#94 - Gabriel Caillaux: Growth Equity in a Tech-Driven Market

23:48So even though we've grown, ironically, we've kind of grown with our market set. We haven't grown beyond the normal type of deals Jay's always done. We haven't had to go look for other areas of growth. We've just kind of been defending our terrain. And you look at how we've grown into new products, whether it's in our credit product where we have investment excellence, whether it's what we're doing now in real assets and sustainable infrastructure, we have premium performance. And there's a real focus on keeping the investment integrity of each of those platforms and measuring growth to make certain that we don't ever get in the way of premium performance.

24:30What are the sectors that you tend to focus on and why? I should have mentioned this probably when we spoke about the evolution of private equity, because one of the other evolutions that's happened is clearly the days of the generalists are gone, right? And I think more and more, we're driving alpha in a way through company picking, right? And to drive your company picking, that means you need to be as smart as possible and as read in as possible on the themes and the type of industries you're going after. And that's exactly how we've organized our firm now for decades, which is very thematically based.

25:02We have a consumer technology and enterprise technology practice, a healthcare practice, consumer practice or consumer goods, a life science practice, and a financial services practice. And everything we do is tied together by technology, right? So every company we back is using technology as a competitive differentiator. But within those sectors, our teams are deeply focused on identifying themes that we think carry growth for a long period of time. And those themes can be, I would tell you, if I had to flash a slide right now with all of the themes, it would fill up the screen because we're constantly churning through themes to identify the next one.

25:38Most of the time, they're dead ends, right? You think of a theme these days, there's a lot of talk around crypto. Well, are you going to find the right company, the right growth rates, the right business models? Are they going to be adequate for our brand and so on? So we churn through them. That helps us identify businesses, but it helps us get really, really smart on the underlying drivers of an industry. And by the way, these themes, once you get to them, they become global themes. It's fascinating when you look at some of the real power rallies where we've delivered consistent outperformance.

26:05These are themes that can go on for 10 years and that can globalize themselves with some regionalization. So part of the thematic genius is then you localize it with our local teams. And that's been a really powerful tool. And I'll give the example of digital payments. That is a theme that we've been investing behind now for 15 years. The first digital payment deal was a deal done in Europe, where the thesis was very simple. It was commerce was moving online. Banks didn't know how to process online payments because credit cards weren't present. There was a fraud risk. So a new brand of processors was emerging and we backed two of them.

26:42One was called Global Collect, then one was called Audien. Audien became a star of the European technology public markets and a fantastic deal for us. Today, that theme has evolved 15 times over. Now it's about integrated payments into software. And so if you look through our portfolio, you will see a number of deals where they are specifically attacking certain verticals. and they're providing software with a payment stack integrated into it and effectively disrupting the type of companies we invested in 15 years ago. That's the depth of the theme that we go through. And we're seeing activity now almost across all of our themes.

27:21I would tell you that the healthcare sector in the US is ripe for disruption through technology. We all know how much is spent in those markets. We all know the inefficiencies there. In some of the emerging markets, it's just access to primary care. So we're seeing a lot happening there. We're still seeing a lot of deal flow through very simple digitization of the small and medium business, right? So software tools around that, we're seeing a lot in financial services as banks get regulated and some of the financial services are fleeing banks into new service providers. So I would tell you, there are a thousand themes we're chasing and they're all generating fantastic deal flow.

27:59Why does GA emphasize minority deals and partnership over control? You touched on this a little bit earlier. And how do you think about alignment and transparency, especially in tough situations regarding human capital? I would tell you, first of all, we don't really define ourselves as minority-only investors, right? I think that the philosophy we've had is a company first. So first of all, let's identify the best company and the best entrepreneur wherever we can find them. And once we find that great entrepreneur, let's try to find the deal that can get done with that company and that entrepreneur or that CEO.

28:35So we don't want to define ourselves either as minority or majority. We want to become investors in the best businesses. That's the starting point to the way we think about it. So if a minority is available, then we'll take that. If we can get a majority, we'll also take that. The flip side of that also is, you know, most of the time when you're doing a minority deal, it's not about buying a company from someone. What we're really doing is partnering with someone. And that is a very different dynamic in the negotiation and the tactics, right? So you will not see us do the safe types of deals as the big buyout firms who are buying control because there, the relationship they have with the entrepreneur, the CEO, or the existing shareholder is, we're buying your business.

