It’s About Time, Right?

Back in 2018, I started a company called Spellbound Partners with a business partner. Spellbound was started to address what we believed to be a gap in software company technology diligence, which from what we observed was focused on a list of “check the box” items rather than understanding how the business was set up to grow and scale going forward.

Since then, Spellbound has performed technical diligence on over 100 acquisitions over the past four years. We’ve had the privilege of seeing these companies from the inside out and have learned a ton about what makes great software companies great.

As with my previous work in the startup ecosystem in Raleigh-Durham, NC as an advisor and fractional CTO, the work with Spellbound has been focused on the lower end of the market, with revenues typically between $3-7M. We also focused on the search fund ecosystem, which brought us into contact with a group of CEOs who had never run a company before, much less a software company. We learned a lot about what matters to investors and, as importantly, what doesn’t.

Having seen a lot of new companies and problems, it feels like the right time to dig back in here and begin sharing what I’ve learned. As with all of my previous work, I’ll be focused on making the topic of building software accessible for the non-technical reader, or to quote a friend of mine, the “not yet technical” reader. Over the coming months, we’ll go deep on topics like:

  • Organization design and evolution
  • Hiring engineering and product leaders
  • Evolving legacy applications
  • Building and maintaining great product culture
  • Measuring engineering performance
  • and much, much more

I realize it’s been a long time since I’ve shared anything, and I know I’ll need to re-earn your trust. But if you hang with me, I can promise you that it will be worth it. There is so much to share, and I’m committed to at least one post per week for the upcoming year, which was my cadence before things went dark.

Last, I’ll also be sharing some fun posts along the way like I used to do with my “Must Haves.”

Thanks for hanging around. Let’s do this.