Today’s episode of Built to Sell Radio is part of our Inside the Mind of an Acquirer series. John Warrillow interviews Lee McCabe, a former Meta and Alibaba executive turned private equity investor—now an advisor helping PE firms modernize how they create value.

McCabe argues the old model of buying cheap, piling on debt, and hoping for multiple expansion is over. Interest rates are up, LPs are demanding more, and the firms that win will need to act more like operators than bankers. If you’re planning to sell, and private equity is your natural buyer, you’ll want to hear this.

Dave Sifry has founded nine companies, including Technorati and Linuxcare, raising more than $170 million along the way. In this episode of Built to Sell Radio, he reveals how he went from being worth more than $100 million on paper to watching that value disappear — and what he’d do differently if he had the chance again.

Despite those scars, Sifry has built an extraordinary career. He has founded nine companies and today is founder and CEO of Warmstart, a platform that helps entrepreneurs turn old contacts into new business.

In 2006, Tad Fallows and two friends spotted a problem inside Harvard’s cancer labs: researchers were spending more time managing freezers, fruit flies, and mice than actually doing research. They built iLab, a SaaS tool for universities and hospitals, bootstrapped it to high–7-figure ARR, and eventually sold to Agilent Technologies for roughly six times revenue.

But the journey wasn’t smooth. Cash was often razor-thin with 75 employees on payroll, and an early inbound offer at 3× ARR forced Tad and his partners to decide: take the deal, or gamble on building more value.