Founder Thesis
Weekly insights on the decisions that determine what a buyer will pay, and what most founders never know until it is too late.
Issue 02
ARR tells a buyer what you earn. These levers determine what they will pay.
Read →Issue 03
The value reductions buyers apply before the founder knows they are being priced.
Read →Issue 04
Why buyers pay more for what they can trust, transfer, and underwrite.
Read →Issue 06
Most founders know their revenue number. Fewer know which revenue a buyer will believe.
Read →Issue 07
Why customer history is not the same as customer transferability.
Read →ISSUE 08
Most founders assume they own their software. Diligence often reveals otherwise.
Read →ISSUE 09
The retention metric that tells a buyer whether your growth is real or recycled.
Read →ISSUE 10
How founder dependency turns from strength into earnout, retention risk, and discount.
Read →ISSUE 11
A buyer does not pay for what you built. It pays for what it can underwrite.
Read →ISSUE 12
Technical diligence is not a bug report. It is a budget for owning the product after closing.
Read →ISSUE 13
The deal was ready to close. Then the seller discovered it could not deliver what the buyer had agreed to buy.
Read →ISSUE 14
Exit preparation is not a presentation exercise. It is an economic one. The prepared business premium is not paid for polish, but for the confidence a buyer can underwrite.
Read →ISSUE 15
A business that performs and a business a buyer can own are not the same thing. The quality that lets it change hands is acquirability, and it is built years before a buyer asks to see it.
Read →ISSUE 16
A single buyer can give you a deal. Only a market gives you a price. The buyer who calls first has every reason to make sure no other ever does.
Read →ISSUE 17
The clause did not arrive with bad intentions. It sat quietly in the contract stack until a buyer's legal team went looking for it.
Read →ISSUE 18
The recurring revenue a founder presents and the recurring revenue a buyer will pay for are two different numbers. The difference is found during exclusivity, at the moment the founder has nowhere else to go.
Read →ISSUE 19
An earnout is not cash at closing. It is a bet, settled later, on numbers the seller no longer controls. Founders accept earnouts to close a valuation gap. What they are usually closing is a confidence gap.
Read →ISSUE 20
For twenty years, seat-based software revenue compounded because customers hired. AI is weakening that link from both ends. The seat is not dead. What is dying is the automatic expansion it once promised, and buyers have already made the pricing model itself a diligence question.
Read →ISSUE 21
The first negotiation sets the headline price. The second decides how much of that price survives completion.
Read →ISSUE 22
When a software company bills for the human labour its own product helps customers remove, AI creates a problem that appears in none of the usual numbers. Customer productivity rises while vendor revenue can stall or fall, inside the same contracts, with nobody leaving.
Read →
Sell-side technology M&A advisory. Sydney, Australia.
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