Vista 48 Manual

[Cecile Lilien]

DisclaimerAlways compare the picture on our website with the actual part in your fireplace. Please check with the actual manual text before purchasing the parts below. This list was procedurally generated from the manual text and may vary from the needs of your actual fireplace.

This is part of my operating manual series opening up the playbook of private equity and company building luminaries. Check out past ones with Mark Leonard, Andrew Wilkinson, Robert F. Smith, ESW, John Malone, Felix Dennis and Mike Speiser.

Vista Equity is a private investment firm that focuses entirely on enterprise software companies and as of August 2021 manages $75+ billion in assets across private equity, permanent capital, credit and public vehicles.

They have bought over 500 software companies and still hold 70+ with 70,000 employees and 700,000 customers across 175 countries. Their combined revenue would make them one of the top 5 largest enterprise software companies in the world after Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP.

In 1981 Smith headed to Cornell University to study chemical engineering, spending many nights and weekends in a three-person study group that met in the basement of the engineering school's Olin Hall. During summers, Smith worked at Bell Labs back home in Denver, a college internship he landed as a high school student after persistent cold-calling.

After graduating from Cornell in 1985, Smith took engineering jobs, first at a Goodyear Tire & Rubber chemical plant outside Buffalo, New York, and later at Air Products & Chemicals in Allentown, Pennsylvania.

In 1990 Smith moved to Kraft General Foods, where he focused on coffee-machine technology. He won two patents: one for a stainless-steel filter and another for a brewing process that makes crema, the layer of foam on top of an espresso.

After business school in 1994, he joined Goldman as a mergers-and-acquisitions banker, eventually moving to San Francisco to advise companies like Microsoft and eBay and becoming the co-head of enterprise systems and storage. He was part of the team that helped Apple recruit Steve Jobs back.

At Goldman, Robert Smith worked with Houston auto-dealership software maker Universal Computer Systems Inc. Its margins were higher than any software business Smith had advised, and he was stunned to learn the company's owners were plowing its cash into certificates of deposits.

He recruited partners including a business-school classmate, Stephen Davis, and a young analyst who worked under him at Goldman, Brian Sheth. Sheth would provide the yang to Smith's yin, focusing on acquisitions and divestitures, so that Smith could concentrate on investors and the companies themselves. They are very close with Sheth serving as Smith's best man at his wedding.

Smith's first buyout fund returned 29.2% annually net of fees. Smith raised money for a second fund from institutional investors, returning a net 27.7% annually. In 2011 Smith moved Vista's headquarters to Austin, Texas seeking to escape the Silicon Valley bubble.

While at Goldman, he started to see the same sort of inefficiencies in how software companies were running across hundreds of companies he was evaluating. It was a new industry. And because it was a new industry, there were very few operating procedures on how to run a software company.

He found one company, Universal Computer Systems, that had some standard operating procedures to make software companies efficient and he thought you could adopt those methodologies across a number of software companies.

He realized that none of the PE firms of the day were really thinking about software as an area of investment. There was a focus on semiconductors and services businesses. He also saw a lack of awareness of the impact of software.

He saw that there was an opportunity to actually create a sustainable competitive advantage by becoming an expert in the software market.

Software is also durable. You have the ability to be in that industry, not for quarters or for years, but for decades. Vista does a survey every year, across all of their portfolio companies, and today the average return on investment of the products that they sell to their customers is over 600%.

There are just very few products or activities that give you that sort of ROI, but software does it fairly consistently. Then if you continue to innovate, you can drive more adoption and provide more benefits to your customers.

The playbook is what Vista is known for and is a closely guarded secret. The best practices most of which run three to ten pages, with reams of attachments and examples, are now numbered in the hundreds of PDFs. Printed out, they fill binders.

They are stored in a password-protected online library, available only to authorized portfolio company managers. Even the top executives of portfolio companies only get access to the sections that they need to know about.

Many of the playbook's best practices are pretty standard. But software companies are often inefficient with legacy processes that come from startup culture. Things like weekly deal-pipeline meetings, commonplace at MBA-driven corporations are often absent.

The playbook is always evolving. Best practices are being added and changed. They have very effective feedback and feed forward loops with structured times when their senior management teams get together and learn from each other.

Often enterprise software companies are started by a person who was really good at developing a product to solve some problem. That person wasn't necessarily professionally trained to be a product development manager, but was a good product developer.

Then does this management team have the capacity to scale and grow or do they need a different set of training or tools or experiences or relationships to enable them to grow those businesses? 70-80% of the companies they buy are led by someone where it is the largest company either they've been in or the largest company they've ever led.

Robert says it is because they see how Vista enhances the value of not only their business from a financial perspective, but creates a business that actually is much more durable. One that's more reliable to their customer base and has the potential to be around for decades.

When Vista buys a company, all employees and recruits are required to take a personality-and-aptitude test. The hour-long test assesses technical and social skills, and attempts to gauge analytical and leadership potential.

For Smith, the test is particularly important because it attempts to bypass inherent biases, such as where people grew up or went to school, race, and gender. Vista touts the tests to its investors as a great equalizer, helping make its companies diverse meritocracies.

Some examples are a woman who ran a Domino's Pizza franchise in North Carolina who was deemed to be a good sales trainer and got promoted to do so for a Vista company. Another from the mailroom, scored high on Vista's test and became a programmer.

After Vista has people where it wants them, there are boot camps that train employees, not just for two weeks but for six to nine months. In the past three years, Vista has put 12,000 new hires through these boot camps. They start by giving employees the big picture: how the Vista company makes money and the way customers use its products. The focus later shifts to specific corporate roles.

When Vista sells a company, Smith often gives its CEO an expensive Swiss or German watch. It is supposed to represent the system they created together. Finding the right person who is going to be the best gear in the machine.

I manually pipette many samples a day. That caused a lot of pressure on my shoulder and elbow, and especially my thumb when ejecting tips. I developed elbow pain and numbness that was diagnosed as carpal tunnel syndrome and required surgery. Now I'm using an Ovation and haven't had any further problems.

In our lab, we all experience shoulder and wrist strains and overall tightness in the back and shoulders from using axial pipettes. With the Ovation, though, you don't have to hold it up very high to clear the test tubes. And the tips fit so well, they're easy to put on and easy to eject.

I used to have tennis elbow and I don't even play tennis. It was from pipetting. I had to stop for a couple of months and start physical therapy. Now I also use the Ovation. I just love it! It's so comfortable and my arm is better.

I wish the Ovation had been available 10 years ago. I'm convinced I would have never developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome from pipetting. The Ovation uses nice, gentle motions without force. All the stresses and strains of the standard pipette are totally gone.

Ovation pipettes are very easy to use. My hands never get tired or hurt when I use them. Their ergonomics distinguish them from all other pipettes. I have arthritis in my hands and these pipettes never stress my joints. Other pipettes make me reach uncomfortably or need too much pressure to release the tip. I absolutely love Ovation pipettes, would not use anything else!

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