Bart Foster

Hey Bart — similar IB → PE path. Been thinking a lot about proprietary origination in tech and business services lately. Would be good to connect.

Hey Bart, see we share a similar PE path, though I was in London doing growth equity not co-investing alongside sponsors like L Capital. most funds I talk to have a database — PitchBook or Grata — maybe a CRM, and then the origination setup is mostly Excel and email from there. but proprietary deal flow still feels thin. thesis, network, and intelligence never sync into one system — so origination resets every cycle instead of compounding. do you disagree? — Russ

Hey Bart, see we share a similar PE path, though I was in London doing growth equity not co-investing alongside sponsors like L Capital. most funds I talk to have a database — PitchBook or Grata — maybe a CRM, and then the origination setup is mostly Excel and email from there. but proprietary deal flow still feels thin. thesis, network, and intelligence never sync into one system — so origination resets every cycle instead of compounding. do you disagree? — Russ

hey Bart — this kept rattling around. when I was doing growth equity we had every subscription going — PitchBook, CRM, enrichment tools, the lot — and I still spent half my time manually pulling origination together across all of it. always wondered if that was just us being disorganised or if it's genuinely universal. did you ever run into that at L Capital, or was it just us? — Russ

hey Bart — appreciate the connect either way. I'm in and around tech & services origination all day — if you ever want to swap notes on what's working, I'm easy to find. — Russ

Hey Bart, looks like we share a similar IB → PE path, though I was doing growth equity for a European fund not co-investing alongside sponsors. the typical origination setup I see is a data subscription, a CRM that's half-populated, and a lot of Excel and Outlook doing the heavy lifting. yet the off-market pipeline stays weirdly thin. the intelligence is all there but it's scattered across tools and inboxes — so nothing compounds into a real origination edge. do you disagree? Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

Hey Bart, been talking to a few tech & services funds this week and a pattern keeps showing up. most funds have targets in the CRM but no one's quite sure what thesis they came in under, whether someone's already reached out, or if they're worth retrying. no system of record tying it together — everyone's working from a slightly different picture of the pipeline. curious whether L Capital has cracked that or if it's the same pattern. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Bart — one more thought on this. at my old fund we had a solid stack and smart people, and origination still felt like it restarted from scratch every cycle. took me a while to realise it wasn't a people problem — the tools just didn't talk to each other. did you ever run into that at L Capital, or was it just us? Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Bart — one thing I keep coming back to from my time doing growth equity — the funds with real proprietary pipelines aren't just seeing more deals. they're seeing them earlier. that changes everything downstream — pricing, competition, conviction. curious if you've been thinking about this at L Capital. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Bart — appreciate you reading these either way. spend most of my time thinking about origination infrastructure for funds — if that ever becomes a thing worth talking about, I'm around. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23