29:14What's the price? And the next day, I will do what I want. The discussion we have with entrepreneurs is completely different. It's a real deep partnership discussion on, okay, what are your plans? What are your ambitions for your company? Do they match what we think is possible for the business? How do we think we can help that? Is that something you'd be open to? And therefore, how do we strike that partnership? It's a very different diligence process, very different dealmaking process, very different everything process, but one that we've gotten really, really good at. I would tell you that one of the biggest upsides of that is our opportunity set is massively bigger because of this flexibility.

29:53So few entrepreneurs are at the point of saying, oh, yes, I'm selling my whole business. And when they're doing that, usually you should be kind of suspicious. Most of the entrepreneurs really buy into the idea of if I sell a piece and keep most, I can I can continue to compound value and do well for myself. So that's been the opportunity set is really exciting around that. On your point around how do we strike the partnership? I think there's a way I think about it is this kind of partnership risk and assessment is some it's like the poison we've been sipping for 40 years of our existence. And now we've developed tolerance and we know how to deal with it.

30:30And which is from the very, very early stage of any discussion we have with an entrepreneur, we make certain that we expose them to as many of our partners as we can. And we make sure that we have every single open conversation about human capital, all the tough stuff, human capital, exit timing, their role, right? The toughest discussion usually with an entrepreneur is, well, what if you're no longer the right person to be CEO? And so we front load that as much as we can, or actually completely in the diligence process so that once we shake hands to become partners, it's a completely open discussion and open negotiation.

31:06Now, nothing ever goes according to plan. So I often get questions from my investors. Well, how do you contract around this? Yeah, of course, we have exit rights. Of course, we have CEO appointment rights. Of course, we have all sorts of governance rights. But I think what's much more powerful is the process we go through in this confidence that we build with entrepreneurs. What would you say are the key attributes of a great entrepreneur, many of which you've obviously met over the years? Listen, the first thing the great entrepreneur has is, of course, they have vision. Of course, they have this.

31:36I would tell you they have a unique way of assessing risk and return that I'm jealous and sometimes I wish I had. I think when they have strong belief in their business, you can see a drive and a commitment to a strategy that very few have. And that said, the most talented entrepreneurs I've dealt with, some of the things that always wow me is you have a lot of entrepreneurs that lose themselves in a thousand ideas. You have very few entrepreneurs that are capable of grabbing the one great idea and really delivering on the execution of that. So this capability of making a complex problem into a simple solution is something that always impresses me with the best entrepreneurs.

32:16And I've seen that happen. And you can imagine in our portfolio, we have companies growing 50%. We have companies that go from single country to multi-country. We have companies that have to reinvent themselves sometimes. We have companies that are hit by a change of regulation or a change of market environment, whatever it is. And so that ability to change complexity into simplicity is, I think, defined some of the great entrepreneurs. And then something I mentioned earlier, I think the really great ones, the ones that scale, the ones that bring a hundred million revenue business to a billion, it's because they have an ability to attract unbelievable talent, delegate and empower people.

32:53And I think the flip side of that is those entrepreneurs you see who can't attract talent. That is a huge, huge, huge warning signal for the future of a business. And you see it very clearly. We do a lot of work on the organizational design of our companies during our diligence process. So we'll do management assessments. We'll speak to three layers down in the C-suite. If the C-suite is weak and somehow you have a feeling the entrepreneur is great, that's not a great sign. When you see an entrepreneur that might have some shortcomings but is able to build a world class team, that is usually a great leading indicator to performance and success.

33:27And I suppose a big part of that simplicity factor that you described is just a clear vision of what they're trying to achieve and being able to communicate that across the team. And it allows everybody in the company to grow in the same direction and become much more efficient in that regard. A hundred percent. That's very well said. It's exactly the way we see it happen. We have genius entrepreneurs who will go to their team and say, well, here are the 14 priorities. and then your team lacks focus and consensus. What is amazing is when someone says, listen, here's the two opportunities that truly can be transformational for our company.

34:09We need everyone to align and they drive that alignment. That's exactly the type of simplicity that is, I think, a defining character. How do you compare the landscape and innovation cycles in Europe versus the US, especially regarding valuations and tech talent? So I'm a proud European. And so I will always defend Europe as a wonderful market to invest, even in technology and growth. But listen, the facts are not great for Europe, right? And one of the facts I love talking to my investors about is if you look at the economic weight of the European bloc versus the U.S. before the financial crisis of 2008, we were almost the same size, including the U.K.

