Season 3 Episode 1: From JP Morgan to business owner with Linh Van Deibel

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Welcome back to a brand new season of The Found & Funded Podcast.

In this first episode of season 3, we welcome Linh Van Deibel, Director of Infrastructure Design Solutions, a B2B telecom services provider. 

From her roots in Vietnam to the high-stakes worlds of JP Morgan and private equity, Linh eventually moved into business operations, where she led five major acquisitions for a fintech scale-up - taking them from 50 to 1,500 employees.

Now, as the co-founder of Acacia Partners, she shares the raw reality of the self-funded search fund model, the mechanics of acquiring a B2B telecom services provider in 2025, and the challenges of being a female searcher in a male-dominated industry.

In this episode, we discuss:

• Moving from investing to operations and why an MBA changed Linh’s trajectory.
• Being advised to bring an "older, strong male figure" to meetings.
• Using interns to build a deal pipeline.
• The heartbreak of a deal falling through.

🕒 Key Chapters

• 00:00 Introduction
• 00:25 Linh’s Background: From Vietnam to the US and the UK
• 03:41 Hearing About Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition
• 08:39 Getting Buy-In From Your Spouse
• 13:01 Why Self-Funded Search Over Other Models?
• 18:04 The Challenge Of Being Female In A Male-Dominated Industry
• 23:45 Using Interns For Proprietary Outreach
• 26:52 The Role Of AI In Outreach
• 27:32 Proprietary Sourced & Brokered Pipeline
• 30:47 Running Two Acquisition Deals In Parallel
• 36:15 Raising Equity
• 41:02 Advice For Other Female Searchers
• 46:30 What Is Linh’s Dream?

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