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Dan Herr

Summary

Dan Herr is a co-host of Deal Sourcery alongside Matt Rooney. Across episodes, Dan brings the perspective of a business development practitioner who has built and run sourcing functions inside a PE firm — he frequently anchors conversations with concrete examples drawn from his operating experience, especially around Portfolio Operations as a sourcing channel.

Current Affiliation

Dan is currently:

Per dealsourcery.com: Dan has "closed over $1B in transactions in the last decade while building and leading world-class deal sourcing teams," and Acqwired was founded "after more than a decade sourcing more than $1B in TEV in proprietary private equity deals across software, services and industrials highly engineered end markets like aerospace, medical and consumer electronics."

NOR carve-out: Current-firm and headline-biography content on host pages may be supplied from outside the transcript per CLAUDE.md's narrow host-page NOR carve-out. Everything else on this page cites an episode.

Personal Bio

Previous Roles

  • Serent Capital — Dan led business development at Serent Capital, a lower middle market PE firm focused on B2B software and tech-enabled services. In Ep. 2 Dan describes creating a new "sourcing operations" role at Serent that he likened to rev ops for the sourcing team: "I hired, I created a new position for us at Serent that I called sourcing operations, right? Which was effectively like that, right? It's like rev ops." He also points to Serent's 30% FTE concentration in portfolio resources as a concrete selling point he could use with prospects (Leveraging Portfolio Ops for Sourcing).

Hosting Style & Perspectives

Dan draws heavily on his own operating experience to pressure-test guest frameworks. A few recurring themes:

  • Portfolio ops as a sourcing lever. In Ep. 2 Dan argues that "the most valuable thing that PortfolioOps does is that it exists and that I can use it as a selling point," framing portfolio operations as the firm's differentiator in competitive sourcing conversations.

  • Content repurposing for outreach. Dan enthusiastically adopted Kate Hopkins's "data snacks" framing in Ep. 2 ("I've got to start using that — data snacks") and describes his own example at Serent Capital: packaging hospitality tech data (hotel opening and closure rates from a CRS portfolio company, restaurant revenue data from POS portfolio companies) into prospect-facing market insights.

  • Outreach quality over volume. In Ep. 20 Dan is blunt about industry practice: "I think the majority of private equity firms suck at messaging and suck at outreach today. It's very generic... it's about how many assets we have under management... me, me, me."

  • Relationships as the starting point. In Ep. 22 Dan frames the work around human connection: "People do deals with people they like. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but you got to start with that human element and that trust building element."

Notable Quotes

"The most valuable thing that PortfolioOps does is that it exists and that I can use it as a selling point." — Dan Herr, Ep. 2

"I hired, I created a new position for us at Serent that I called sourcing operations, right? Which was effectively like that, right? It's like rev ops." — Dan Herr, Ep. 2

"I think the majority of private equity firms suck at messaging and suck at outreach today. It's very generic... it's about how many assets we have under management... me, me, me." — Dan Herr, Ep. 20

"People do deals with people they like. I'm not saying that's the only reason, but you got to start with that human element and that trust building element." — Dan Herr, Ep. 22

Cross-References