That would be "search funds".
I first heard about search funds last fall, from a friend who was giving it a go after quitting her prestigious job in venture capital. A few weeks later, a management consultant I met was telling me about his Harvard Business School reunion, where so many people he ran into were starting a search fund that it became an inside joke among his former classmates. He kept trying to explain to me the mechanics, but everything about it was bizarre: that MBAs with pristine résumés would ditch their fancy corporate jobs to devote their lives to septic tanks; that 20- and 30-somethings would suddenly become the CEOs of multimillion-dollar businesses; that investors would give real money to people who have zero company-running experience to go run a company in a blue-collar industry they know nothing about.
