Consistency in his recipe for success and openness to new opportunities are the strengths that investor Orlando Bravo balances to ensure the upward trajectory of his private equity firm Thoma Bravo and his role as a mentor to emerging companies in Puerto Rico.

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“Good leaders are disciplined and consistent. It’s not week in, week out, ‘I’m going to do this, I’m going to do that. Now, I’m going to see all my consumers in April and I won’t see them again until next year.’ No, it’s not like that,” he said.

At the same time, the co-founder of the firm that currently manages around $166 billion in assets urged the business community not to get hung up on buzzwords, such as generative artificial intelligence (GAI), or speculation about changes in government administration and macroeconomics.

“Technology is not revolutionary, it’s evolutionary. For example, there are people well, well concerned with AI. In 2025, AI is not going to change all of our jobs. It’s not going to be anything, anything like that,” he said.

Instead, he said that companies will be able to add GAI services or solutions to existing products as they make financial and operational sense.

“For people, my recommendation is: stay focused on the micro, on the details that belong to you. If you have a business here in Puerto Rico, win the competition. That’s more important than what’s going on with the interest rate. It’s intellectually interesting to talk about that, but focus on the business. Compete and make good decisions,” said Bravo, who hosted Negocios at the Miramar headquarters of his philanthropic arm, Bravo Family Foundation (BFF).

The investor, whose personal wealth is estimated at $9.8 billion by Forbes, added that “there is always going to be uncertainty. There are always going to be wars and changes in the economy. No one can control it and no one can predict that”.

In turn, Bravo emphasized the importance of looking closely at what is happening within the human team, both in startups and nonprofits: “Do I have those people next to me that are growing enough, to give them more so that we can do more? How many people are leaving every year?”

“As a leader of small companies or large companies, the most important thing you need is someone who loves it so much, who is so focused on that market, for some reason, who is always growing that business, who has this passion for the consumers of your product and is listening to them closely, what do they need, what do they want, how am I doing it. That is paramount,” he added.

He pointed out that this philosophy is an essential part of the formula he applies year after year to Thoma Bravo and to the companies acquired by the company.

“We know what our lane is: software companies that sell to other companies, what we call enterprise-level software... and the opportunities are the same ones we’ve been following for 20 years,” said Bravo, whom Forbes has dubbed ‘Wall Street’s most sought-after dealmaker’.

As a concrete example, he mentioned that in 2022, they bought QAD Software, which provides solutions to run operations and processes in manufacturing companies around the world. “That company was one of the first companies I called when I started in the business in 1997. But it took all that time to get the price right and the company pretty good.”

“We’ve been following it for over 20 years and we bought it. That happens a lot,” he said.

Although the firm headed by the Mayagüezano is practically an icon in the world of alternative asset investments and private investment, the sector is not exempt from challenges: from new regulatory requirements to a universe of companies that would be candidates for acquisition, but show less growth or high leverage.

In a recent report on the private equity segment’s expectations for 2025, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) indicated that the sector has generally remained suppressed in the past few years, in part because of the challenges of valuing the assets to be transacted.

According to PwC, with the exception of the second quarter of 2024, when private investment activity in the United States recorded over a thousand transactions with a valuation of close to $125 billion, both the volume of transactions and the value of these have moved downward since the first quarter of 2023.

In an interview with CNBC last October, Bravo noted that building the relationships and gaining the knowledge about the companies to make a transaction feasible can take three to five years before it can materialize.

That reality, compounded by other factors such as the strength of economic activity or interest rates, makes it difficult to build a pipeline of deals even among the savvy like Bravo and his team.

In 2025, according to Bravo, the plan is to keep the pace of monitoring some 1,000 companies, close the purchase of three to four that are valued between $3 billion and $12 billion, and sell more or less the same amount.

“In the world of Alternative Asset Management, Private Equity is the biggest business,” said the investor, who was educated at La Inmaculada Academy in Mayagüez and completed his college education at Brown University and Stanford. “We buy companies and transform them from being tremendous innovators to being tremendous businesses. And you can do both at the same time.”

This combination of innovation and profitability is what he tries to transmit to the entrepreneurs participating in the Rising Entrepreneurs Program (REP), one of BFF’s initiatives.

“We want to teach these entrepreneurs how to run companies, that is, to be able to grow them without losing money, without needing so much money from outside, because there is also less capital here. It’s not like Silicon Valley, where a guy can go out and say ‘I want $100 million because I have this idea’ ... and I think it’s a better way,” he said.

Bravo celebrated that the REP has been able to retain the judges and mentors it has brought to support Puerto Rican entrepreneurs with their experience and expertise “because they are inspired by the talent that is here”.

“The challenge is to be able to connect these entrepreneurs so that they can compete and sell to international companies. Because, remember, the market here is not very big. It is more limited. So if you want to have a huge company, in technology, you have to sell things to the big finance companies in the United States, to the big manufacturing companies. That’s the only way,” he analyzed.

Thoma Bravo specializes in acquiring technology companies, primarily enterprise-level software, to promote their strategic growth, according to the website of the firm co-founded by Bravo and Carl Thoma. The investment philosophy “focuses on working collaboratively with existing management teams to help drive operational results and innovation,” the firm explains on its official website.

“Our firm has acquired or invested in more than 500 software and technology companies representing a valuation of approximately $265 billion,” summarizes Thoma Bravo on its official website.

At present, according to data from the private investment firm, Thoma Bravo has a portfolio of approximately 80 companies. The firm has offices in San Francisco, Chicago and London, among other major cities.

A significant milestone for the firm was reached in 2023, when Thoma Bravo became a major Nasdaq shareholder after selling the exchange operator, Adenza, for some $10.5 billion, paid in a combination of cash and stock.

The Puerto Rican’s upward path was unknown to many locally.

It wasn’t until the passage of Hurricane María, when the phenomenon devastated Puerto Rico, that Bravo’s name became familiar. This, despite the fact that the investor - often a keynote speaker at world-caliber events, interviewed in major business publications in the United States and Europe - maintains close ties to his family and La Sultana del Oeste.

After the cyclone, Bravo unveiled his philanthropic initiative in Puerto Rico, a project of various dimensions that has included direct support to communities affected by natural disasters; the REP, which has been a platform to strengthen local businesses of various kinds and even financially support innovative projects such as Skootel and BrainHi, and other similar initiatives.

As a token of his connection to Puerto Rico, Bravo will soon be a special guest at a series of events and talks by El Nuevo Día in collaboration with the Spanish News Agency (EFE).

Joanisabel González contributed to this report.

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This content was translated from Spanish to English using artificial intelligence and was reviewed by an editor before being published.