ACG, the outbound engine, and scaling distribution

The Talking Biotech playbook had a shape: earn a platform role, contribute something concrete, use it as the reason to talk to people who would otherwise never take your call. I looked for other places where that same shape existed.

ACG was the clearest one. I got fast-tracked into membership through Gary Chang in September 2025, then got routed onto the M&A Conference Committee and Programs Committee through Yvonne Schwab. I started the AI Pod with Sabrina Ritchie, took on pod leadership, and joined the M&A West planning committee where I co-ran speaker outreach and organized the AI panel for the Napa conference. Each of those roles gave me a legitimate reason to call deal people, fund operators, and advisors I wanted to learn from. I did not have to pretend I was entitled to their attention. I was calling because the committee needed speakers.

I also built a referral network with adjacent diligence providers. MCG Capital, Insperit, and other financial, HR, and operational diligence firms became referral partners. The idea was to make Colabra part of a bundled offer rather than a standalone tool competing for budget.

The outbound engine itself was custom-built. Every meaningful message started with transcripts and prior emails pulled from Granola and Fireflies. Live company context came from web research and acquisition alerts. The message then ran through a custom skill framework I built on Claude Code: dedicated skills for cold outreach, discovery prep, demo planning, prospecting, and a humanizer pass at the end. The first draft already used the buyer's language. Not generic AI personalization. The *actual* words they used in the last conversation.

I convert every call into a structured writeup with commercial implications at the bottom. Call notes that just capture what was said are useless to me. What I want out of a conversation is an updated org map, a clearer picture of who has authority, what competing tools they have looked at, and what a realistic next step actually is.