USC Marshall · Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies

Search.Acquire.Operate.

USC Search Fund is building Southern California’s home for entrepreneurship through acquisition — the coursework, the community, and ultimately the capital behind Trojans who buy and run enduring businesses.

For students → How the program works

Launched Fall 2026 BAEP-560 Los Angeles, California

The model

What a search fund actually is.

A search fund is a vehicle through which an entrepreneur raises a small amount of capital to fund a full-time search for one privately held company to buy — then acquires it, becomes its CEO, and spends the next several years growing it.

It is not venture capital and it is not private equity. There is no portfolio and no fund cycle. There is one searcher, one company, and a group of investors who back the person before they know the business. Since 1984, the model has produced returns that are difficult to ignore — and, more to the point, it has produced a few hundred operators who got to run a real company in their thirties.

Raise

A searcher raises roughly $400K–$700K from a group of investors to cover two years of salary and deal expenses. Investors are buying conviction in a person and the right — not the obligation — to fund the eventual acquisition.

Search

Eighteen to twenty-four months of proprietary sourcing: brokers, intermediaries, direct outreach to owners, and the relationships that surface deals before they are listed. Thousands of companies screened to find one.

Acquire

Diligence, an SBA or bank-financed capital structure, and a negotiation with an owner who usually cares as much about legacy and employees as price. Typical targets: $1.5M–$5M of EBITDA, boring and durable.

Operate

Day one, the searcher is the CEO. The work shifts from analysis to leadership: holding a team together through transition, professionalizing operations, and compounding a real business over five to ten years.

The asset class

Four decades of evidence.

862

Core search funds formed in the U.S. and Canada since 1984

33.9%

Aggregate pre-tax IRR to search fund investors

4.75×

Aggregate return on invested capital

2.88

Public market equivalent, measured against the S&P 500

Source: 2026 Search Fund Study, Stanford Graduate School of Business Center for Entrepreneurial Studies, measured as of December 31, 2025. Returns follow a power law: a small number of outcomes drive the aggregate, and roughly a third of search funds return less than invested capital. We teach the distribution, not the headline.

The USC model

A classroom taught by people who have actually done it.

01 — The course

BAEP-560 is the engine.

Search Funds & Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition is a graduate elective at the Greif Center covering the full lifecycle of a search — raising capital, developing a thesis, sourcing, diligence, closing, transition, value creation, and exit. Students don’t write a paper about searching. They source live deals and call real owners.

02 — The community

Trojans find Trojans.

Search is relationship-driven work, and the network is the moat. USC Search Fund connects current students to the alumni, operators, brokers, lenders, and investors already active in ETA across Southern California — and keeps them connected after graduation, when the search actually begins.

03 — The ambition

Capital, next.

The long-term goal is a fund: a USC-affiliated vehicle that backs Trojan searchers at the moment they need conviction most. Stanford, Harvard, Chicago Booth, and MIT have institutional search ecosystems. The West Coast’s lower middle market is enormous, and Los Angeles has no home for this. We intend to build it.

Why now

The largest ownership transfer in American history is underway.

Baby boomers own millions of profitable small and mid-sized American companies, and most of them have no succession plan. Their children do not want the business. Private equity will not look at it. These are firms with decades of customer relationships, real cash flow, and no obvious next owner.

That is the opportunity a searcher steps into. It is also, quietly, a public good: a company that would otherwise be wound down or stripped for parts instead gets a committed owner-operator who keeps the lights on and the employees paid.

Los Angeles County alone is home to hundreds of thousands of small businesses. USC has the largest, most loyal alumni network in the region. The two facts belong together.

Where you fit