Micro Private Equity - New Path to B2B SaaS Liquidity + Growth -Akeel Jabber, Horizen Capital

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Akeel Jabber, host of the SaaS District Podcast and investment director at Horizen Capital. Today, we will be covering three main topics with Akeel. First, stage by stage company value creating metrics. Second, early stage B2B SaaS and cloud acquisition opportunities from both a buyer and a seller perspective. And third, top considerations to evaluate when selling your SaaS company. Akeel, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Akeel Jabber** (1:12)
Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast today Ray. Super blessed to be on. Appreciate it. So got a quick background on my side. I'm actually a petroleum engineer turned entrepreneur. I actually worked in the white collar industry for several years and as many other engineers made that full-time leap seven years ago into entrepreneurship. But even while I was in university, I actually launched my first business of a recruitment firm. I was actually hiring tech talent for startups all around the world. But I realized my passion was really around how do I increase my cash returns from the money I was making to really replace my income.
That was about seven years ago. But even before that, I really started with investing in a stock market. That was the easiest thing to do. I think I was 17 years old. I opened up my first account. But I quickly learned some hard mistakes after a couple of years of trading. And what I learned was, A, when it comes to public markets, you don't have a lot of control over so many other factors that are out of your control when trying to pick the right stocks, right? A business can be affected by turmoil or some news on the other side of the world. And that could plummet the value of your stock overnight, say 50 percent. So there's just so much out of your control. It doesn't matter how much effort or time or energy you put into it. There's some things you just can't control. On the other side, you're also competing with the guys on Wall Street, right? They have a lot more sophisticated technology. They have a lot more experience in trying to pick better deals to invest in. I mean, these are guys who do this on a daily basis. This is their life and how they make a living. So you're coming in and trying to do this as a hobby or doing it a couple of hours a week, it's just not the same. You've got to build that kind of skill set to be able to try and compete with them. Around that time, I actually came across the book you may have heard of called Cash Flow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki. And I learned about investing in cash generating assets, controlling your own income time and how to leverage debt effectively. So I used some of the cash I saved at the time and invested in some real estate in Canada. So I bought one, then I bought the second one. And at this time, I'm around 25 years old. And buying real estate when you're 25 years old just feels so slow, right? Like I wanted results fast, right? I'm 25 I wanted to run. I wanted to make a lot of money. And making a couple of hundred dollars here and there was nice on cash flow. But I wanted something a lot quicker. So I still love real estate and I still own it. And I still think it's a good investment. But I still look at it more as a long term investment strategy, maybe 20 years return or so. So when I'm 40, 50 years old, that money is sitting there and part of my retirement income. So then I invested in physical businesses, right? And I actually own a physical franchise gym in Canada.
And that's where I learned about recurring revenue. What is LTV? What is churn? What is ACV? Retention, contracts, all those kinds of things, but at a physical local level. But I still felt the limitation of that model at the time. I was like, I'm physically dependent on one location. Every time I want to scale, it's super expensive, right? I've got to open up another location, restricted to the geographical location of that gym. And it's going to cost me between 500K and a million dollars every single time. But still good return overall is to look at it like a five-year return. And looking at that, that's what I learned about digital and online businesses. And I bought my first online business from a broker called Empire Flippers. I don't know if you've heard about them. That was an affiliate website, I think, for less than $50,000 at that time. And I was hooked. So that's what I learned about conversion rate optimization, SEO, hiring, the remote teams, affiliate marketing, email marketing, all that good stuff on how to optimize the website. So that's around the time I quit my job, joined a startup at the time, and then I also later on joined a firm called Wired Investors. So they were doing what I always wanted to do. So instead of doing acquisitions of $50,000, $100,000 websites, they were doing these seven-figure acquisitions. So we call them micro private equity firm. So at that time, I helped raise some capital, and then I moved on to the role of being a CEO of a company, they acquired a time called $99 Social. So when I took on that role, I was able to double the bottom line within five months, I was able to double the earnings. And then I moved on to be kind of a group CEO of all the SaaS companies. So I was working with each of the CEOs of the SaaS companies, helping them implement different growth playbooks, and helping them put in place different frameworks to help them really grow and get better results for our investors and everybody involved. Then about two years ago is when I left that group, and I decided to focus on launching Horizen Capital, which is the micro private equity firm that we have today. And where we really just focus only on SaaS companies or B2B SaaS as our expertise. The funny thing is, when I started Horizen, the goal was no longer about focusing on cashflow was as it was years ago. Yes, even though we provide double or triple digit returns to our investors, but the real focus is really just about empowering entrepreneurship through a different path that many people maybe don't think about, which is having that partner who can really help them scale, take their business to the next level, and provide that financial resources at the right time to the right buyer. That's my background and where we are today with Horizen Capital.