Just start with what you plan to do differently and what the approach to take will be when you take charge September 1st with your co-CEO. Yeah, I'm honored to be able to take the position and share that with my colleague and friend Devi Patel, and taking over from my colleague and friend Kurt Bjorklund and Tom Lister before him. This is just one in a series of multiple leadership transitions that the firm has undergone during the 40-year history that we've been in business. It's a very happy continuous transition. Kurt is remaining as executive chair in the business and so he's not going anywhere. And we're looking forward to continuing advancing the strategy. Dependent. I bring a bit more of a technology bent to us, but that doesn't mean we're going to change the strategy wholeheartedly to being only about tech. We actually think some of the most

exciting and interesting areas to continue to invest in are not just our very strong technology sector, our digital consumer sector, but also health care and services. We listed at the top some of the transactions that the firm has been involved in and that have taken place moves that forward. What kind of sectors, subsectors, specific corners of the technology world would you pay attention to? We think software will continue to be a really exciting area to invest in. It's our largest area that we have been investing in for the last several funds, both in our buyout flagship strategy as well as our minority Premier Growth Opportunities Fund strategy, which is more focused on minority, faster growth investing, and that's really driving mostly around the cloud transition. And increasingly AI, which is on the cloud side, is still a 30-year-plus transition that is still in mid-cycle. So there's a lot of cloud transition still to go that's driving quite a bit of growth inside that portfolio.

Air is becoming a more interesting driver in that segment too. We actually think we'll talk to some of the more interesting areas to invest around the AI transition or actually outside of software, more in the services portfolio where you're automating business processes and frankly, you're competing with businesses that might not have quite the same digital backbone that really every software company today has. And so then dictate for us, Brian, when you're looking to do a take private and when you talk about software, I'm looking at Squarespace, you're looking at taking that private at about I think a $6.9 billion valuation. What secret sauce do you want to inject? What sort of growth do you stimulate when you've taken a company private? Yeah, I can't speak about Squarespace. It hasn't closed yet as a public company. But more generally, when we have any software company that we're looking to

invest behind, there's usually a core great product capability there. We invest in product-forward product-led growth. We're typically investing behind the market leader, oftentimes the market creator in a segment of the technology ecosystem. But there's usually something that we can tune with them, collect in collaboration with those management teams to help improve the operation, whether it be pricing in packaging, the Salesforce organization, how actually they're doing their own product investing. But at the core, we're investing in product-led growth. And we, I should say philosophically, you know, we're a unique investor at large scale in that we're tending to back continued growth and expansion of growth rather than what most of private equity tends to do, which is help companies find their maximum EBIT margin. We'd like to help companies find their maximum efficient revenue growth rate, and that's typically higher than what they've been able to achieve on their own.

And you've got some product experts that come on as advisors, right? Carolyn Everson, we all know her from a time at Facebook that became better. But also she's with the likes of Coca-Cola, she's with Disney on boards. You've also got Simon Segars that we know of aam back in the UK that really speaks to a global nature that you have at permira. How are you looking at global opportunities? Is all about us investing what is it in Europe and Asia even. Yeah, the US is our largest and most important market that we invest in, just simply the scale of what that market, this market represents for us. Europe is our original market. It's a very significant market for us to invest in. I'd say it's a technology investor. We have a wonderful set of senior advisors around the world. Carolyn, you mentioned coming from Metta and really building the ad business.

there. Simon from aam, a fellow Brit, having run that business. But we have other people in product and technology around the world. Europe has been a very interesting market for our technology. We've been very positively surprised, actually, with not so much Europe as an end market, but actually Europe as an innovation hub, especially in our growth fund businesses like NextThink in Switzerland, Miracle in France, FlexBus in Germany. These are all businesses that are global leaders but headquartered in Europe. And so the talent, the entrepreneurial talent, as well as the engineering talent that we're able to find in those countries, I'd say it's been a really big positive upside over the last decade. Brian, you've been with the firm since 2008, and you're based in Menlo Park. And I think we hear about the role of private equity in a different context these days, maybe more of a strategic investor. You talked about the willingness to back.

Revenue growth. How have things changed or shifted since that? The early days of 2008? What technology companies might want from you relative to what you want from them? Yeah, I started in this industry in the mid-1990s, and at that time, private equity was really a financial investor and purely a financial investor. You tended to buy at single-digit profitability multiples, get a good management team in that set to do its kind of basic blocking and tackling. And typically, you would say that the business you'd invest in are ones that weren't very interesting to a strategic buyer. If you fast forward to today, the industry has really evolved into being a strategic investor. So, we are investing in and around themes and theses and points of view about where markets and industries are going. We very frequently are a higher payer than a strategic buyer might be because we see more value in both the operational and long-term strategic potential in a business.

And so, there are very few companies that can't be targeted by some form of private equity capital, whether it's early stage on the venture side, all the way through growth equity, and then large-scale buyouts.

Permira's Outlook on Tech Investing, M&A, IPO Landscape

Welcome to the Bloomberg Technology YouTube channel. Subscribe for original series and mini-docs on game-changing technologies, profiles on innovators, live conversations with experts, and breaking technology news & analysis from Bloomberg TV.