At 30, Orlando Bravo, JD/MBA '97, thought his private equity career might be over. “I did three deals and when the dot-com bubble burst two out of the three went to zero,” he tells Gintare Zukauskaite, MBA ’26. “It was an absolute disaster.” 

Mentor and firm principal Carl Thoma, MBA ’73, gave him one more chance. Bravo pitched software buyouts, and five years later — “one deal at a time” — he’d become a named partner at the firm, Thoma Bravo, which today manages about $180 billion.  

“Find the [risks] that are meant for you to take,” Bravo advises. “Do the work, focus on your business, focus on you, and do your thing. That will pay huge, huge dividends, and will make everything very, very clear.”

This conversation was recorded on October 21, 2025.

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