Mark Leonard's Private Billions
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A story about Mark Leonard, a mysterious billionaire who built Constellation Software while maintaining complete privacy.
"The billionaire of the week is Mark Leonard of Constellation Software. They buy software companies and roll them up, trying to be a perpetual owner - not like private equity where they do leveraged buyouts and try to flip it. This guy is like the Satoshi Nakamoto of boring businesses.
Nobody knows anything about this guy - you can't even find a photo of him. All we know is he was born in 1956, maybe in South Africa, maybe in England. In his bio, he wrote that he was a banker, a valuator, a mason, a gravedigger, a dog handler, a bouncer, a sapper, and a wind energy researcher. He particularly enjoyed the bouncing.
They started by buying small businesses, like $2-4 million acquisition targets. What seemed like small ball turned into big league returns. Last year they had $1.2 billion in sales, 20% margins, doing 10-20 acquisitions per year. When I read about them their market cap was $5 billion - I just looked it up now and it's $31 billion."
Shaan Puri
Host of MFM
Shaan Puri is the Chairman and Co-Founder of The Milk Road. He previously worked at Twitch as a Senior Director of Product, Mobile Gaming, and Emerging Markets. He also attended Duke University.