The Weekly Bloom

Your weekly SaaS community update

Happy Friday, founders and friends.

TLDR: The PE markets are on 🔥🔥 in 2021. Last week EY released their Q2 Pulse Report, which included insights from this year’s second quarter in the PE market. Highlighted below are some key takeaways👇👇

1. Exit activity via M&A and IPO’s are seeing record levels of activity, which is impacting the entire PE life cycle, including fundraising.

2. Fundraising is picking up as demand from investors strengthens and funds start to close in earnest once again.

3. Deal activity and deal volume are on track to compromise the most active half-year on record.

4. Deal sizes are increasing due to increasing post-pandemic certainty and the accumulation of dry powder.

5. Club deals are increasing in prevalence for large-scale deals.

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What We’re Reading and Listening To…

📚 Expectations: Entering Due Diligence

📚 Have classic buyout funds run their course?

📚 A Valuation Framework for SaaS Companies

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News from the Industry: deals, deals, and more deals 💰

Thoma Bravo to take software firm Medallia private for $6.4 bln

Vertu Capital and BDC Capital announce sale of Firmex

Vista Equity considers sale of Tibco, which it bought for $4.3 billion in 2014l

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Favorites from the Ecosystem

Investors👇…..

Michael Girdley @girdley

Smart negotiators will make you bid against yourself. This means basically refusing to counter and just making you sweeten your offer over and over by throwing new constraints at you — or telling you nothing. How do you handle this?

Jeff Richards 🇺🇸 @jrichlive

Investors have pretty consistently underestimated the TAMs for newly public software companies. ServiceNow ($NOW) is a great example. $2B market cap at IPO, today >$5B revs and likely >$15B in C26. ☁️🚀reuters.com/article/us-ser…

Founders👇…..

Aleksandr Volodarsky @volodarik

Most of the startup advice is horse shit. Especially when you google it. Let's build a thread with the best startup threads and articles. I'll start:

Andrew Gazdecki @agazdecki

Simple advice for founders. Realize everything's going to work itself out and have fun because when you're having fun, you can make much better decisions and when you can make better decisions, you can grow your startup a lot faster. Half the gig is mental. Stay positive.

Operators👇….

Bart Macdonald • Bloomvp.com @BartMacdonald

“Professionals get rich off amateurs” Great reminder during an investor call yesterday — a self-made HNW who was once upon a time a janitor, now owning a retail empire w ~$40m turnover We agreed on the framework: GP what’s in your Circle of Competence, LP everything else

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About Bloom Venture Partners

Bloom Venture Partners is a lower mid-market software-focused private equity firm, leveraging deep operational and commercial experience to create enduring market value for the benefit of our investors, founders, and their companies.

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End Note

Thanks for joining us for another edition of the weekly bloom. At Bloom Venture Partners we buy, build + invest in SaaS.

We’re excited to continue backing remarkable teams on their quest of changing the way we work, live + create.

As always, if you enjoyed this week’s newsletter we'd love it if you shared it with a friend, co-founder or anyone that would find value.