Search Panda, building Asia's search fund community
Asia Pacific's first community for search funds, where young operators raise money to buy and run one small company. I led its partnerships with CEIBS, HKUST and IESE during a summer at SP Capital.
A search fund is a way for a young operator to raise money from investors, find one small profitable company, buy it and run it. It is a proven model in the US and almost unknown in China. Search Panda is the community trying to change that, and my job for a summer was to get people who had never heard of it to take it seriously.
Stanford's 2024 study counts 681 search funds since 1984, with an aggregate return of 35.1% a year and 4.5 times the money invested, and a record 94 new funds in 2023. Outside the US and Canada, IESE counted 320 funds in 40 countries, and the first ones in China and Vietnam only appeared in 2022 and 2023.
The need in Asia is real. A generation of founders who built profitable small and mid-sized companies is getting close to retirement, often without anyone in the family who wants to run the business. The search fund model was built for exactly that kind of handover, but in China there was no list of searchers, no investors who understood the model and no playbook in Chinese.
Search Panda launched in November 2022 as China's first community for search funds and entrepreneurship through acquisition. I joined through SP Capital as a summer analyst in 2025 and worked on the network around it.
I was the first point of contact for the community's partnerships with CEIBS, HKUST and IESE. I proposed an ETA Fellowship with HKUST based on Kellogg's Zell Fellows program, and HKUST now runs it with Search Panda as its strategic partner. I organized the first ETA Fellowship conference in Hong Kong, hosted together with two of the partner schools, with investors from mainland China, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia, Japan and Europe.
On the deal side, I screened more than 30 small and mid-sized companies against the fund's criteria, kept the pipeline database the partners reviewed every week, and built cash-flow models for four shortlisted companies worth $10 to $20 million, testing whether they could still cover their debt in a bad year.
A community like this has four groups who show up for different reasons. Searchers want money and peers. Investors want deals that have already been checked. Retiring owners need a successor they can trust. Schools want a program that makes them look ahead of the curve. Each group needs a different first message.
The order mattered more than the number of messages. Schools came first, because a school's name turns a cold invitation into a credible one and brings students along with it. Investors came next, because they follow credibility and deal flow. Events were where interest turned into commitment. A cold email gets a reply, but a room with the right people in it gets them to sign up.
The community now has more than 400 members, over 50 related institutions, members in more than 30 cities, 13 forums, and 11 events with more than 1,500 people attending in total. Those are the community's numbers, built by its founders and team over several years. My part was the school partnerships, the fellowship, the conference and the outreach around them during my summer. HKUST's ETA Fellowship lists Search Panda as its strategic partner and trained its first group in September 2026.
Most of my later work is technical, but this is where I learned the part of deploying anything that is not code. It means building trust from zero with people who have no reason to answer you, finding out what each side actually wants, and ordering the asks so that each yes makes the next one easier. It is the same skill I use now when a client cannot tell me their requirements.