34:52So forget about Brexit. If you look today, we're more than 40 percent smaller. And if you double click on what happened, it's not about fiscal incentives. It's not about the capital markets. It's not about demographics. It's not about any of that. It's actually purely GDP per capita, which tells you it's all about productivity. And productivity is because there's been much more innovation in the U.S. than there has been in Europe. And frankly, a lot of the digital champions of Europe are U.S. companies, right? We search as Google and the cloud computing stack is all U.S. providers. and so on and so forth.

35:29So I think Europe has some catching up to do in terms of the innovation cycle. But I would tell you the last probably decade, we've seen fantastic innovation happen across Europe. And that's evident and apparent in the size of our portfolio, right? So a 25 or$22 billion portfolio in European technology growing at north of 30 % and delivering great performance tells you that there is innovation happening in our markets because one, talent is here. So absolutely, you will find the same quality talent underlying across all of our markets, whether it's the UK, France, Germany, Italy, so on. There is an enormous amount of talent and talent is starting to gravitate more towards entrepreneurial jobs than the more traditional jobs.

36:14So we see tons of momentum there. I think where Europe continues to struggle a little bit is access to capital and higher borders, right? Yes, you hear a lot about over legislation of the market. That's true. It is hard. People talk about Europe as a single block. That's not the case where you speak to an entrepreneur. Growing your company from France to Italy, even if there's a lot of cultural similarities, is very hard work. Different everything, different regulatory processes, different everything. Same, even more if you're going north. So it still is harder to grow. And then access to capital, what I mean by that is the venture community is smaller than the U.S.

36:53community. It's a little bit less ambitious in its scale. The growth community is smaller than the one in the U.S. And then the public markets are frankly not supportive of technology companies. It's a really sad statement to look at the FTSE, the DAX, or the, you know, or your next technologies under 5 % represented in all of those indices, right? These are indices of the past rather than indices of the future. And so I think we need to go through a little bit of a transformation of ambition in Europe, which is we've, we've got the talent. We obviously still have a large market to address. We just need to give them the right tools to continue to grow their businesses and not be ashamed of being European in an odd way.

37:37Now, to your point on valuation, the flip side of that is because the perception of our market is a little bit less exciting or dynamic than other markets, it means there's a little bit less competition for us as growth investors. It means valuations are typically slightly more appealing. It means processes are easier to manage. And I think that's also why we're so excited about the opportunity set here. And what about the Middle East and Africa? What do you see the most compelling opportunities and also the biggest risks for growth? Yeah, the Middle East has been an eye-opening market for me because when you look at it, there are so many strong fundamentals behind it.

38:18Of course, it's a very young population. It's completely digital. You look at 5G penetration, smartphone penetration, it's at 100 and something percent. It's a rich population, right? GDP per capita is very strong, in particular in the Middle East. And all those dynamics are great for the kind of digital innovation we want to back. What we typically see is when those trends start, you have a venture community that shows up and pushes companies from product concept risk and development risk to get it really to where we get involved, which is execution risk once the product has proven itself and has a go-to-market strategy and customers.

38:54And that's kind of where the Middle East is today. We're seeing the venture community made some good headwinds, I'd say, during the period of 2020-21. I think it was a little bit of a crazy market. People overpaid for stuff like everywhere else. But that's left us now with a landscape where we've got very healthy entrepreneurship and opportunities set in a fairly large market. So some of the recent transactions we did, I'll give you a sense, is we bought into a fragrance brand called Kayali. It's a Dubai-based and born company. It's selling completely globally through Sephora. It's growing north of 50%.

39:29It is winning a global customer base, yet it's born through an entrepreneur in Dubai. We did the same with a Warby Parker-type equivalent across the whole region. And so you're seeing similar trends that we saw in other markets. It's still earlier days, but we're seeing something fascinating happen in that market. It seems like the UAE and Saudi are attracting most talent. I think if you had to give a nod to how people have managed their countries, I think Abu Dhabi and Dubai do a wonderful job at attracting corporates and talent and capital. So we're seeing a lot of entrepreneurship happening there.

40:04How does GA structure value creation and risk management differently across regions? Listen, every market has a ton of variance and variability, right? And part of what we do, I mentioned this earlier, is we're incredibly entrepreneurial in the way we let our teams on the ground think of the best risk return in their own market, right? So I think it's a mistake to think that you can, from a center, whether it's in the UK or the US, dictate what are the best themes and the best investment opportunities and name the market. So at the heart of the way we manage our investment program is every region is empowered to find the best within their market, within their opportunity set.

