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Pacific Lake Partners vs Futaleufu Partners

Side by Side

Pacific Lake Partners and Futaleufu Partners, attribute by attribute
AttributePacific Lake PartnersFutaleufu Partners
What It IsA committed fund founded in 2009 solely to back search fund entrepreneurs, co-founded by Coley Andrews and Jim Southern. It describes itself as the largest dedicated search investor, with offices in Boston and the Bay Area, more than 200 search funds and 120 operating companies backed across eight funds and $1.58B of committed capital on its own story page, and a long-term hold strategy since 2018 for chief executives who want to keep running their companies.David Dodson's search investor, styled 'Search Fund Investing. Old School.': the man who wrote the original Stanford search-fund course material and raised the model's third search fund, backed by seventeen operator-LPs who commit to mentor and join boards, with a deal count deliberately held flat to keep the mentorship personal.
CategoryCapital & InvestorsCapital & Investors
Pricing ModelCustom PricingCustom Pricing
What It CostsInvestment terms, not fees: standard traditional search-fund economics, negotiated per the model's conventions.Investment terms, not fees: search-fund economics per the model's conventions; nothing is published.
Best ForTraditional searchers who want the scale player: a large institutional partner with hundreds of searchers backed and the portfolio network that comes with itTraditional searchers who want the model's deepest operating mentorship on the cap table and accept a deliberately small, selective fund to get it
Where It FitsLearn & Choose Your Path, Set Up & Fund the SearchLearn & Choose Your Path, Set Up & Fund the Search
Our VerdictThe scale anchor of the traditional path: most funded searchers want it on the cap table, and every funded searcher should understand why before deciding whether they do.The cap-table seat you want if mentorship is the bottleneck you fear most; the trade is access, since staying small is the whole point.
Pros
  • Scale: the largest dedicated search fund investor by most accounts, with institutional fund size reported by trade press
  • Full-time team and structured searcher support beyond capital
  • A Stanford-rooted history at the center of the traditional model's ecosystem
  • The founder helped invent the model and raised its third search fund
  • Seventeen operator-LPs are recruited specifically to mentor and join boards
  • CEO Boot Camp, a searching webinar series, and a CEO accelerator come with the check
Cons
  • Traditional search economics apply; the structure trades meaningful equity for the backing
  • Scale cuts both ways: you are one of many searchers in a large portfolio
  • Highly selective, and terms are not published; its primer does publish the company it wants, down to an EBITDA floor, and the salary a searcher can expect
  • Deliberately few deals a year, so selectivity is the product and access is the constraint
  • Terms and check sizes are not published
  • A mentorship-first pitch is hard to weigh from outside until you are in the room

Both rows were read at source: Pacific Lake Partners ↗ and Futaleufu Partners ↗.

Our take

Choose Pacific Lake for the machine: one of the largest dedicated search investors, where hundreds of backed searchers become playbooks, peer intros, and pattern recognition you can draw on weekly.

Choose Futaleufu for the seat next to you: a deliberately small fund whose operator-LPs sign up to mentor and join boards, from the man who wrote the model's original course material.