This episode is brought to you by Avidbank. Avidbank is one of the most experienced search fund lenders in North America, having funded over 40 separate transactions since 2014, for a total of over $300M. They are deeply familiar with the search fund model, and understand the nuances of the fundraising process, dealing with sellers, communicating with your equity investors, LOI reviews, and everything else in between. Reach out to Anthony Rodriguez (arodriguez@avidbank.com) or Conor Tidgwell (ctidgwell@avidbank.com) to learn more.
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This episode is brought to you by Symphony. Symphony not only performs technical due diligence engagements for search funds, Private Equity firms, and strategic acquirers, but they also partner with those buyers on an ongoing basis on all things product (outsourced development, team augmentation, new product prototyping, UI refreshes, QA professionalization, and so on). Symphony is offering a full 15% off of any of their services for listeners of In the Trenches. Just go to the Contact form on their website and tell them that you’re a listener of the podcast to receive this discount!
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Though search funds have historically acquired companies within countless different industries, software has been among the most popular and sought-after industries among searchers for many years now. Because of this, I chose to conduct a survey of SaaS CEOs (who became owners/CEOs by way of the search fund model) for two reasons: (1) To better understand the complexion of the "typical" software acquisition within the search fund ecosystem; & (2) To see whether or not the the complexion of the "typical" software acquisition has changed over time.
As you will see from the data presented in today's episode, I feel safe in concluding that, yes, the profile of the typical SaaS acquisition has indeed changed over the past few years, in some cases quite materially. Today's episode will walk you through how and why I arrived at this conclusion.
*Special Note for today's episode*: Because this post is necessarily heavily on stats and graphs, I would strongly suggest viewing the blog post (as I can only verbally describe graphs so well!), which you can find at this link.