Private Equity Funcast

Jim and Devin spend an hour talking with Jay Bartlett and Scott Orleck from Parthenon-EY Ernst & Young LLP.  We've worked extensively with Jay and Scott on buy-side due-diligence projects over a number of years.  They share their experiences tackling questions workig with us around market sizing, growth rates, cyclicality, and the competitive landscape.  All of which serves to answer the fundamental questions: Is a particular industry a good industry in which to invest?  And is the target company the right company to buy?  Jay and Scott reveal the three main reasons why deals go bad.

The second episode of our trifecta covering the raising of ParkerGale's first fund.   This episode starts off where we left our intrepid heroes just after their first close in September, 2015.  Come have a listen as we talk about our decision to hire a placement agent and our marathon of trips in late winter/early spring in pursuit of capital.

Devin and ParkerGale Limited Partner John McCarthy continue their book club series with an investing classic, "The Most Important Thing" by Howard Marks, the legendary cofounder and Chairman of Oaktree Capital Management. Turns out that Marks most important thing is actual nineteen things -- come have a listen as Devin and John focus on three of them.

Devin and ParkerGale Limited Partner John McCarthy kick off their book club series with an unusual choice, "Rumsfeld's Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life" by Donald Rumsfeld. Some surprising advice in this book when we apply Rumsfeld's observations about leadership, business, and life to investing.

Devin and Jim spend an hour talking about the strategy and tactics of raising ParkerGale's first fund. This episode covers the pre-launch up to the fund's first close.

Jim and Alan talk about a scary subject on our Halloween episode -- Distributed Denial of Service attacks.  Two weeks ago the internet experienced an unprecedented DDOS attack against a popular DNS hosting service -- Dyn -- that blocked access to a huge number of popular sites -- eBay and PayPal included.  What does this mean for the small business owner -- should you avoid the Cloud altogether?  Come have a listen and find out.

We had a great conversation with Kevin Hurley, a recent graduate from Fullstack Academy. Kevin is a high school math teacher who caught the coding bug and decided to switch careers. He's exactly the kind of self-motivated technologist that will thrive our the tech economy. So, if you are thinking about jumping into the tech space, or you're a CTO looking to hire talent from "outside the box" -- then come have a listen. One more thing ... if Chevy Chase is reading this description, we assure him that in this episode there will be NO math.

Jim talks about all things social media with Cappy Popp and John Maver from Thought Labs -- a leading Digital Marketing Strategy company. We've worked with Cappy and John on a number of projects in our portfolio, and they know what it takes to develop a social media strategy. This is the first part of an ongoing series on social media marketing. In this first part we cover the basics of when/why/how you should consider a social media campaign for your company.

Alan and Jim spend a fun hour talking with Zeke Nierenberg, Academic Director/Chicago from Fullstack Academy. Fullstack teaches qualified non-programmers to code using an immersive 13-week program. Our bias going into this conversation was Alan's belief that you can't learn to code in 13 weeks. Zeke managed to school us both with Fullstack's point of view. Come have a listen and and decide for yourself.

Alan and Jim spend an hour talking with Ben Johnson, author of BoldDB and and freelance Go developer.  The Go language is a relatively new open source programming language (and platform) started by Google and maintained by a community of developers.  The authors promote "Go" as being easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software.   Go is somewhat unique in that it compiles into a native operating system executable that can be easily distributed across platforms (Windows, Linux, Mac OS).  Is "Go" the right choice for smaller companies?  Have a listen and find out.