Every day, I wake up feeling fortunate to be part of this industry and this team.
The chance to be part of something like Advent Tech is what brought me back to investing after a couple of years outside the industry. I feel super-lucky to be around so many different kinds of technology companies and so many great business leaders. We’re encountering new innovation every day, and being able to help these companies reach their full potential is incredibly rewarding. It’s part of what first drew me to private equity: being close to the important strategic decisions that go on at companies, seeing this at scale, and being able to help them think through their challenges.
We may look slightly different, but we’re Advent through and through.
With Advent Tech, we’ve embarked on a mission to broaden our tech efforts and build up our team. In a sense, we’re aiming to be an entrepreneurial shop inside of Advent, and we’re channeling the innovativeness of our industry to a degree. But ultimately, we’re building on the heritage of Advent, and there’s great alignment and consistency with the rest of the firm. Most importantly, our culture, our focus on growth, and the way we work with management teams is exactly the same.
Working for a tech company provided some valuable lessons.
I thought about going to business school, but ultimately felt I’d rather take the leap and go into an operating role. I joined Tesla, and my years there gave me a strong perspective on what it’s like to execute on strategic initiatives inside a large organization. It also taught me that many of the most successful entrepreneurs share a degree of boldness and charisma, plusa scrappiness and a willingness to change the status quo. These are important and powerful forces to drive innovation at scale.