S. and the UK, we have customers using, for example, Raptor to manage the sign in and sign out process for visitors, volunteers, contractors and other individuals trying to enter school campuses. So in the last 12 months, 64 million signs have been managed through Raptor systems. That represents about 20 million unique individuals. And 20,000 times in the last 12 months, we've identified individuals that should not be allowed to enter campus, and of course we make schools aware of that and they take action to keep those individuals off campus. Another example is our student safeguarding workflow system where over the last 12 months 40 million safeguarding concerns have been logged in that system.
There are many other examples. Almost 50,000 emergency drills have been run using the Raptor drill management. The number of emergencies ranging through various levels of severity that have been initiated through Raptor alert is about 30,000 over the past 12 months. You know, we've managed millions of student dismissals in the past year, and hundreds of large-scale reunification events through our reunification system. So those types of use cases are very important to school safety practitioners and the people that are ultimately responsible for keeping schools safe, our goal is to make their jobs more efficient, more effective, and those types of systems go a long way in doing that, and we look forward to adding more and more in the coming years.
ADAM SOLOMON:
That's great. Every time I hear those numbers, it just never ceases to amaze. We are in so many districts in the U.S., in so many schools in the UK, touching the lives of so many students. Just the scale of that never ceases to amaze. As you said, we're I think, feel like we're just at the beginning as well.
GRAY HALL:
Agree. It's a journey, and being such a broad problem domain and the surface area of risk around school safety continuing to grow, we want to be more helpful and we want to do everything we can to help the people that are on the front lines trying to protect our school children and our schools.
ADAM SOLOMON:
Maybe to pivot a little bit, th-this is actually a question I'm super curious to get the answer to 'cause, Gray, you and I have never really talked about this. I know how this deal came together from my perspective. How did it come together from your perspective?
GRAY HALL:
Well, as you know, we first got to know each other when we were looking at CPOMS as a as an acquisition target and as part of this inorganic expansion of our product suite that we discussed, and we were very excited about CPOMS at the time. My understanding is you had developed independently an interest in CPOMS, and so the prospect of Thoma Bravo investing in the combined companies was very exciting to me. One of the things that I value in a, in a private equity partner and what I think Raptor needs in a private equity partner, three things actually. Focus on enterprise software and specifically the software as a service business model, deep understanding of best practices for SaaS companies, and deep expertise in strategic transactions like the kind of transaction that we were hoping to put together with CPOMS. Thoma Bravo's reputation precedes itself on all three of those areas. I think Thoma Bravo's perceived as the best in the business in all three of those ways and my experience over the past two years has certainly reinforced that, and you really added a lot of value in the way we approached the CPOMS transaction and putting that deal together in the right way, and you and the rest of the team have been terrific partners in implementing the integration and pulling the two companies together in a way that's best for customers and best for building a great company.
ADAM SOLOMON:
Well, that's very kind of you to say, and-and I'll say very much likewise. There's lots of different types of leaders, lots of different types of CEOs, and Gray, I think your style and your approach to leadership and your demeanor as-as a CEO is just such a terrific fit with the way that we do business, with what we look for, and honest with me personally. I think you're my kind of CEO, my kind of leader. No BS, no fluff, no kind of slick salesmanship. It's all about being transparent with each other, being thoughtful, being open-minded, being collaborative, and then we make a decision in a data driven way, in a way that that takes into account all the various factors that the day that can express in terms of cultural and personal and otherwise, and then when-when we make a decision jointly having a real bias for action, a real urgency, and it's that style of leadership that you have I think is-is so effective. It happens to be a terrific fit with the way we do business as well, but it is so effective at earning trust and respect from everyone you interact with. Pulling off a transaction like this is not for the faint of heart and there's no way we would have been as excited about this transaction as we were were we not backing you.
GRAY HALL:
Thank you. That's very kind of you to say that. It means a lot and it's been just truly a pleasure working with you and the team.
ADAM SOLOMON:
I remember when-when we first talked about this deal, I talked to JMI, then I talked to you a little bit, and we were just sketching out what this could look like at a high level. How early in that process that it click that, hey, this thing could work?
GRAY HALL:
My recollection is it was pretty much immediate. You were very kind to come down to Texas and spend time with me and the rest of the Raptor team, and I thought it clicked from the beginning and, you know, again, thank you for being interested in the combined business and embracing our vision for what we wanted to do with CPOMS.
ADAM SOLOMON:
So that was how we got the deal done in those very challenging circumstances. That might be the easy part, relatively speaking. The harder part is how do you integrate these businesses again across the Atlantic, during COVID, and that's integrating cultures, products, teams, et cetera. How did you manage to pull that off?
GRAY HALL:
We're a little more than two years post transaction now, so the integration's done, and all three aspects of the integration have gone well. So people, process and technology. The people part was the fastest and what we did there was for every functional area in the business to have one global team with one global leader, in other words not replicate management structures in both countries on both continents, and the great cultural fit that existed between Raptor and CPOMS even before the transaction really contributed to that people integration going faster. Process integration was all about retaining the best practices from both businesses and the functional teams in each country learning from each other, and once we had the global construct in place, that was easier and faster and that's gone well, too.
