Private Equity FunCast

Jimmy sits down with Dean Brown, CEO of Ipro Tech. Dean discusses his upbringing in a military family, his education in Industrial Psychology, the serendipity of a career, his love of products and product strategy, his experience founding, scaling, and ultimately selling his startup, why culture is so important to him in business, and much more.

In part 3 of a 3 part series on Product Strategy, Jim and Cici continue the discussion of how product strategy ties into value creation, and how specifically as a PE firm, we monitor our portfolio companies' product strategy through taking a detailed look at their product roadmaps. We discuss how we conduct Product Strategy Reviews – the objectives, who's in the room, and what we actually cover. We talk about why we're focused on outcome-driven product roadmaps, how we work with our portfolio companies to prioritize what actually gets built and why that's so critical when we're allocating scarce resources to create value.

In part 2 of a 3 part series on Product Strategy, Jim is joined by Cici to discuss the private equity investor's perspective on how and why products get built. Living in a world of limited resources, we discuss the framework that we use to help shape the discussions with our portfolio companies about prioritizing their products and features. We talk about market segments versus markets, the Ansoff matrix and Geoffrey Moore's famous "Bowling Alley" strategy.

In part 1 of a 3 part series on Product Strategy, Jim is joined by Cici to discuss the three levers of value creation - risk mitigation, revenue growth, and cost reduction, and how we think about the three in the portfolio. Jimmy joins as well to add the People dimension.

On this episode, Keith Hadley from the Table Group joins Paul Stansik to chat about how we build aligned C-suite teams and healthy portfolio companies. We cover what healthy organizations do differently, why most team offsites are not time well spent, and how to tell if you're on (or leading) a dysfunctional team.

Devin and Jim kick off the new year with our annual predictions episode. Come have a listen as we opine on what 2020 has in store for Private Equity.

Jimmy Holloran talks with Stacey Kacek, OnePlus Systems CEO. They discuss her early career as an engineer at Motorola, her transition into leadership, and her perspective on being a CEO. Along the way, they cover key influences in her life, lessons learned, and as well as advice for aspiring CEOs.

Jim recently got massively over-billed by Hertz, prompting a discussion about what happens to customers when process automation goes off the rails. Ryan Milligan jumps in with a Zappos story that will warm your heart.

As part of our continuing People Operations series, ParkerGale Principals Jimmy and Paul dive into the 9box, a talent management framework commonly used to assess an organization's breadth and depth of talent. Jimmy and Paul cover why this matters, how to effectively review an organization's entire talent base, and why it pays for investors to be involved in the process.

Devin sits down with Cici to discuss some easy but very important things you should be doing to extract deeper customer and market insight into your software products.