Bill Kloza
Bill is a Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Blue Ladder Capital. Bill brings over a decade of software investing experience along with several years as Co-CEO of one of BLC's portfolio companies, an industry-leading vertical SaaS platform.
Before starting Blue Ladder, Bill was an investor at M33 Growth, where he focused on growth-stage B2B software. Earlier, he spent time at JMI Equity, an $8B+ software-focused growth equity firm. Across those two seats he worked on dozens of investments spanning a wide range of SaaS verticals, which gave him a strong feel for what makes certain software businesses break out while others stall.
Earlier in his career, Bill was a software-focused investment banker and strategy consultant at Bulger Partners (later acquired by EY-Parthenon), advising SaaS founders and PE firms on M&A, capital raises, and value creation. The combination of that early deal work and years on the buy-side is part of why CEOs often describe BLC’s investment process as efficient and direct.
Bill has also sat in the operator’s seat. After BLC’s acquisition of Nuqleous (now rebranded as Engine), a Bentonville-based retail analytics software company, Bill served as Co-CEO alongside his partner Garrett Levey for several years. Together with the founders, they led a number of add-on acquisitions, rebuilt the go-to-market motion, and grew the business meaningfully before taking on a growth investment from Rubicon Technology Partners. Bill draws on that day-to-day operating experience in how he works with every BLC portfolio company today.
Bill graduated from the Carroll School of Management at Boston College with a degree in Finance and Information Systems. He lives in Portsmouth, NH.
What's the best part of being an investor now that you've led a SaaS platform as a CEO?
What kind of companies do you love acquiring?
What's an underrated lesson from your years operating?
Best golf course you've played, and the next one on the list?
What's your live-sports résumé look like?
Saying 'no' is hard. When is it the right answer?
Our largest customer offered us over a million dollars a year to build a new module. We ran the diligence, found the category had defeated everyone who tried it, and said no while keeping them as our biggest advocate.
Why we treated every customer migration as an opportunity
Customers don't resist change. They resist uncertainty. Handled with a disciplined three-person team, a migration becomes one of the most productive growth activities in the business.
Why we stopped treating price increases as optional
Some customers hadn't seen a price increase in close to a decade while the cost to serve them rose every year. Treating pricing as a normal operating discipline restored the economics without breaking the relationships.
Want to learn more? Start a conversation.
We'd love to meet, trade notes on what we're seeing as the software world goes through a generational evolution, and share more about our philosophy for building great software companies.