How Diversity Limited CEO Ben Kepes grew Diversity Limited to $1.1M revenue with a 13 person team in 2021.

started writing his first Angel checks back 19 years ago first when the cloud ability 20K check that turned out nice for me in fact 19 years later after that first check he still got 40 percent of his checks he's written call it in play 40 of debt and 20 who the hell knows what happened to those guys but it growing nicely a lot of diverse Investments and you know he's building it really a life he loves he's has his own manufacturing company on the side doesn't want to run his own thing and like supporting entrepreneurs with right governance right structure especially in the early days as they scale and obviously hopefully generate returns hey folks my guest today is Ben keeps he is a professional board member on globally recognized technology commentator along with being an entrepreneur he's building governance investment and Analysis at diversity.net.nz Ben you ready to take us to the top always all right so my audience is obsessed with SAS walk me through how you think about investing in B2B SAS companies yeah so I mean the great thing about B2B tests is that the metrics are so obvious um you know OTV Tech uh you know Apple all of those sorts of things and so it's kind of pretty easy to to assess uh as this company but fundamentally I come back to the same thing which is all around around t uh so you know a terrible team can screw up a great idea but a great team can can pivot off a terrible idea and make something good and so can you guys tell me the story of the last SAS company you guys invested in yeah so I I invest in a bunch of a bunch of different companies uh probably I guess uh one of the highlights is a company that was on this one I was also the chair of the board of uh companies called swiped on so that there's uh you know entry management software uh building information type stuff uh you know it's a pretty busy field but they've done a great job of of organic marketing did a great job of moving you said swipe John right with haley.com yeah yeah um and and so uh great job of moving up the food chain uh you know adding adding features uh you know delivering Enterprise Solutions uh and wrote that way we got acquired by a UK listed company a few years ago uh and and still doing doing super well so so really cool to uh to invest early uh to join the board uh to chair the board and to run through the the uh the acquisition process and to kind of see how that plays out for the the full life cycle mm-hmm so just it looks like uh they raised about 700 000 and that's in New Zealand the currency obviously you and I see their seed round was to be a New Zealand Venture investment fund was that you no no I invested myself individually oh as an angel investor okay so so what is diversity.net.nz is it a fun structure do you have a pool of capital you're investing I guess I'm a little confused yeah sure so that's me so I do a bunch of different things so I do a bunch of Consulting through there I do a bunch of Industry analysis uh and I and I invest uh directly and and uh and alongside of the funds uh and also I I do a lot of advisory and governance work uh that's kind of my holding vehicle I see okay got it I guess does that have any connection to the government of New Zealand right are they a big LPN a fund that you're running or is there any connection there I know so the government of New Zealand has what's called The Venture investment fund so basically they will co-invest alongside uh credible investors and so a lot of the deals that I've been involved when evolved with uh that fund is invested alongside uh but uh but yeah they're trying to let other people pick winners I guess interesting so yeah it looks like you're also involved I'm looking at your LinkedIn profile now uh things like uh siftery which we add on cloud ability now you got into all these via the the first Angel round yeah pretty much uh so I was the first uh first investor um in cloudability and again that was super interesting invested uh introduced those guys to to to Brad and the team in The Foundry uh you know watch that investment play out over time and then they got that got acquired by fto uh and yeah that was that was an interesting and interesting Journey sifter is another example you know I invested early when it was I can't even remember what it was called before siftry uh and and and watched that proposition because I was an industry analyst and and Sophie was trying to kind of uh disrupt the the analysis space uh and you introduced them to Goddard no no I didn't um uh I mean I knew kind of I knew yeah I knew the people who knew those who were in the zoo uh but they that they met up and they and they were acquired uh which was great you know it was a good outcome for the investors but but great to see that product in a in a bigger home I guess yep yep no that makes tons of sense oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from Real Time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed around 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview we had Cloud ability on the on the show now this was way back before they were acquired this was back when they were doing around 20 million in revenue and they had only a 41 million raised I guess one good question that would be uh I think that would be good to ask you is there's a lot of folks that have boards but they just do a terrible job of using board members right for strategic reasons what founder have you worked with in the past that is just you think is in a brilliant job at treating you like an employee almost getting you to do stuff that really helps them yeah so what the first thing I'd say is it's super important to know the difference between governance and management and it's important for board members to understand where that lies and it's super important for for Governors for directors to to to to to be involved but to be to be hands off I guess uh you know they say well they just say yeah noses and uh hands out um you know the the CEO of swiped off CEO and founder Hadley uh did a great job of of kind of leaning on me when it was appropriate but also you know having that arm's length separation um and so that was that was a fun process it was a really fun process to walk alongside him from from the very early stages to the end you share a real story one that he won't care if you share when you it actually quantify what you need to say he quote leaned on you yeah so in the early days uh before I came on board when it was a very very early product they had outsourced some development uh to uh an individual in in Pakistan I believe uh and that uh these horror stories sometimes happened that kind of kind of went South that relationship went South uh and there was this is a long long time ago and now and...