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Pacific Lake Partners vs Miramar Equity Partners

Side by Side

Pacific Lake Partners and Miramar Equity Partners, attribute by attribute
AttributePacific Lake PartnersMiramar Equity 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.A Dallas family-office investor focused exclusively on search-acquired businesses: reports backing 125-plus search funds and 100-plus portfolio companies over nearly a decade, with former searcher-CEOs on the team and stated search, platform, and holdco capabilities; its team page calls it the private equity platform of Miramar Holdings.
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 and acquisition economics negotiated per the model's conventions.
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 family-office patience rather than fund-cycle pressure, with an investor bench that has searched and operated itself
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 family-office alternative on the traditional bench: same model, longer clock; worth prioritizing if patience matters more to you than brand.
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
  • Family-office capital removes the fund-clock pressure that shapes some investor behavior
  • 125-plus search funds backed with a team of former searcher-CEOs
  • Search, platform, and holdco capabilities cover more than one ownership shape
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
  • Check sizes are published per strategy and a five-point scorecard says what it likes to see; the equity split, step-up and governance are not published
  • Traditional search economics apply, with the standard equity and governance trade
  • A single family's capital concentrates relationship risk in one partner

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

Our take

Choose Pacific Lake for the machine built around the model: one of the largest dedicated search investors, with the playbooks, peer network, and pattern recognition that hundreds of backed searchers produce.

Choose Miramar if the clock matters more than the brand: family-office capital with no fund cycle behind it, an ex-searcher team, and the patience that structure buys when year three gets hard.