40:45Of course, following the guidelines of our investment themes and so on, but they need to be focused on that. The way we then add value is incredibly scalable across different markets. The challenges of an entrepreneur, whether he's based in Europe or based in Singapore, are very similar. They're always anchored around talent management. They're always anchored around technology scalability. They're always anchored around building their go-to-market strategy and product development. And there we can really benefit from best practice across all of our portfolio. I think what's a new overlay that if you've been having this talk with me 10 years ago, I would have said, doesn't worry us much.

41:25Is this geopolitical overlay? I think that's something that, of course, is growing in importance. But at the heart of it, the value creation and the way we think of risk return is very similar. How are consolidation and industry trends shaping the PE landscape today? We spoke about it a bit earlier. I think the trends that are happening in PE are not dissimilar to what we've seen in other financial services markets. I mean, banks went through it 20 years ago. Hedge funds went through it more recently. You see it with the audit firms and some of the law firms where I think you've got to commit yourself to growth if you want to continue to be relevant and vibrant as a private equity partnership.

42:05And we think our perception and our vision here is to continue to be one of those winning platforms. within that, that means you need to have the resources and the scale to be relevant and have the right brand for entrepreneurs, right? You need your entrepreneurs to want to accept your capital. So do you have the scale? Do you have the tools? Do you have the brand for entrepreneurs to want you as an investor? You need to have the scale and the capital to attract the best investors within your teams, right? So if I don't have the tools, maybe I can't hire the next bright investor. And that's what's going to drive my business forward.

42:39So I think those dynamics are pushing for a little bit of a push towards scale. I think there's a lot written around how some of the very large platforms are giving up on investment excellence. I think there's a way of growing without giving up on investment excellence. I think there's a way of growing where you continue to have a vibrant partnership and continue to have a brand that represents the core values of your investment program. But I think over time, I think you'll see some consolidation happen in private equity. I think you will see some undifferentiated firms disappear or struggle to raise capital.

43:15And I think you'll see some winners emerge within their sectors. Climate tech has been a pretty big topic lately. What catalyzed GA's conviction in climate tech as a multi-decade investment thing? So we always built, if you look at the way General Atlantic has built its growth equity program, it's always been thematically focused, as we spoke about earlier. And we've grown our program really by adding themes within a growth equity strategy, right? So we were a tech firm. We then added a financial services theme. That's been a 20-year franchise. And we kept going. We added consumer about 10 years ago.

43:50That's become a new great franchise. Five years ago, we started seeing a significant tailwind that was driven by energy transition and the push towards a more sustainable economy globally, right? And what we realized then is we started looking, there's a lot of estimates on how much capital is needed to make this transition happen and get to net zero and it's trillions of dollars. What we noticed is a lot of people were attacking the venture side. By the way, I think those will be dreadful returns. But that's a problem we don't have to worry about. There was a lot of people attacking the infrastructure side, right?

44:21The building of renewable energy, the building of battery technology, I mean, all that kind of stuff. what we didn't see was a lot of people applying growth equity capability and taking proven technologies and pushing them to scale. And when actually, when you look at the need for the transition, yes, it's about renewable power. Yes, it's about new battery technology. Yes, it's about all this kind of stuff. It's also about gaining efficiency. And that's really where we thought we could play a role with our growth equity strategy. So within that, What we did is we launched Beyond Net Zero as a new thematic approach into our growth equity strategy.

44:57So it does exactly the same type of investing, exactly the same type of partnership deals, same value creation strategy, same everything as the rest of the growth equity strategy. However, it does it with companies that not only are net zero targeted themselves, but on top of that, will specifically measure and target the reduction and avoidance of greenhouse gas emissions globally. And so a simple way of thinking about it is we're trying to find companies that are at that intersection of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but still being great growth companies with good business models. So a lot of software, a lot of analytics, a lot of data and high-end services.

45:33And that's been a fantastic opportunity set for us. We developed a great climate framework. So all of our companies adapt to that. We report it to our LPs. You can see the emission reductions. It's a very powerful tool. And we're also finding a category of businesses that not only are great growth companies in their own self, right? These are great businesses to start with. In addition to that, they actually really care about avoiding emissions. And that's really how we built this Beyond Net Zero strategy. I think this is a put all the noise aside and the lack of commitment by the U.S. on some of the sustainability topics, by the way, which hasn't affected our strategy.

