I’m Sean Markey. I spend most of my time on acquisitions: who’s buying, who should be, and how the good deals actually come together versus how people imagine they do.

The short version of my opinion is that buying is the most underused growth lever there is. Founders will burn two years and a seed round building a thing they could have bought for less than they paid their growth team, because building feels like progress and buying feels like admitting something. I think that’s backwards, and most of what I write here is me arguing the point with examples.

I do this for a living, not as a hobby take. I run Winterline, where we broker and advise on acquisitions, so I see the inside of deals that never make the news: what sellers actually want, what buyers actually pay for, where deals die. This site is the version where I get to say what I think without a deal on the line.

Here’s the part that surprises people. I also edit a literary magazine about death. Hugo-nominated, which I’m still a little smug about. It is the opposite of spreadsheets and it is the best thing I do. I bring it up because the two halves are not a contradiction, they’re the same muscle: read the thing in front of you closely enough to see what it’s really doing, then say the true thing about it plainly. That’s a deal memo and it’s an edit letter.

So this is a writer’s site that happens to be obsessed with acquisitions right now. If I get obsessed with something else in three years, this is still the right home for it, because the through-line was never the topic. It was me, paying close attention, out loud.

If you’re a founder wondering whether you should be buying instead of building, or a buyer trying to read a deal you can’t quite price, those are my favorite conversations. The writing is the front door. Winterline is where the actual work happens.

Sean