Brad Johl

Hey Brad — similar PE background, been deep in founder-owned deal origination thinking lately. Would be good to connect.

Hey Brad, see we share a similar PE path, though I was in London doing growth equity not deploying permanent capital into founder-owned businesses. 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 Brad, see we share a similar PE path, though I was in London doing growth equity not deploying permanent capital into founder-owned businesses. 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 Brad — 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 Acacia, or was it just us? — Russ

hey Brad — appreciate the connect either way. I'm in and around founder-owned deal origination all day — if you ever want to swap notes on what's working, I'm easy to find. — Russ

Hey Brad, similar background — though I was doing European growth equity not deploying permanent capital into founder-owned businesses. most founder-owned funds I talk to are running on PitchBook or Grata, maybe Affinity, and then basically Excel and email for everything else on the origination side. 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 Brad, something I keep coming back to with founder-owned funds. most funds I talk to are still 70-80% broker-dependent for deal flow. works fine until two funds get shown the same deal and it becomes a pricing war. the proprietary pipeline is the thing that's supposed to prevent that — but it rarely gets built systematically. curious whether Acacia has cracked that or if it's the same pattern. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Brad — 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 Acacia, or was it just us? Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Brad — 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 Acacia. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Brad — 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