"The private equity conversations that never make it to the conference stage."
"Every LP meeting I took, I made sure they understood I wasn't raising a fund. I was building an institution. The check size was almost secondary."
Marcus Ellwood has run origination at Arcadia Capital for eleven years. In that time, the firm has completed 34 platform acquisitions in the industrial services sector — none through an intermediary. When we sat down with him in a conference room overlooking the Hudson, he spoke for two hours without a PR handler in the room.
What emerged was a masterclass in how middle-market deal flow actually works — not the version you read in pitch decks, but the one built on a decade of cold calls to business owners who have never heard of private equity.
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Issue 001 ships to founding subscribers first.
Managing Director
Arcadia Capital Partners
Sourcing & Origination
Operating Partner
Meridian Growth Equity
Hundred-Day Plans
Founder & GP
Threshold Fund I
LP Pitch StrategyEach issue features one long-form interview (4,000–6,000 words), two shorter profiles, and an editor's note on what we learned in the room.
Published weekly. No aggregation. No press releases. Every word earned in a room with someone who had no obligation to say it.
The middle market moves on relationships forged over years, not announcements distributed over wire services. The deal partner who sourced a platform company through a weekend fishing trip won't describe that process in an earnings call. The operating partner who fired a CEO in week three of the hundred-day plan won't put that in a case study. The emerging fund manager who spent eighteen months getting rejected before a single LP finally committed won't mention that timeline on a panel.
These are the conversations that shape how private equity actually works. They circulate among a small group of people who already know each other. They don't get written down. They certainly don't get published.
Dossier exists to change that. We sit across from practitioners who have agreed to speak candidly — not on background, not with a communications team in the room — and we ask the questions that associates whisper to each other after a deal closes. We treat our readers as the sophisticated professionals they are.
If you're refreshing your inbox at 6 AM hoping to understand how the game is actually played, this newsletter was written for you. Not for the partner who already knows. For the person who is determined to find out.
"The best deal memos I've ever read were written after the investment closed, by the people who almost didn't do it."
Each issue arrives on Tuesday morning. Long enough to be worth your time. Focused enough to finish before the market opens.
How Arcadia Capital built a pipeline of 400+ owner-operators who call them before calling a banker
"We made a decision early on that we would never compete in a process we didn't start. That sounds arrogant. It's actually just expensive to be wrong in an auction."
Marcus Ellwood
Managing Director, Arcadia Capital
An operating partner explains why the first 30 days are a diagnostic exercise — and why most firms get them wrong
"The hundred-day plan you present to the investment committee and the hundred-day plan you actually execute are different documents. They have to be."
Priya Nair
Operating Partner, Meridian Growth Equity
A first-time GP on 22 months of rejection, the email that changed everything, and what he'd tell himself at the start
"The LP who eventually led our first close told me later that what convinced her wasn't the deck. It was that I never tried to make the numbers look better than they were."
Daniel Furst
Founder & GP, Threshold Fund I
James Whitmore
Editor-in-Chief, Dossier
Formerly: Associate at Summit Ridge Partners, LP Relations at a $3.2B fund, and a decade writing about the industry for people outside it.
I spent four years as an associate at a middle-market firm. In that time, I sat in hundreds of meetings where senior partners said things that contradicted everything I had read about how private equity worked. Not because the books were wrong. Because the books described the public version of the industry.
The private version is more interesting. It involves more luck, more relationship maintenance, more mistakes made at 11 PM before a deadline, and more genuine insight earned through years of pattern recognition that you simply cannot accelerate by reading deal announcements.
Dossier is my attempt to put that private version in writing. Every interview is conducted by me, personally. Every subject has agreed to speak without a PR handler and without pre-approval of quotes. Every issue will contain at least one thing that makes the subject slightly uncomfortable to read — because that's where the useful information lives.
We take no advertising. We accept no sponsored content. The only thing we sell is the subscription, and we haven't even done that yet. Issue 001 goes to founding subscribers first, which means it goes to the people who trusted the editorial premise before they had evidence for it. I intend to reward that trust with every issue.
James Whitmore
New York City · February 2026
"The conversation that makes it into the newsletter is always the one I didn't expect to have."
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