Nathan Dey

Hey Nathan — similar PE background, been deep in small business acquisition origination thinking lately. Would be good to connect.

Hey Nathan, see we share a similar PE path, though I was in London doing growth equity not building a search fund like Saltspring. 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 Nathan, see we share a similar PE path, though I was in London doing growth equity not building a search fund like Saltspring. 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 Nathan — 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 Saltspring, or was it just us? — Russ

hey Nathan — appreciate the connect either way. spend most of my time wiring origination systems for small business acquisition funds — if that ever becomes a thing worth talking about, I'm around. — Russ

Hey Nathan, similar background — though I was doing European growth equity not building a search fund like Saltspring. 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 Nathan, something I keep coming back to with small business acquisition 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 Saltspring has cracked that or if it's the same pattern. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

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

hey Nathan — been thinking about this a lot — the difference between funds that build origination infrastructure in the first couple of years vs those that keep running on brokers and inbound. by year 3-4 the gap is pretty hard to close. curious if you've been thinking about this at Saltspring. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23

hey Nathan — appreciate you reading these either way. I'm deep in origination infrastructure for PE funds all day — if you ever want to swap notes on what's working, I'm easy to find. Russell searchloop.ai linkedin.com/in/russellt23