Show me a growth strategy from the private equity playbook, and I’ll show you an ambitious, practical founder doing it differently.
I just interviewed a scaled-up founder who is doing exactly that with acquisitions.
Ajay Gupta founded Stirista in San Antonio after helping with micro-targeting a presidential campaign in 2008.
His first product identified people who spoke a second language for multicultural marketing, built from scanned baby-name books, a hundred thousand first names, and 107 sales calls before Dish Network became the first big client at $100,000.
Stirista now helps major brands find new customers using data, connected TV, and email, with identity-enriched data as the “secret sauce” behind the targeting.
This data and software company has roughly 270 employees and will clear $100 million in profitable revenue this year.
It was bootstrapped for over a decade before a single $14 million growth equity investment round from Wavecrest Growth Partners.
Ajay is now the serial acquirer, rolling up founder-run data businesses whose owners want to retire and find a good home for their employees.
Nearly every deal uses an earnout, avoids debt, and keeps most of the staff, deliberately contrasting with private-equity roll-ups that gut companies for profit.
Ajay described their acquisition strategy:
“We’ve identified a type of business we like to acquire: founder-run companies, usually an older founder looking to retire. We’ve already worked with almost ninety percent of them in some capacity, so there’s a trust factor.
“The founder wants to retire, and they’re looking for a nice home for their employees. That’s a very important part of it. And these founders are often tired, so some of them actually end up working with us for a couple of years afterward, because now they have the freedom to go out and sell.
“A lot of them were sellers who built nice small businesses, then got bogged down by payroll and leases and all the things we free them from. As a founder and CEO myself, it’s an easy conversation to have — and we have a track record of keeping most of the employees, so they know it’s not somebody coming in to gut the company down to the bones just for profit.”
They never use debt to finance these acquisitions. They use their growing cash reserves and acquire efficiently with earnouts.
Practical founders don’t have to reject the PE playbook.
They can steal the good plays and run them their own way.
Check out this interview with Ajay Gupta on the Practical Founders podcast.
