Writing

We occasionally publish our work in an effort to help advance thinking in topics we care about and to learn alongside the people we most want to work with.

April 8, 2025

Developing Buildfire's Sustainable Growth Engine

At Curious, we focus on acquiring promising SaaS businesses in the $1-5 million ARR range with untapped growth potential. Rather than looking for exits, we take a long-term approach, implementing strategic transformations that drive sustainable growth.In this post I'd like to share how we think about growth post-acquisition through the lens of one of our portfolio companies: Buildfire.

March 7, 2025

Transitioning Business Ownership: Lessons from Convox

Transitioning ownership of a company is one of the most significant changes an organization can undergo. This post shares insights from our experience transitioning Convox, a platform that simplifies cloud infrastructure management for developers. While every business transition has unique elements, the lessons we learned can provide valuable guidance for others navigating similar changes.

December 23, 2024

2024 Shareholder Letter

As 2024 comes to a close, along with the first full year of operations at Curious, I wanted to take a moment to recap on the work we’ve done, the learnings we’ve earned, and the future we believe will start to come into view. In just over a year, we’ve established Curious as a preferred buyer for founders. This is due to our ability to move quickly, our permanent capital base, and our team’s deep operational experience — something many claim, but few firms actually possess.

October 31, 2024

Welcoming Buildfire

Buildfire is a really remarkable story. The company was founded in 2014 and has been a key player in the mobile app development space. This happened during a time when mobile apps evolved greatly and eventually emerged as the key platform of today. It’s difficult to constantly adapt, and Buildfire has been able to do that.

October 9, 2024

Ensuring on Smooth Migrations

At Curious, our focus is on buying and operating software companies for the long-term, and a big part of that success comes from having a clear, well-structured transition process. Over time, we’ve fine-tuned this approach to make sure everything runs smoothly—for both the companies we acquire and our own internal teams. Here's a deep dive and links to our internal resources.

August 8, 2024

On Debt and Boards

Not enough is said about board composition in early-stage companies and the decisions they encourage founders to make. Let's look at the incentive structure of these boards and how those incentives are driving greater use of debt in venture-backed startups.

August 2, 2024

Why Curious?

We often get asked, why Curious? It's one of the most important questions for us to have a clear answer to -- so much so that we include this in every LOI (letter of intent) that we submit. Given our commitment to transparency, we wanted to publish the answer to this question publicly. This is our promise to every company we work with.

May 29, 2024

Valuing Venture-Backed Software Companies

In the world of venture capital, you might think that valuation plays a crucial role in investment decisions. As a former VC, I’ll tell you that you’d be wrong. It’s all about backing the next big thing - rather than haggling over price. We're sharing our underwriting methodology to shed some light on what we believe to be achievable when you are not restricted to traditional PE or VC ways of thinking.

May 17, 2024

A Bridge Too Far

Much has been said about the slowdown in Venture Capital dollars flowing to startups, particularly early-stage startups, but not much has been said about the fundamentals of why. If 2023 was the year of the of the bridge round (and we’re seeing that it was), 2024 is the year of a bridge too far.

April 19, 2024

Welcoming Convox to the Curious Family

We're excited to announce the addition of Convox to the Curious family. This is our first majority acquisition from the new $16M permanent capital fund and a perfect example of the work this fund is dedicated to doing.

October 16, 2023

Announcing $16M in Permanent Capital

Announcing Curious Fund II, a dedicated $16M to help provide an alternate path for software companies. We acquire majority interests and operate companies profitably, for the long-term.