Timothy Goddard
Thanks for the introduction, Blair. George, let’s go to you for a brief introduction of yourself and your firm.
George Kase
Perfect. First, thanks to the Corum team for having me on the panel. My name is George Kase, I’m a partner at Marlin Equity, a member of the investment committee. Marlin is a PE firm based just outside of LA in Hermosa Beach, CA. We started relatively recently in 2005 as a $60M fund. We’ve grown pretty rapidly and have five funds with over $3B of capital under management. We’re very much an operationally focused firm in that most of our folks are in operations, but we have a vertical expertise operating partners on one end of the matrix and then functional expertise in things like finance, HR, tax on the other end of the matrix. The only thing that we typically outsource in the deal is the actual legal documentation, the rest is done in house by Marlin’s operations team.
We broadly focus on the technology sector and all different nuances within technology and technology enabled services. In our transaction structure we’ve done a lot of corporate carve-outs.
Myself, I spend most of my time in healthcare IT and lead that vertical here at Marlin. I’d say from a perspective going forward it’s a vertical that we at the firm and my personally are very excited about. I think you’re seeing trends where there are unprecedented levels of regulatory changes going on within healthcare and this could be anything from ACOs, paper value, ICD10, that’s just putting tremendous pressure on healthcare providers. I think the ability of technology to do two things, one is to improve clinical outcomes, and two is to take costs down in the system, that’s just imperative, so we’re looking for companies within healthcare IT that can do one or two of those things, hopefully both of them, and that’s really our sector of focus.