Recently, I sat down with Fred Voccola, co-founder and Vice Chairman of Kaseya and now Chairman and CEO of Simpro Group. If you follow tech, you know the name. If you don't, you have almost certainly seen it on Miami’s Heat arena on Biscayne Boulevard.
Over a decade as CEO, Fred took Kaseya from a struggling single-product company doing roughly $85 million in revenue and turned it into a $15 billion platform with nearly 5,000 employees, 18 acquisitions, and a place among the most valuable privately held software companies in the world.
That’s just one chapter. Fred sold his first software company his senior year of college for about $50,000, joined the buyer as a 21-year-old executive, took it public, and watched it get acquired before he turned 23. He scaled a web hosting business from zero to $60 million in revenue and out the other side of the dot-com bubble. He then co-founded Identify Software, sold to BMC for $150 million in 2006, one of the largest strategic software sales of its era. He built that company in Miami in 2004, when scaling a 150-person software business here was considered a bad idea.
Today he is building Simpro out of downtown Miami, with naming rights on a new tower going up soon and a plan to grow from 180 employees to a thousand within three years. His thesis is simple: the trades are the largest underserved market in B2B software, and AI is about to make them dramatically more profitable.
Why the obsessive founder is the only reliable predictor of a company that keeps winning, and what happens when the operator in the weeds is replaced by a consultant.
The difference between micromanaging the business and micromanaging the people, and theKPI discipline that let Fred challenge any number, at any level, in a 5,500-person company.
How Moore's Law pushed enterprise-grade technology down to dental offices, contractors, and law firms by 2014, creating the wave Kaseya rode to a $15 billion valuation in a decade.
Inside the 2021 Kaseya ransomware incident: 37,000 customers, roughly 30 million downstream businesses exposed, and how Fred worked with the FBI to catch the attackers, leading to only about 50 customers ultimately being affected.
The Simpro thesis: 23,000 field service businesses, more than two million tradespeople, and 150 million jobs of data, now being turned into an AI-driven digital workforce that takes contractor margins from 5% to north of 20%.
Why Fred calls trade contractors the second responders of society, and what changes when you multiply the economics of the people who keep the lights, water, and air conditioning on.
What his father built at Datacom, the transponder that became E-ZPass, and the dinner-table lesson behind every company Fred has started since.
Why he has moved three companies to Miami, and what the immigrant, hustle-driven DNA of this city does to a workforce.
Why he never says "exit," only "liquidity event," and what he has learned about what money actually buys.
Fred tells a story about Kelly Slater being asked why he wins every surfing contest. The answer was that the first thing you do is pick the right wave. Fred has picked four of them, and he will tell you he is just getting started.
