I’ve been a management and technology consultant for most of my career and find technology to be an endlessly fascinating field, especially how it is used in corporate America.  Last year, as I was finishing the final report of a strategy project for a small business client, it just validated what I already knew - small businesses have most of the same problems that large companies do when it comes to technology.  This thinking led me to look back over my career and I came to a few additional realizations:

1. There isn’t much I haven’t seen before – I’ve been fortunate to work with a wide range of companies and people, which has provided me a wealth of knowledge, broad and deep, that only hands-on experience can provide.

2. Digital disruption is the "new normal"…what we technologists thought was happening in the late 90s is happening now with much less hype (it’s not hype because it is actually happening). Entire industries are changing and evolving -- so much so that there is now a name for the phenomenon, getting “Amazoned”.

3. The rate of change is accelerating…rapidly.  Five years is an eternity in the tech world, and that presents a whole new set of challenges for every business today, large and small.

Fast forward to late last year when I met Paul, a friend and former colleague, for lunch at Banger’s in Austin.  We’d worked together at several companies and followed a similar path to where we both happened to be that day….on an extended sabbatical. We were both not working by choice, being fortunate enough to be able to take some time off after 30+ years in the technology business.  A vacation this was not because we were both considering what we wanted to next.

I’d been dipping my toes back into the consulting world as an independent, often jotting down ideas for a company that I would like to start someday.  So all this was fresh in my mind when Paul called me suggesting we get together for lunch.  As it turned out, he had also been thinking along similar lines and, though we didn’t know it then, our discussion would be the first step towards the birth of our new company – Sabio Tech Partners. 

So what is Sabio Tech Partners all about?

We are in an extraordinary period of change and transition -- the so-called Information Revolution, on par with the Industrial Revolution and the Transportation Revolution.  Just like the transition from horses to cars, and trains to airplanes, corporate America is experiencing the effects today of endlessly improving technology.  We believe that no industry is exempt, and many are not adequately addressing the degree of technological change.  Nowhere is this truer than the investment community, specifically investment banking and private equity firms operating in the middle market.  We also believe that established companies face similar hurdles when looking to be acquired or to raise money from such firms.

Enter Sabio Tech Partners -- we help middle market investment firms solve this problem through our version of Technology Due Diligence. Through our innovative process, we perform a rapid and comprehensive assessment of a company’s technology ecosystem and express the result as a set of assets and liabilities on an easy-to-interpret report that we call the Technology Balance Sheet.  The Technology Balance Sheet is unique in the industry and we think it will help firms significantly improve the quality of their investments.