Getting Paid to Assess Tech
October 9, 2017
Welcome to my new blog! I am glad you came by to enjoy the journey as I continue to build up the brand “Gary Dollinger”. The entire purpose of this blog is for my to impart my knowledge and random thoughts to the rest of the world while hopefully providing some quality entertainment.
Who is this Gary Dollinger and why should I care?
Great question – I am glad I thought of it. For the last 20+ years I have been a technologist and entrepreneur working my way through the business world. At the end of 2016, I sold my company Pongworks Consulting after 9 years of building up a great little consulting firm specializing in working with startup and new ideas. Now I focus my attention to my new job – leading tech diligence projects for mergers and acquisitions. I took a good role at West Monroe Partners and now get to see behind the curtain of many great (and not so great) companies. They actually pay me to be a cynical a$$ that is always looking to see what’s wrong. I go in and listen to all the great info from the company and then question everything. I am there to find risks, assess future costs, and make recommendations to private equity firms if they should spent tens and hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire the company. What’s best is they actually pay me cash to do this!
So as you can imagine, to do a job like this you need to have been around the block a few times – and I have been. I’ve worked in many industries, especially in healthcare, real estate, travel, and even sports (I actually ran a online daily fantasy sports gambling site back in 2012 until money and legal got in the way – a story for another day). In my early days I was a programmer writing in the Microsoft stack. I was (and still am) a wiz when it comes to everything data – especially at looking at someone’s data, figuring out what is really going on, and making magic out of it. I see patterns where others see junk. It’s just what I do.
Why should you care about what I have to say? Well, if private equity companies care about my thought and opinions and make $100M decisions on what I say then maybe I have some value to you. Over time I’ll give away some of my secrets – things I look for and ways I know you are lying to me. I might also tell you something interesting about where the market is going. Maybe one day I will even make you say, “hmm”.
Ok, that’s it – I have nothing more to say at this point. Welcome and please keep coming back for more.