The part that took a little longer was the technology integration. Raptor and CPOMS are both SaaS providers and the customers of both companies want, as we've discussed, more breadth in the solution that's brought to help them take on the school safety challenges, and the way they want that delivered is integrated user experience, data integration, integrated workflows, a truly integrated suite, so to do that we had to get both companies on a common technology fabric so that all those customer benefits could be realized and so that we'd be positioned to innovate faster for customers in both countries, and we're happy to say now two years later all that technology's in place and we're now positioned better for continuing to broaden the suite in both the U.S. and the UK.
ADAM SOLOMON:
I love it.
GRAY HALL:
So Adam, what was it like from your perspective, integrating Raptor and CPOMS?
ADAM SOLOMON:
Great question. I think what we were most focused on was how can we get this product to the U.S. market as quick as possible, and that was something where we, again, your bias for action I think lines up really well with our bias for action, where before the deal was even closed, or even signed frankly, we were drafting up operational plans for how can we kind of get the CPOMS product ready to be the behavioral threat assessment product, Student Safe, that we have today and how can we put more resources into it to get it to market just as quickly as possible? And our kind of early alignment and the urgency that we had there was really terrific and really important in getting that product out in market ahead of schedule and to the point where now it's a very fast-growing product for us. We're also of course very focused on the personnel, and I think we were honestly a little nervous, right, because there's this very important part of our business now that's in Skipton, North Yorkshire with a team that we've never met before because it was COVID, that you've never met before because it was COVID, and gee, what happens if they decide to leave? What happens if they're not trustworthy or something like that?
And to the point that you made, we did our best to up front reduce that risk and spend some real time with them virtually and all that and make sure that they were aligned, but I think that where there was some nervousness around, gee, we haven't actually met them in person because we weren't able to, and I think the way that, again, you and the team handled that and made sure that John Wild, who's the son of the founder of that business and still runs that business for us today, that John and his management team, you know, felt included and part of our culture really de-risked that element for us and they're all still there today and doing great. And look, obviously Raptor is such a phenomenal business in terms of just market leading product, super happy customers, delivering real, crucial value to their customers, great financial profile, great leadership team, more M&A to do, which we'll of course as always be thoughtful about. But a big part of the business is and what makes it so special is the mission, and we mention that a couple of times, but I'm curious for how that mission really filters down to the day-to-day operations of the business, to the culture of the business. Why is that mission so important to the business itself?
GRAY HALL:
The Raptor mission is top in mind for everybody at raptor every day. Many people join Raptor because of the mission. I think employees stay at Raptor because of the mission, and the mission drives our strategy and it drives our behavior. The three big contributors to having an excellent culture and having the kind of commitment to excellence that we want at Raptor and what's worked for me in the past is to have a strategy that's clearly understood by everybody and that's tied to a mission that everybody's bought into, and then to bring the kind of people into the business that are going to share a common set of values, and it starts by hiring leaders that are committed to developing other leaders and to have the humility to listen to customers and build a-a customer first culture, and then to get everybody aligned behind an operating plan and focused on executing the strategy, and when you have a mission at the core of all that, it really winds up defining your culture as a company, and I think we refer to our team as the Raptor Pack. I think if you were to talk to people in the Raptor Pack, one of the first things you would hear is how much they're bought into our mission.
ADAM SOLOMON:
I love that. I always say that as a private equity investor you don't get to be involved with that many companies over the course of your career, arguably and usually even fewer for a CEO in terms of the number of companies you're involved with over the course of a career, and to have this level of mission and this level of importance in terms of what the company's doing, it just makes it all a little bit more fun, honestly.
GRAY HALL:
It does. No doubt about it.
ADAM SOLOMON:
And so we've been with you guys for a little more than two years. Looking back on it, we've accomplished a ton, but certainly it's our view that we're just scratching the surface. We got a lot more to go do in the future. What makes you most excited about Raptor and its future?
GRAY HALL:
I'm excited about where we stand now, and if I think back to the reasons I joined Raptor and the reasons I got excited about the opportunity in the school safety market, I'm proud and excited that we've managed to expand the product suite significantly over the past few years. But as we've discussed, we're still early in this journey and I still believe as I did three years ago that school safety concerns will continue to grow and that the needs of school safety practitioners for more help from technology and software will continue to grow.
So this challenge and opportunity of both organically and inorganically broadening and deepening the Raptor product suite is still in front of us, and that's both exciting and challenging, and as you said, Adam, we've been together now for a little more than two years, and I couldn't ask for a better partner as we navigate through, how do we grow organically and inorganically? How do we find business combinations that can allow Raptor to deliver more value to customers and to continue to keep pace with and hopefully get out in front of the growing concerns about school safety?
ADAM SOLOMON:
I echo everything you said. I couldn't ask for a better partner as a CEO. I couldn't ask for a better podcast partner, either, so thank you for doing this.
GRAY HALL:
Thank you for having me.
ADAM SOLOMON:
Thanks to Gray for talking with us today. To learn more about Raptor and see the work they're doing, visit raptortech.com. For more stories behind the deal, check out all of our episodes wherever you get your podcasts, and be sure to subscribe to Behind the Deal to hear new episodes as soon as they drop. If you liked this episode, check out our mini-series Beyond the Deal for more of my conversation with Gray that you didn't get to hear today. Catch it on YouTube and in this feed next week. From all of us at Thoma Bravo, I'm Adam Solomon.
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 compensation, 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.
