Why Linchpin

Investment banking matters because companies cross inorganic moments once, maybe twice, in an entire lifecycle. When they do, the banker is the one who decides how the story gets told, how the value gets framed, how the capital moves. Those moments don't get re-run. They go one way.

But the people who get to influence those moments — analysts, associates, VPs — spend most of their time on workflows that pull them away from the strategic work that gives the moments meaning. The clock kills the deal long before the strategy does.

I learned this in the trenches. Three years of M&A execution — founding tech analyst class at SVB Securities, tech M&A at Moelis — running sell-sides from cross-border public transactions to bootstrapped Bay Area deals. The pattern was the same every time: half the work that mattered was repeated, manual, error-prone triage that nobody designed for and nobody owned. Diligence was the worst of it. Hundreds of questions across four or five buyer groups. Fifty to ninety percent substantively identical. Each one answered from scratch.

That's not a workflow problem. It's a knowledge problem. Banks won't compete on AI performance in the next decade — that race ends in commodity. They'll compete on expertise, the way they always have. The trouble is expertise doesn't compound today. It lives in MDs' heads, in dead Excel trackers, in scattered emails. Every deal generates dense, hard-won knowledge. Every deal loses it.

Diligence is the wedge because it's where the densest concentration of that knowledge gets created and lost. Start there. Build the layer where it stops getting lost.

I'm building Linchpin because I've been the banker who lost evenings to the wrong work, and I think the industry deserves to operate better than it does. I'm building it solo for now, with Claude as my execution layer, because the right cofounder shows up when there's real momentum to join — not before. And I'm building it now, because ten years of preparing taught me that action gives you more information than planning ever does.

The bet is simple. If diligence is run right, bankers spend their hours where the value actually compounds — on the strategic work they were hired for in the first place. The fee follows. The trust follows. The next deal follows.

That's the company.