Mark Dickinson

Hey Mark — similar IB → PE path. Been thinking a lot about proprietary origination in energy & industrials lately. Would be good to connect.

Hey Mark, similar background — though I was doing European growth equity not building an energy PE firm like Velocity. most energy & industrials 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. 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 Mark, similar background — though I was doing European growth equity not building an energy PE firm like Velocity. most energy & industrials 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. 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 Mark — 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 Velocity, or was it just us? — Russ

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

Hey Mark, see we share a similar PE path, though I was in London doing growth equity not building an energy & industrials firm like Velocity. 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. but proprietary deal flow stays inconsistent. nothing connects systematically — the firm's thesis and network intelligence don't feed into each other, so origination never builds on itself. do you disagree? Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

Hey Mark, been talking to a few energy & industrials funds this week and a pattern keeps showing up. 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 Velocity has cracked that or if it's the same pattern. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

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

hey Mark — 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 Velocity. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Mark — no stress on any of this. 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