Why I joined Mosaic as an Advisor

Have you heard of Mosaic? Or as I like to call it — "SourceScrub 2.0."

Ian and I first met and started hanging out playing squash at the Harvard Club in NYC (I have neither gone to Harvard nor do I play squash so you could tell I genuinely wanted to get to know the guy before I took on this role). Ian Gutwinski is a stand-up dude.

Aside from the fact that he comes in with a background of accounting, investment banking, large-cap PE, and an HBS network — as if all of this wasn’t impressive enough… Mosaic has already seen SOLID traction.

I’m a revenue guy, the first thing I ask when hearing about someone's company is how much have they sold. I believe that growth solves all problems — Ian has already generated hundreds of thousands of dollars of ARR and has multiple Megafund customers. Phenomenal for a team of 1 and some outsourced help. Most importantly, Mosaic is solving a problem Ian knows very well from being on the Buyside for multiple years as an Investor.

This background genuinely reminds me of the days when I joined SourceScrub as their Employee #2 after I heard about the traction that they had started getting (including having me at Battery Ventures as a customer amongst a few others). If we can emulate what we saw with SourceScrub (primarily selling to PE firms and eventually expanding to investment banks without taking on a lofty valuation), there is potential for success here. A lot of it.

Private Equity has historically been competitive (now more than ever before) — utilizing a tool that helps you run models faster with various assumptions and cases through a modern web-application? That too with minimal errors? And one that you can customize eventually to your firm's base-cases and various scenarios... makes sense to me.

Software has disrupted almost everything that we do today on a day-to-day, about time PE adapts more and more of it.

I look forward to seeing Ian and his team more and more often on our trips to NYC visiting their offices in Midtown Manhattan (575 5th Avenue — definitely stop by if you're around!). My own venture, OfficeHours, might even find a way to help train analysts on using Mosaic after they understand the basics of LBO modeling for their PE interviews, but more to come on that later!