Entrepreneurship through Acquisition - Anatomy of a Search Fund with Pacific Lake - Tues 9/25 12:30 in N400

Interested in buying and running your own business? Want to be your own boss and the CEO of a small company? You can, via a Search Fund.

Join us on 9/25, when Pacific Lake Partners' co-founder Jim Southern, entrepreneur and investor who exclusively focuses on investing in search fund entrepreneurs, will walk us through the search fund model. The event will also include as special guests Haas MBA alumni Mahesh Rajasekharan, search fund entrepreneur and CEO of Cleo Communications, and Jeff Oldenburg, who recently launched a search. Both will provide input and answer questions.

A search fund is an investment vehicle through which investors support an entrepreneur's efforts to locate, acquire, manage and grow a privately held company. In this model, a recent MBA graduate (or two graduates) becomes the CEO of the company and works to build the business over the following 5+ years. The entrepreneurs are compensated with a significant equity stake in the value created during their tenure. This challenge and independence has resulted in the creation of over 250 Search Funds, with the asset class as a whole boasting an aggregate pre-tax internal rate of return of 36.7 percent and 8.4x multiple of investment.

Entrepreneurs with the courage of their own convictions, a desire to lead a company early in their career, and the resilience to take on a life of entrepreneurship seek out the search fund model. Learn more at this session.

Here's who will be coming to campus:

Jim Southern
Founded in 2009 by Coley Andrews and Jim Southern, Pacific Lake Partners is the largest and most experienced firm dedicated exclusively to investing in, and providing support for, search fund entrepreneurs. Collectively, Coley and Jim have invested in over 50 companies sourced and acquired through the search fund model. This list includes many of the most successful outcomes, such as Asurion, AlphaCredit, OnRamp, Raptor Technologies, and Vector Disease Control. Jim Southern pioneered the search fund model when he acquired and operated as CEO a $43 million national printing company after having graduated from Harvard Business School. Since that time, over 250 search funds have been raised by talented, recent graduates of top MBA programs who seek to lead and build a sizable company.

Mahesh Rajasekharan
Mahesh is President and Chief Executive Officer of Cleo, a global software company that delivers cloud integration software solutions to help companies discover and create value across their multi-enterprise ecosystems. Prior to Cleo, Mahesh was Chief Operating Officer at SumTotal Systems and before that, Vice President and General Manager of the High Tech Industry Sector at i2. Mahesh has authored several industry and academic publications in the areas of Supply Chain and Operations Management and has spoken at numerous industry conferences. In addition to Cleo, Mahesh also serves on the boards of Omatic Software, and Banyan Software, and on the advisory board of StartupWind. Mahesh has an MBA from Berkeley-Haas, a PhD from Texas A&M, and a B.S. from Anna University.

Jeff Oldenburg
Jeff is co-founder of The Tusker Fund, a firm dedicated to acquiring and operating a business through the search fund model. Prior to founding The Tusker Fund, Jeff was a Director at the Royal Bank of Scotland, where he specialized in selling interest rate derivatives to hedge funds and other institutional asset managers. Most recently Jeff led Institutional Interest Rate Sales in the Midwest and South, growing the region's sales from $6 million to $36 million in just three years. Over his career, Jeff has transacted trillions of dollars in notional value of fixed income securities and derivatives with some of the world's largest, most prestigious asset managers. Jeff holds an MBA from the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, and a BA in Economics and Geography from Middlebury College, where he played varsity tennis.

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