# Long-duration enterprise

A committed pool raised once to buy and hold several companies for decades.

It is the fourth path, and until recently it had no name that the field agreed on. A traditional [search fund](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/search-fund) buys one company and the investors expect an exit. A long-duration vehicle raises its capital up front, buys more than one, and is built to keep them, so the return comes from cash flow over years, not from a sale. That changes what the operator's job is and what the money wants: patient owners, boards that meet for decades, and none of the pressure to sell into a window. The annual Stanford study began reporting these separately in its 2026 edition, with data through the end of 2025, and counted 67 of them, which is the field acknowledging a model that had been growing quietly. If a firm approaching you describes itself this way, the question to ask is not the multiple, it is the [holding period](https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/holding-period) and who decides when it ends.

In numbers: Where a search fund's investors look for a sale inside five to seven years and price the result as a 4.75x return, a long-duration owner may hold past 20 years and measure itself on the $500,000 of cash a business hands back annually instead.

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/glossary/long-duration-enterprise
Not dated: A definition is editorial: what a term means, why it matters, and an example. None of it reads a source that can go stale, so there is no date to take and a stamped one would be the build time wearing a costume.

Site index for machines: https://searchspheresource.com/llms.txt