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L14Case note

Search Funds: What Does Not Seem to Work and What Can Be Done About It?

Jan Simon. (2026)

Part I: Vendor Involvement and Leadership. IESE ST-680-E, 15 pp

Dated February 2026 (copyright line says 2025). A deliberate counterpart to Johnson (2014): "technical notes, newspaper and magazine articles, interviews, and podcasts almost exclusively praise the search fund model", yet "about a third of searchers close their funds without acquiring". Based on "observations from fellow investors shared during the 6th IESE Search Fund Investors' Summit held in Madrid on May 13, 2025" plus Center analysis; Part I covers the continuing role of the vendor and leadership failure at CEO and board level, each with remedies. Reproduces outcome trees for the US and Canada (Stanford) and the rest of the world (IESE). Investor-sourced and qualitative.

Source

Full citation

Jan Simon. (2026). Search Funds: What Does Not Seem to Work and What Can Be Done About It? Part I: Vendor Involvement and Leadership. IESE ST-680-E, 15 pp.

https://media.iese.edu/research/pdfs/ST-0680-E.pdf

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