46:11That's really affected some of the more infrastructure layers. But put all that noise aside, we think this is a 30-year investment tailwind because of the amount of capital that we need to make this transition happen. And I think if you're grounded about this, we need this transition to happen, and we're very committed to it. Another hot topic these days is data centers. How do you see this area evolving in response to the growth in AI, cloud, and also the sustainability pressures? Listen, it's a topic I think is in the press almost every day. And first of all, I'd tell you, this is my fourth technology cycle.

46:48And every single one surprises me. This AI cycle I find is even more surprising in the speed of its adoption and the amount of capital going behind the opportunity set. So it's been, I think, two years ago, I would have never predicted we'd be where we are. And even the adoption of ChatGPT in the U.S. on the consumer end or some of the applications we're seeing on the enterprise end, And I think the developments are really extremely exciting, but also a little bit overwhelming in their pace. The data center opportunity, I think we have to ground ourselves a little bit on what's happening because we should remember data centers right now are about one and a half percent of global power demand.

47:27Right. So it's a tiny part of the grid.

47:32And I think the biggest projection is it might double. So it's going to go from 1.5 % to maybe 3%. If nothing changes, it needs to be built intelligently, and it needs to have an application of technology to make them more efficient. So when I mentioned that we thought data centers would go from 1.5 % to 3 % of global power demand, within that, please remember that only about 50 % to 60 % of all power that goes into a data center actually powers the compute. 40 % is either wastage or cooling. And I can tell you, we're seeing incredibly exciting technologies that address both of those. So what I hope is going to happen is the 1.5 % stays 1.5 % despite all the new gigawatts that are being developed because we're going to find efficiencies through technology and innovation to go against the growth in data center power demand.

48:24We do think there's an opportunity in data centers. We have a data center capability across the developing market, so outside of the U.S. and Europe. We're not at the stage of building two gigawatt data centers for large language models to train themselves. We're really at the stage of just powering the shift to the cloud economy. Those, we think, deliver incredible risk return for investors. It's emerging market investing, despite everything being dollar denominated. So you make a real premium in the way you get rewarded for that. And the trends are obviously incredibly powerful. Just to go back on the sustainability risk around that, I think people see it as 5 % of the global emissions.

49:08I do think that that's unacceptable. And in a way, as I mentioned, there are so many technologies already in production that are hitting critical scale that can help avoid those emissions. And I think we need to make this the responsibility of not just the hyperscalers, but everyone that's building a data center, all the cloud providers, and actually all the developers, we should have our eye on that. How is GA leveraging AI, both as an investment opportunity and also as an internal tool for your company? So AI, as I mentioned before, I think we've all been blown away at the pace of innovation and the number of applications that are being added into the market every day.

49:49And I think you're right. We see kind of three elements to how we use AI. There's the internal element within GA. And you can imagine we're an incredibly data rich environment. We have a database of over 100 ,000 companies in our database. We add more than 10 ,000 companies a year to our database. By the way, out of those 10 ,000, we do about 25 deals. So it gives you a sense of the funnel of information that comes through. But the 10 ,000 is an important number because it helps inform every investment decision we make. And now applying AI to all that data is making us not just intelligent at the moment of underwrite, but also intelligent at the moment of portfolio management, at the moment of risk management.

50:28So that's an area we're spending a ton of time on. We already have a decision support tool that helps our investment committee make decisions. that tool has ingested 20 years of investment decisions at GA. And we use it as a tool as an investment committee, it votes on deals. It's not a formal vote in our compliance, but it has a vote and we look at it very carefully. But more importantly, I would think of it as a tool that helps eliminate certain biases. Because as investors, you always have a bias. And my underlying team have biases. I know that so and so who does our enterprise tech typically likes to overpay, but he'll be too confident on margins and he'll always undershoot on growth.

51:08And so, you know, this kind of decision tools put that feeling I have about his bias into real numbers and really helps our decision making. On the portfolio side, it's even more powerful because it allows us to compare not just the obvious how is the company performing against budget, against plan, against this, against that. It's also takes all sorts of other data sources, external and internal, and helps us read through as much of the noise as we can and get to the real heart of underlying performance. So that's one bucket. I can tell you also internally, we're using AI now to automate all sorts of tasks around the job of the analyst, around the job of data collection.

51:48And that allows us to focus even more time on the higher value add stuff around decision making and deal structuring. The second area is what do we do with it within our portfolio companies? And as you can imagine, with a portfolio of over 200 technology and services businesses, this is an incredibly exciting set of tools that's being given to us because after years of inflationary pressure, whether that was on wages, on tech costs, on chips, I mean, you name it, we've been dealing with inflation on the cost side of our portfolio companies for 10 years. This is the first real deflationary tool we've had for a while.

