The customer left before the feature arrived. Tyler Fair’s young company had spent a month or two building something an early client wanted. By the time it was ready, that client had moved to another provider. Nobody else used it. A small software company had delivered the answer to a question its audience had stopped asking.
Fair later told the story himself. It is an unusually useful place to begin a founder’s biography: a completed piece of work, an empty seat, and a bill measured in time. Sourcescrub existed to spare investment professionals repetitive research. Its co-founder was discovering that choosing the wrong work could be expensive too.
A job that kept producing the same problem
Fair came to software through finance. He graduated from the University of Arizona in 2007 and worked at Harvey & Company, the Newport Beach advisory firm, finding investment opportunities for private-equity clients. After roughly three and a half years, he moved to Serent Capital in San Francisco to develop its proprietary business-development strategy.
That work put him close to a peculiar information problem. Investors wanted to discover businesses before a sale process brought them into everybody’s field of view. Yet much of the readily available information concerned companies that had already raised money or changed hands. The businesses Fair wanted to find often sat outside that familiar paper trail.
A company could be operating, selling and appearing at industry events without having generated the transaction records an investor expected to search. There were clues elsewhere: exhibitor lists, buyers’ guides, awards publications. Collecting them was a separate job, and the job returned with every new research assignment. A spreadsheet has a remarkable talent for creating another spreadsheet.
At Serent, Fair trained researchers to assemble information on bootstrapped companies. In 2014, that effort began taking the shape of a business. He connected with Prescott Nasser, a childhood friend with investment-banking experience, who built the platform around the research. Sourcescrub dates its founding to 2015. Serent became its first customer.
- Find the trailTrade shows, industry lists, buyers’ guides
- Make it usableCollect, organize and verify company information
- Start a conversationHelp a deal team decide whom to approach
Having a customer at the beginning gave the idea an immediate test. The people buying it understood the underlying task. They could judge whether the information helped them do their work. For Fair, the research operation he knew from the inside had become something another firm could subscribe to.
The feature that outlived its customer
Knowing the task did not settle every product decision. The unused feature was a lesson in how eagerly a small team can respond when somebody asks for something. One customer’s enthusiasm can occupy a disproportionate share of the room, particularly when the room contains very few customers.
Fair’s conclusion was to concentrate on essential functions and treat optional additions more carefully. The episode deserves its place alongside the investments and expansion announcements. It shows the cost of a decision while the company still had limited resources, when a month of development represented a substantial commitment.
There is a distinction between hearing a customer and handing that customer the roadmap. Fair had built Sourcescrub from direct experience of a problem; extending it required deciding which other problems belonged in the same product. Each yes consumed time that could have gone toward the reason customers subscribed in the first place.
His early sales relationships offered a more encouraging lesson. By 2020, both firms where he had worked since college were paying customers. He took pride in having maintained their trust. Leaving a firm had not ended the relationship. He had returned with something useful to sell.
First the subscription, then the investment
Mainsail Partners began using Sourcescrub in 2015. Four years later, on November 6, 2019, it announced a growth equity investment in the company. Nasser described Mainsail as an early customer whose feedback had helped shape the product. The investor had already spent years on the other side of the subscription.
That sequence gives Fair’s growth story a pleasingly practical rhythm. Before the investment conversation came the recurring experience of using the software. A customer could see the company’s understanding of the work in its ordinary operations, across research assignments rather than a single presentation.
The new capital was intended for product development, customer success and expanded sales and marketing. By then, Sourcescrub served hundreds of customers across investment banking, private equity, venture capital, lending and corporate development. The business had moved beyond its initial circle while continuing to sell into professions Fair understood.
In September 2021, Francisco Partners announced another strategic growth investment. The company then reported coverage of 1.7 million businesses and more than 160 million private-company data points. Its data-operations team numbered over 600. Existing investor Mainsail, the founders and management would remain significant equity holders.
Those figures describe an operation that had grown far past a founder assembling a list. They also reveal how much human work sat inside the software business. The promise depended on gathering and maintaining information, along with making that information searchable. Expansion required an organization capable of doing both repeatedly.
The founder has only so many hours
By March 2022, Fair was describing a company approaching $20 million in revenue. His initial idea had been more modest: perhaps a business with $5 million in revenue that could eventually be sold. The distance between those two numbers brought a new management problem. He could no longer personally do everything that needed doing.
“Hire smart people and get out of the way.”
Tyler Fair, on leadership
Delegation, in his account, required letting colleagues learn and giving them room to approach work differently. The founder’s preferred method could not become a condition of every useful result. The objective was to free his time for the work where he could make the largest contribution.
The progression echoes the company’s beginning. Fair had once run out of time to conduct research himself. Building an organization did not abolish the limit; it moved the limit to his own decisions and attention. A business can employ hundreds of people while still waiting for one person to stop being involved in everything.
A database cannot shake your hand
Fair’s view of dealmaking leaves considerable space for personal contact. In an October 2021 interview, he described online information as a way to improve discovery, track companies and begin relationships. He also stressed the continuing importance of meeting people and understanding a business before investing.
Preparation mattered from the owner’s side of the table too. An investor who understood the market could have a more useful discussion about helping the company. Technology could accelerate the preliminary work and make limited meeting time count. The eventual conversation still asked something of the people in it.
In a guide for a slower deal market, Fair urged investors to build their pipelines and define clearly the businesses they wanted to pursue. Waiting for opportunities to arrive left less control over the search. His advice followed the same logic as his product: decide what you are looking for, then organize the effort to find it.
A March 2025 anniversary conversation brought that logic back to an early user. Fair spoke with Sean Kelly of Insignia Capital Group about how sourcing had changed over a decade. Kelly described using data to make more targeted approaches and decide whether a conference merited attending. Better preparation could mean choosing to stay home.
There is some understated comedy in building conference intelligence that helps someone avoid a conference. It is also a useful account of the value being sold. A longer list of possible appointments has limited appeal if the appointments should never have been made.
The company becomes somebody else’s target
Fair’s own operating role changed in January 2023, when Sourcescrub appointed Jim Obsitnik as CEO. The announcement said Fair and Nasser would continue as board members and significant equity holders. The company had recently expanded to London. The founders were handing over an organization that reached well beyond its original research desk.
Nasser returned to a full-time operating role as CEO in September 2024. Then, on August 8, 2025, Datasite announced its acquisition of Sourcescrub from Francisco Partners, with plans to integrate the business’s data and capabilities into Grata. At that point, Sourcescrub reported insights on 16 million companies drawn from more than 220,000 information sources.
The acquisition brought the work of discovering businesses closer to tools used elsewhere in a transaction. Fair had helped build a company around finding other companies. Its own place in the market had now become part of a larger combination.
His history has room for the boardroom and the abandoned feature, the investment announcement and the research list. The details belong together. They show how a familiar task became a product, how customers helped shape it, and how growth forced its founder to reconsider his own job.
The original problem was ordinary enough to be overlooked: too much time spent finding information that somebody needed. Fair stayed with it long enough to build a business. Along the way, he learned that time could disappear into an unnecessary feature just as easily as into an unfinished spreadsheet.