What I learned from reading Constellation Software Inc. President's Letters by Mark Leonard.
Mark Leonard reminds me of Warren Buffett.
Anyone who likes reading Berkshire shareholder letters will enjoy Leonard's.
The Globe and Mail describes part of what Leonard has accomplished at his company, Constellation Software.
With an initial $25 million investment in 1995, Mark Leonard has built consolation into a world leading consolidator of vertical market software companies.
These are companies that create products to help run businesses in specific industries.
Over the years, Constellation has acquired over 500 businesses.
Typically, Constellations acquisitions are small in the two to $4 million range, but add them all up, slip in a dose of Constellations financial and operational discipline, and you have a company with a market cap of $40 billion.
In this age of zero privacy, Mark Leonard has managed to maintain a practically unthinkable level of anonymity for just about any individual, let alone an executive who runs one of Canada's most dynamic and fastest growing software companies.
That was an excerpt from a blog post about the founder of Constellation Software, which is Mark Leonard.
I just spent the last several days reading every single one of his shareholder letters.
And so that is what I'm going to talk to you about today.
And so Mark's interesting for a number of reasons.
One I just touched on in that excerpt, he took a $25 million investment almost 30 years ago and has compounded it over, what, 27 years to a $40 billion market cap.
I'm obsessed with people that found and run the same company for a long period of time.
Based on my math, Mark was 39 when he started the company, and he's still working on the company.
And he's 66 years old today.
What also makes him interesting is that he's a recluse.
There's only one photograph that you can find online of what he looks like.
He actually looks strikingly similar to Rick Rubin.
And so outside of the occasional underground podcast that you might be able to download on the dark web, the only way to get information about him is to read his shareholder letters or listen to his investor calls.