52:24And as a result, within our value creation group that I've spoken about, we now have have experts in AI and we dispatch them within the portfolio companies to make sure that they have the right AI strategies to change their P &L. And the impact has been unbelievable. Not hard, not easy to implement. So I think it takes some time. I'll come back to that in a second. But, you know, in certain areas like obviously software coding and development, so some of the engineering stack, everything that touches consumer interaction, everything that touches editorial content, marketing content. We've seen automation gains and efficiency gains that I think none of us expected.

53:05And they're very, very powerful. Now, I said they're hard to implement because you need to have the right data environment. You need to have the right change environment. You need to have the right people. So you see articles of people say, God, AI is going to change my business in a year. I don't buy that. I think it's a two to three year evolution, but it's one that's going to be hugely positive for the technology ecosystem. And then the third part is obviously, how do we invest our own investors capital behind some of the AI evolution and AI opportunity set in there? I'd say we're still in research and development mode.

53:39We've made a few investments. The struggle we still have is you would typically see a guy, an investor like us, invest in a point in time where union economics and a company are stabilized, right? You understand the gross margin profile. You understand the margin profile at scale and the cash flows. Because what's happening right now in the development of the large language model or even the application layer is there's so much capital chasing these deals. That one, values are high, but two, unique economics are a little bit subsidized by overcapitalization. And that's something that we're very cautious about.

54:10But you'll see through our portfolio, whether it's an anthropic on the coding side where we've committed some capital or other businesses, we're starting to see an appealing set of opportunities. How are quieter public markets impacting portfolio company fundraising, IPOs, or liquidity planning? The toughest part of our job for the last four years has been predicting liquidity. And a firm like ours, because our portfolio is an appealing growth portfolio, we typically rely on three types of exits and now really four. There's obviously the strategic buyer. So if there's a consolidator in the market, a strategic buyer that comes in and buys your businesses, that ebbs and flows, but it's a pretty consistent opportunity for liquidity.

54:53The second is later stage investors. So once a company has matured from our type of growth profile to a bit more later stage, then the buyout firms show up or some of the sovereign funds or something like that. The third tool was always the IPO. And, you know, over the last four years, technology IPOs have been hard to come by. Right. I would tell you in Europe, I don't think we've had many technology IPOs in the last seven or eight years. We actually priced a successful IPO last week. So we're really excited about that. But that pool of capital has been very hard to predict. and sometimes actually not very fair or rewarding, right?

55:27When volatility is high, the long only investor in an IPO demands massive discounts to what they think fair value is to compensate them for the volatility risk they're taking. So that's been a hard one. What I think has happened since is you've seen the emergence of secondaries markets, continuation vehicles and so on. Some people find those as an unpopular way of getting liquidity. I still think it's a great way for us to manage liquidity for LPs because it offers risk transfer, right? You can deliver liquidity for those who want it. If someone wants to keep going, they get to reinvest in the vehicle.

55:59And I think that's a part of the market that'll see some growth. In a way, taking a bit of share from the IPO because we simply can't rely on it. Now, that doesn't mean we're giving up on the IPO. We've had a couple of great offerings the last few months. We thought this was going to be a big IPO year. And then some of what happened with Liberation Day set the markets back massively. You had volatility spike, impossible to price once VIX is above 40. You just can't price a deal, et cetera, et cetera. The last couple of months have been more stable. And so we priced a great IPO in Europe called the Swiss Marketplace Group.

56:36That's the first successful tech IPO in Europe for a while. It seems to be trading well. So I would tell you it's pushed us to innovate a little bit on liquidity channels. But we want the IPO to work, right? We think it's an important part of the capital ecosystem. system and we need it to work. So we spent a lot of time worrying about that and trying to help both the exchanges and the regulators think that you've got to create an easier, more simple process for tech companies to list themselves. Because if not, you're starving capital from an industry of growth. Well, Gabe, you've been very generous with your time.

57:11I appreciate you sharing all your insights with our audience. Thank you for joining us. Thank you so much, Alex. Thanks for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Please visit our website at insightfulinvestor.org to access past shows and learn more about our podcast. If you have questions, feel free to email us at info at insightfulinvestor.org. And if you enjoyed the discussion, please subscribe to this podcast to ensure you don't miss future episodes. And don't forget to forward today's conversation to others you think would enjoy listening. This podcast is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice.

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