Welcome to Demystifying IT. I'm your host, Surajit Hanunga, CEO of CG INFINITY. Welcome to Demystifying IT season two. Today's guest is Brent Williams. Brent is a seasoned private equity leader with more than thirty years of experience in building and growing companies. He spent over two decades as a senior partner at the Halifax Group, where he helped invest more than four billion dollars across diverse industries. And he now continues to support the firm as a senior adviser. Brent has served on numerous private and public boards. Private equity is the broadest name for the asset class, which means you're, generally, you're raising money from big institutional investors. So it could be insurance companies, pension funds, university endowments, sovereign nations, anybody that's investing generally over a billion dollars, but usually a lot more than And they invest in private equity firms. Then under the umbrella of private equity are several sub strategies. Right. So venture is one of those. So venture is private equity, but it's specifically geared towards the smaller start up companies that are higher risk, higher reward. Next, you'd have growth equity, which is companies that are transitioning. They're not really start ups anymore. They're going, but they're growing really fast and still looking for equity investments. Where I spent my career was in buyout, which is at the far right. This is investing in mature companies that have revenue and profits and all those great things. And but but the mission in of all of these sub asset classes within private equity is the same. It's, you know, good old buy low, sell high. Yeah. So when we are evaluating companies, we're gonna do a very deep diligence dive on their entire technology stack to figure out everything from what are they doing in digital specifically. Right. But we also just want to understand what are their systems? What level of data do they have? Yeah. How clean is the data? How actionable is the data? Are they are they actually getting insights out of the data? And it it doesn't tell us whether or not we'll invest in the company, but it tells us what our road map needs to be. Thank you. Sure. So let's talk about everybody these days talking about AI. You know, apparently, it's taking away all of our jobs and machines are gonna take over the world. How do you foresee the impact of AI on PE, not just as a investment decisions that they're making, but also their own operations of PE organizations. It it it probably comes into play in three areas if you think about what a private equity firm does, right? So you're evaluating opportunities at the front end for investment. And you may look at a firm may look at between five hundred and a thousand companies every year that will come in in one way or another. And for a lot of those, they'll come in. Somewhat will give it a quick skim and you'll kill it. You won't spend any time on it. Yeah. But for a deal that you close, you're gonna spend between four and six months on it and and hundreds and hundreds of man hours and, you know, millions of dollars in chase costs. So between there is kind of where the magic happens. Right? And it's really how do you get good information around those opportunities and quickly and efficiently kill the ones that are not a good fit for you so you can spend more time on other activities. And so AI can clearly you know, you're looking at all kinds of information. You're looking you're trying to analyze and understand and research companies, industries, management teams. Using AI to do that is gonna accelerate your ability to do that. It's gonna really make you more efficient and how quickly you can get through those companies. Everything I mean, you could you could take when you get a confidential confidential information memorandum, it's in a PDF. You could literally just drop it into an AI and say, hey. What do you think? Right? I mean, the the the ability of an AI to to accelerate that is amazing. The second thing you're doing is you're you're making investment decisions. And once you close a company, you're monitoring that portfolio. Right? And so this just has to do with how is the company performing. And so, again, all that data that you can get and it's easy to monitor one company, but you could put all the data for all of your companies and you can aggregate that. You can start running more more in-depth analytics or business intelligence in around your portfolio. And then there's at the portfolio level itself. And there, it's gonna be doing the same things that your CG Infinity is doing for its clients. Right? What's your technology roadmap? What's the opportunity? Yeah. Actually, it was written in the book you authored, Demystifying IT. How do you take tech from being in the in the the GA phase, I think is what you called it Yeah. And really integrate that into all their other departments and have it be a strategic weapon rather than just a back office? And that's and AI is gonna be a big part of that. So you and I are fortunate to live in the same, like, great state of Texas and and here in the DFW Metroplex Yeah. Which is not necessarily historically not seen as a find one of the big financial center in the country. Yeah. You know, to some of the big ones like New York City and stuff like that. But