What do you do at a search fund
I posted on here a few weeks back about some ideas for a freshman year internship and a search fund was suggested to me so I reached out to some alumnus through my school’s career center for an internship.
I was given an offer for an unpaid internship during the upcoming summer at a search fund and during my phone call with the founder I was told that there would be another intern from school interning there this summer as he anticipates an LBO going down during the summer.
So my question is what exactly do you do at a search fund? Push numbers around and build models like what normal analysts do? What can I expect to do now that an LBO might be happening during my intern period?
PS : I’m posting this in the PE forum cuz this seems more like a PE thing, especially the LBO part
Search funds are all about sourcing. You will go through company websites and try and flag ones that look like they could be targets. Even if the founder has a deal near completion he needs to keep sourcing because these kinds of deals can break at the last minute for the most random reasons. So it's going to be mind-numbing, boring work 99% of the time. Maybe during deal completion you'll get to look at the deal and get taught by the searcher.
That said, I always recommend people do these internships as freshmen. It shows demonstrated interest in finance and can be a great springboard into better internships/jobs. I know former search fund interns at BBs, MBB, and Big 4 consulting jobs, and I'm going to an EB which I think my freshman search fund internship helped set me on the path to do.
Hi, thx for the reply! Mind if I ask if ur school is a target of non target? I feel like it’s great that I’m going to get a search fund internship under my belt after the summer is over but I also feel like the recruiters and HR folks are going to look more at the school name.... and being from a non target it’s probably going to take a lot more for me to convert this internship to an IB one
I go to a target but the BB, MBB, B4 people I described all went to non-targets. You obviously need to do at least one other internship between a search fund and IB as well as network, the search fund is to help you get something more substantial for your sophomore year.
How did you get over the hurdle of being completely inexperienced? I’m looking forward to this opportunity but I feel like I might need some hand holding but I’m worried that it kind of puts me at a disadvantage since there’s another kid who’s going to intern with me and he seems to be a natural born finance bro from the few times we interacted
I'm a lender but we work with a lot of search funders but can offer to very basic starting points:
1. Be very good at excel. Breakingintowallstreet has a class for like $180 that will make you the best excel user in the room.
2. Stanford publishes bi-annual reports on search funds as well as a search fund "primer", read them all.
Again just a lender so I'm the one they call at the end of the process but that's my two cents.
Tons of sourcing. I’m a freshman and the search fund was my second internship after a role at a small Pe firm. The experience across both was similar. However at the search fund I got to work on a couple of live deals and do a little modeling which I leveraged into a boutique ib role. My founder also had a network he tapped into to help me.
Thanks for the feedback! Working at a search fund seems really interesting when u get to work the live deals!
Statistically, waste time and money. They're just not a great asset class and only receive any praise because of a handful that became obscenely successful thus skewing the datasets. Those ones were being launched by people who already had substantial operating experience beforehand whereas now they seem to be a popular flavor for recent MBAs trying to make a name for themselves or other folks who are less than 10 years into their careers. Personally, I would try to find other LMM PE work before a search fund internship. It'll be taken more seriously even if both roles are mostly just sourcing related, and you'll be able to sell yourself better just by observing some of the processes at a real fund vs a search fund. If you just search around and try cold-emailing it shouldn't be too hard to find opportunities. That's how I got most of my internships in undergrad (which were all unpaid) and now I work at a $1B+ fund.
This is one of the higher profile search groups too: Search Fund Accelerator settles Massachusetts wage dispute for nearly $550,000
I would’ve loved to look for opportunities in LMM PE but I mostly rushed into things as I had an internship lined up for me back at my home country and my circumstances changed last min so I was forced to stay in the states this summer so I decided to go for whatever I can land since I’m only a freshman and I come from a non target (decent LAC but lacks finance alums and OCR). Having said all that, I’m pretty happy that I even got an internship for the upcoming summer but thanks for your guidance! I’ll begin networking soon and hopefully I’ll land a decent internship next year.
DM me if anyone has/will have a deal under LOI and are looking for a senior lender, we'll go up to ~$20MM.
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