Chris Sudgen: Hello, and welcome to Electrifying Growth. A podcast brought to you by Edison Partners. I'm Chris Sudgen, the managing partner here at Edison and your host. There are moments in a person or company's journey that are undeniably electric, the spark or sparks. If you will, that propel you or your company to new Heights with Electrifying Growth, we're here to have in depth, real convers.

With great leaders who have been there and done it before Edison has been investing in high growth technology companies for more than 35 years. And I have been here at Edison doing this investing piece for more than 20 years, we've led over 225 investments. We understand that it takes great leaders and visionaries to build market leaders.

We are your support system. A CEO and management's entourage, if you will, let's introduce this episode's guest welcome Al to another episode of electronic growth, a podcast dedicated to really providing lessons from those who have been there and done it. And Al Subbloie certainly fits that bill. Al is the CEO of a company called Budderfly, which just recently had a great transaction in May, which we can't wait to show with you a little bit more detail about that, but welcome Al.

Thanks for being with us.

Al Subbloie: Thank you, Chris, looking forward to the discuss. Absolutely.

Chris Sudgen: Well, I did allude to it and I think it'd be better coming from you than us. We talk about you being our first inductee to the Edison, Mount Rushmore, some who aren't familiar with that in sports. We do these Mount Rushmores of golf of basketball, and some of the firms in our world have begun to do that.

And there'll be four faces eventually, but I was the only one today, but Al I think it'd be great if you don't mind a little of your career arc, but maybe the Edison career arc specifically of what you've done and how you've done it. It'll give some context to the questions we get into and conversation we

Al Subbloie: have.

I appreciate the topic. I don't think back very well as you know, I'm always looking forward, but I'll try to remember the history and it's gone by quickly as does life, as you know, so. You know, I started my first company when I was 24. I did two years, right. Outta college with Anderson consulting, which is Accenture essentially, and learned a lot in two years as you know, a great, great place to learn.

Certainly this is my third company you could tell with only three in that many years ago. They've averaged about 15 to 16 years each you folks were involved in the prior two, certainly the last one in a big way. And we've had great successes together, which I've enjoyed, but, you know, I start them from nothing.

It's usually an idea. The idea I would like to say matches a need with a corporate buying customer, with a heavy technology base to make it better, more efficient. And that's a good understanding of the value prop. They typically create those models. Go out there and actually lead the charge to sell them with a few people and then grow hopefully a very successful and large company.

And I love every stage of that all the way from 1, 2, 3 of us to start all the way up to the last company which we did together, which I think we got up to 2,500 employees altogether and over 200 million. So I've enjoyed every facet of the stages. I was so eager to do. As you know, which is Budderfly, which you and I discussed at a board meeting that we shared the same board together, but I really have enjoyed this journey.

It's been about five, six years since I created this business model and it's going terrific. But I could tell you the lessons that you learn along the way are so invaluable, good and bad by the way.

Chris Sudgen: Well, we'll get some of those. I do wanna talk for a minute. Cause you have really created categories, which is hard to do and test product market fit.

You've also done capital efficiently. On a relative basis, but also on an absolute basis in both the two I'm thinking of tango in the telecom expense management space, that was really no category at all. You kind of created it. We all talked so much about that one, but Budderfly, you got this overarching ESG movement, right?

Environmental, social governance, Budderfly does some things in energy management. I don't think you thought about ESG as much, but you did create a whole category. Maybe you can talk about Budderfly a little more. Did you know that you'd have these tailwinds of the environment as strong as you do? You know, when you look back

Al Subbloie: well , there are things I'll take credit for in a lot that I won't listen.

We saw some writing on the wall of the ESG movement five, six years ago, but not like it is, you know, probably some of that is fortuitous, as you can probably guess the energy space has always intrigued me. Actually, when I found a tango in 2000, you may or may not know this. I bought a URL around energy management, so I was debating it at the time.

And. Decided to do that at the tail end of the tango experience. But for me, certain things bother me, Chris, like the way they operate just bothers me. And I say, why does the world do it that way? And one of 'em with energy is just drove me crazy. In this case,

Chris Sudgen: they being the utilities or what the whole world.