Ursula Burns - Integrum Co-Founder - SuperReturn Nov 2021

It's a great place to start. First of all, I formed the firm with two other partners. The three of us were kind of mid to late career. We had already done a whole bunch in our lives, and we found ourselves thinking about what we could do in the future. And what we thought was to try to actually change a little bit of the way that business building is done today. Business building is done largely in PE and VC firms. It's generally done by people who were born and raised to be in PE and VC firms. They think about it when they grow up, when they go to college, et cetera. We wanted to have a more diverse firm—not just racial or gender diversity, we wanted experience diversity as well. I'm an operator, for example, was not in investing. We want aids diversity. We want to diversify the vendor pool that we use. Everything, we wanted to start from scratch, build a firm that had nothing before. Literally, the offices that we go into, who provides our copying machines, everything, is broadening the access to people who were not in before. Diversity, equity, and inclusion is not an afterthought. It's not like we're taking something that's already running and trying to contort it to be diverse or equitable. We're trying to build it from the bottom up, and that's the difference, I think, with Integrum. And it's important that we're not a diversity firm. We're an investing firm. We're going to be as good or better than investing firms out there. I just want to do it in a different way. And it's a competitive environment out there right now.

It's really interesting that because of the approach that we're taking, our ability to get talent into the pool of people that we're looking at is amazing. So young talent—we're a small fund, a billion dollars, small compared to the world out there. And so we can work on—we bring people in who can work on things with us from the beginning. So they literally, younger people, mid-career people, and senior people actually all engage around deals, all engage around staffing the organization, all engaged in building the funds. So we found access to talent to be very, very good. It's a problem that other people are dealing with and struggling with. Fortunately, we're only hiring 10 to 15 people, not hundreds and hundreds, because that is a challenge. Talent is a challenge in the world today.

It's interesting. I think that they're getting the same things wrong that public companies got wrong for many, many years. I say that they're one cycle out. They're one cycle behind. And they have to get on it, because you said it—you know, I'm standing in or sitting in the hallway here and I think I've seen, I'm the only person of color that I've seen, and there are very few women around. This can't be sustainable. Obviously, all studies—the facts are already in, the die has been cast. You're more innovative, you have better results, you're more future-ready if you are diverse. You serve more people if you are diverse. So this ability to actually stay in the old white male club is not going to last very long. I think this is the next place that there will be a turn in private equity and venture capital firms. We did a study in this thing called the Board Diversity Action Alliance that I started with some—I mean, just started, I started, me and a couple of people thought about this. I said, why are there not more? And we studied it and looked at that number, just the performance. Yeah, it's unbelievable in public companies. But the progress has been made in private firms, and PE firms and VC firms, it's an embarrassment. It is an embarrassment. Literally, you couldn't design a less diverse set of firms. That's what we have. The good news is that the owners and the founders and the principals of these firms know it, and they're starting to change. It's just taking a lot longer than it should take. That's every journey. Starts with a single step.

I think that right now we are in a super heated mode. We've been there unfortunately for probably five to seven years, and it's just not cooling down at all. Every year that we think something is going to impact it—we thought the pandemic would—actually it came out of the pandemic even hotter than before. So in normal times, I would say that inflation would have a negative or chilling effect, but I'm not sure that that's going to be the case. We've been riding a wave—we meaning the industry—investing has been riding a wave for 15 years now. Something has to stop it. Something has to adjust the valuations because now they're at the point anything that's called tech-enabled, that trades on—I love this—trades on multiple of revenue. A multiple of revenue. But good news is Integrum is not in that space. But it's a very big challenge right now. I don't believe that inflation is going to be the cooler of that. I think something else has to happen structurally to slow down this wave that we're on.

Yeah, I think that capital-intensive conglomerates are waning now. But we still don't lose sight of the fact that we have massive conglomerates in software and services. So yeah, it's just a different way to look at size, a different type of size. So I think that technology can come... All right, conglomerates on capital-intensive business I think are slowing down, but on tech businesses I think not.