Einar Vollset

Einar Vollset is a Norwegian entrepreneur and investor best known as the co-founder of TinySeed, the accelerator and fund for bootstrapped B2B SaaS companies, and the founder of Discretion Capital, a boutique investment bank that sells SaaS businesses. He is one of the most-quoted voices on how small software companies get acquired.

Vollset trained as a computer scientist, earning a PhD and spending time as a computer science professor at Cornell. He went through Y Combinator and sold his first startup to Google in 2010, then built and exited another software business around 2016. In between he spoke at MicroConf about productized consulting, which brought him into the bootstrapper community around Rob Walling.

In 2018 he and Walling co-founded TinySeed as a year-long, remote accelerator modeled on Y Combinator but built for founders who want to stay profitable and in control rather than chase venture-scale growth. TinySeed invests in B2B SaaS companies with existing revenue, and in 2021 Axios reported it had raised $25 million to back more bootstrapped startups. Its portfolio includes many companies that appear on IndieMakerList.

Vollset says he fell into M&A after selling his own companies and seeing how often founders sold too cheaply to whoever emailed first. Discretion Capital, based in Santa Cruz, California, runs sell-side processes for B2B SaaS companies with roughly $2 million to $20 million in ARR, and Indie Hackers reported in 2026 that the bootstrapped firm handles more than $100 million in deal volume a year. The firm also published a guide to M&A for SaaS companies in that range.

He is a frequent guest on Startups for the Rest of Us and MicroConf stages, where he argues that founders should run a real, competitive process before selling. For indie SaaS founders weighing an exit, his work is a practical reference.