# Pacific Lake Partners vs Futaleufu Partners

The biggest network or the most personal bench?

## Choose Pacific Lake Partners

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 Partners

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.

## Side by side

| | Pacific Lake Partners | Futaleufu Partners |
| --- | --- | --- |
| What It Is | A 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. |
| Category | Capital & Investors | Capital & Investors |
| Pricing Model | Custom Pricing | Custom Pricing |
| What It Costs | Investment 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 For | Traditional searchers who want the scale player: a large institutional partner with hundreds of searchers backed and the portfolio network that comes with it | Traditional 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 Fits | Learn & Choose Your Path, Set Up & Fund the Search | Learn & Choose Your Path, Set Up & Fund the Search |
| Our Verdict | The 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. |

Full review of Pacific Lake Partners: https://searchspheresource.com/resources/pacific-lake-partners
Full review of Futaleufu Partners: https://searchspheresource.com/resources/futaleufu-partners

Source: https://searchspheresource.com/resources/compare/pacific-lake-partners-vs-futaleufu-partners
Last checked: 2026-09-17

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