I have been noticing more and more private equity firms showing up and now there is announcement of Texas Stock Exchange. So in your opinion, what do you see? Where are we headed in terms of the financial DFW and Texas in general becoming also a financial capital area. It always surprised me that Dallas wasn't more of a financial center than it has been because of the size of the city, you know, the location geographically, and a number of other factors. But it didn't have the history of financial exchanges like New York or Chicago. It didn't have banks headquartered there like New York or Chicago or San Francisco or LA. And so it didn't have that nucleus to grow from, but it is changing. And and the Texas Stock Exchange is going to be a big step in that direction. You've already seen as a competitive response, NASDAQ has opened up a regional office in Dallas as a response to that. They're they're I think they're scared. They should be. New York Stock Exchange moved its regional office from Chicago down to Dallas. So that's going on. Oh, I didn't realize that. And then you've got you've got massive companies that have relocated here, whether it's CBRE, which there is private equity in the real estate world. They just invest in real estate instead of operating companies like Buyout. You've got Fortress Investment Group, which is expanding here massively. Goldman Sachs just announced an eight hundred thousand square foot massive expansion here. So I think it it's it's the the momentum is already there, and it's just gonna continue. Very good. Awesome. Yeah. Super excited to Yeah. To hear that. So let's talk about a little bit, you know, peek into the private equity executive mindset. Okay? Sure. When an outsider like me think about and we try to stereotype people like you and your profession, we're like, you know, one phrase comes to my mind is hyper performance. Oh, okay. I thought I thought you're gonna say sharks or vulture capital or something like that. No. Something horrible. Very ambitious, hyperperformance driven. Yeah. But I also, you know, know you that you you have some amazing leadership trait. Okay? Thank you. Leadership traits could be described as empathetic, patience, which is contrary to hyper performance or sound contrary. So tell us about how do you balance between being have a have a hyper performing mindset and have a leadership trait? And how do you balance or do you balance? There's a couple answers to your question. One is you do you have you do have high expectations. Right? High expectations of what a team and a company and leaders can achieve. Yeah. But you have to complement those expectations with very high levels of support. Interesting. Otherwise, I don't think you're gonna you're gonna you're gonna succeed. And you've got to realize that this is a people business. Yeah. And that you want people to want to work for you. You want it really comes down to what's leadership, in my opinion. Leadership is, you know, is motivating people to achieve a goal. And you're not going to do that by telling them what to do. Yeah. And micromanaging them and telling them that and creating a sweatshop environment that doesn't motivate anybody. So I think it's really So I think it's really just having good leaders, training people, coaching people, empowering people throughout the organization, which is a big place that I a big opportunity, I think, in most companies where most employees haven't really been empowered and they have great ideas and they they get so excited when you pull them into the team. Yeah. And so anyway, so that that's a a short answer. But the other thing is we're human beings. Right? I mean, we have families. We have kids. We have priorities, and and we respect that everyone else has those same things. And so if something comes up, family matter, kid matter, go do that. That's more important. Right? You gotta you gotta you you want them to you want everyone to have a life, take vacation. They need to be they need to be healthy. They need to be sharp. So a a good example, we we bought a lake house a couple of years ago, and there's some weeds growing in the water and all this. I said, well, how do you get rid of those? Okay. Well, you put down this aquatic herbicide. It's more effective if you put it in a granule. Well, how do you do that? So, well, I don't know. Why don't I make a build a remote control boat that will do that for me? Well, if I need if I do that, I'm gonna have to how am I gonna make the parts? I guess I need a three d printer. So I bought a three d printer. So I I kind of get into these things. And so, yeah, I've been working on that for a while, and I've loved having my three d printer. It's just a lot of fun. There was an issue the other day about trying to effectively make reservations for something online, and I wanted to automate that. And so I I use AI. It's like, okay. How do I do this? So I end up writing writing a JavaScript that I can execute from my computer. It'll automatically do it. Oh my god. I like getting into that kind of stuff and and just really dorking out, but I I'm so focused on doing that that everything else just kinda melts away, and I'm in my own little world, and I I enjoy that stuff. I love it. Take care. Thank you. Subscribe now and join the conversation.
