Mark Richman
Translating enterprise technology into financial impact for private equity. Author of Cloud Economics for Private Equity.
Cloud Economics for Private Equity
Translating technical findings into financial impact across the entire PE deal lifecycle—from pre-LOI screening through exit preparation.
Pre-LOI Screening
Evaluating cloud economics red flags and optimization potential before letter of intent. Technology Risk Assessment framework translates findings to valuation multiples.
Due Diligence
Technical diligence focused on cloud economics—waste identification with confidence levels, EBITDA adjustments, and risk-weighted projections that inform deal pricing.
Integration Planning
Integration complexity scoring and economic modeling for multi-company cloud consolidation. Clear timelines and confidence intervals for value creation plans.
Value Creation
Portfolio-wide optimization strategies grounded in benchmarks from hundreds of PE-backed companies at AWS. Focus on improvements that enhance EBITDA and exit valuation, not just cost reduction.
Exit Preparation
Optimizing cloud economics to maximize exit valuation. Preparing infrastructure for buyer diligence and demonstrating optimization discipline that supports premium multiples.
Portfolio Management
Multi-cloud portfolio strategy and shared services platforms. Leveraging portfolio scale for better pricing and standardized optimization across companies.
AI Diligence & Unit Economics
Every target is an AI company now, and the premium is worth several turns of EBITDA. Two questions decide whether it is earned.
Capability or a Wrapper?
In a large share of companies described as AI-powered, the capability is a prompt against a commercial model — replicable by any competitor in a week. That can still be a good investment, but the premium should attach to the distribution and the workflow, not to the API call. Five diligence tests separate the two.
Does the Margin Survive Scale?
Inference cost scales with usage while SaaS pricing generally does not, so growth amplifies the margin problem rather than fixing it. A company can look healthy at current volume and be structurally unprofitable at three times the volume — and none of that is visible in the financials you underwrite against.
Fractional and Interim CTO
When a portfolio company needs someone to own technology decisions rather than advise on them, I take the CTO seat — part-time on an ongoing basis, or full-time for a defined stretch.
Fractional CTO
One to two days a week of senior technology leadership for companies that need CTO-caliber judgment without a full-time executive. Roadmap ownership, engineering org design, architecture and build-vs-buy decisions, and cloud spend governance tied to unit economics.
Interim CTO
Full-time coverage when the seat is empty — after a departure, during a carve-out, or ahead of a value creation push. Stabilize the organization, keep delivery on track, and hand over a clean operation to the permanent hire.
Cloud Economics for Private Equity
The book on translating cloud infrastructure into EBITDA impact for PE deals. Inference is now the fastest-growing line item on that bill, which is where the AI economics work picks up.