Jeff Galowich

Hey Jeff — similar path in a way (IB → PE-adjacent). been thinking a lot about proprietary origination in B2B software lately. would be good to connect.

Hey Jeff, similar-ish background — I came through banking at CS & Greenhill in London into growth equity, not through law and operating like you, but we both ended up acquiring software businesses. origination was always the same story for me — clear thesis, decent relationships, but no proprietary system of record tying anything together. every deal virtually sourced from scratch, nothing compounding over time. curious if that's still how most funds operate or if I'm behind the times? — Russ

Hey Jeff, looks like we share a similar background, though I was in London doing growth equity deals at Treis not in Chicago acquiring and operating software businesses like you're doing at Blue Horizon. the pattern I keep seeing with most funds is weirdly consistent — strong thesis, solid network, but no proprietary system of record. the people, tools and ideas are never really connected, so every deal is virtually sourced from scratch. nothing compounds on itself. curious if that resonates or if you've built something different given you've been at this since 2019? — Russ

hey Jeff — no worries if the timing's off. most funds I talk to have tried some version of building origination in-house — analyst pulling from Pitchbook or Grata, maybe using ChatGPT to help qualify, dumping it into a spreadsheet. each piece kind of works, but there's no system of record tying it together. the people, tools and ideas are all disconnected so everything ends up out of sync. been helping a few funds like Noble Rock work through that. curious if you've run into the same thing at Blue Horizon? — Russ

totally get it if origination infrastructure isn't top of mind right now — most funds have 10 things ahead of it on the priority list. the funds I've seen crack it early just tend to compound deal flow in a way that's hard to replicate later. if it ever moves up the list, I'm easy to find. — Russ

Jeff, Saw we share similar paths (sort of) from restructuring advisory work to software growth investing. Though I'm originally from Zimbabwe and been at the game for a fraction of the time you have.   I'm sure you get emails like this all the time, but hopefully this one is a little different. At least because it is not ai.  In a previous life I was deploying €30m growth tickets into promising European companies, but recently I've been building custom deal sourcing systems for growth investors like you: Axiom Equity in the UK (they do £60m+ equity tickets) and Noble Rock Software here in the US. They've been focused on mapping b2b workflow saas markets & scoring mission criticality, switching costs, etc.  Figured I'd reach out because Blue Horizon came up as strong fit based on my other clients and your focus on profitable B2B software. It's not fancy, but it's powerful because we build it custom to you. It handles the whole origination stream from finding companies that match your thesis to doing outreach and booking meetings with ceos and founders.   Let me know if worth a call to discuss further.  Very best, Russ searchloop.ai  www.linkedin.com/in/russellt23

Jeff, Most PE associates I work with spend 80% of their time doing work that could be 95% automated. The workflow looks like: Export companies from PitchBook → Open each website → Copy information → Score manually → Hunt for contact info → Draft outreach → Track everything in Excel. That's a $200K-$300K employee doing $25/hour data entry work. For a fund like Blue Horizon that's thesis-driven around operator-led acquisitions, this is backwards. Your associates should be evaluating whether a founder's legacy is actually protectable and if the software is truly mission-critical. Not hunting down email addresses. Same quality of analysis. Just 25x faster when you automate the grunt work properly. Russ

Jeff, PitchBook will tell you a company raised $8M Series A, has 47 employees, and did $12M ARR last year. It won't tell you: - Whether their pricing model creates real lock-in - What customer benefits they actually claim on their site - How deep their compliance requirements run - Whether implementation takes 2 weeks or 6 months - If their software is a nice-to-have or mission-critical For your thesis around mission-critical vertical software, the second list matters infinitely more than the first. Expensive databases are great for finding companies. Terrible at evaluating them. That gap is what we built automation to fill - reads websites like a senior associate would, extracts what actually indicates defensibility and stickiness. Just 1000x faster. Russ

Jeff, The way most funds source deals is structurally broken. You hire smart people. Pay them $200K-$300K. Then have them spend most of their week doing data entry - copying pricing information from websites, hunting for phone numbers, updating spreadsheets. Meanwhile the actual strategic work - determining if a software business is genuinely mission-critical, whether a founder's legacy can survive institutional ownership, if switching costs are real or imagined - gets squeezed into whatever time is left. It's not a people problem. It's a process problem. We built automation that handles the first part so your team can focus on the second. Human-in-the-loop AI that extracts mission-critical signals from company websites at scale. I know you've got these emails before. But probably not from someone who used to sit in your seat, got frustrated with the same workflow, and actually built something different. Russ

Jeff, Timing might not be right, which is fine. If you ever want to talk about automating the grunt work of deal sourcing so your team can focus on actual evaluation - I'm here. Russ