Acqwired Blog
Frameworks, tactics, and research from 35+ years of institutional deal sourcing — applied to the AI-native era.
From 1–3 bidders in 1985 to 50–200+ today — how the deal sourcing landscape evolved and why manual research is now the bottleneck to proprietary deal flow.
High-growth, founder-owned companies with 90%+ customer retention don't need capital — so they never talk to PE. Here's how to find them before bankers do.
Generic PE outreach gets a 2% response rate. The firms winning founder conversations show up with something valuable first — before asking for anything.
How applying hypothesis-driven thinking, continuous improvement, and output measurement to BD creates a repeatable, scalable sourcing machine.
Generic AI-generated emails are flooding founder inboxes and burning hard-won banker relationships. Four critical mistakes — and how to avoid them.
A three-phase framework for new PE business development professionals to build relationships, learn sectors, and generate deal flow in their first quarter.
As AI commoditizes data and analytics, the only sustainable competitive edge in PE deal sourcing is the one thing algorithms can't replicate: trust.
AI is not disrupting markets uniformly. Understanding contestable vs. non-contestable markets — and Baumol's Cost Disease — reshapes where PE should be deploying capital.