Kevin Hong is a former searcher who was fired from the company he acquired and is now the founder of Caprae Capital, a tech-enabled lower middle market investment platform behind SaaSquatch Leads, Search as a Service, and a growing portfolio of businesses.

After years as an entrepreneur, Kevin turned to search as a more de-risked path to ownership. But his experience running a data center services business turned into a battle over governance, board control, seller alignment, and strategy. Instead of disappearing after being removed, he went public, interviewed other terminated searchers, and began publishing investor rankings and operator feedback in an effort to bring more transparency to the search ecosystem.

In this episode, Kevin discusses:

• Why search appealed to him, how he approached his acquisition, and what ultimately led to his firing
• What he thinks traditional search gets wrong about governance, boards, and operator-investor alignment
• How Caprae works, what he means by “rewriting LMM PE from the source code,” and why he believes founder-led, tech-enabled models can outperform the traditional playbook
• What he learned from surveying terminated searchers and why he believes the industry needs more transparency as it scales

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Turner Wyatt is the founder and CEO of Small Capital, an investment firm backing self-funded searchers who want to bake employee ownership into their acquisitions from day one. A lifelong social entrepreneur (food security, food waste/climate, and founding the Upcycled Food Association), Turner describes his pivot into ETA as a direct response to what he sees as the other defining challenge of this century: income inequality. His core thesis is simple: if ETA is reshaping ownership in America, it’s a missed opportunity if employees remain locked out of wealth creation, and it’s also a missed opportunity for business performance.

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On this episode of Search Funded, we sit down with William D. Cohan, bestselling author, longtime financial journalist, and former Wall Street M&A banker, for a wide-ranging conversation that spans search fund investing, leadership, capitalism, and career reinvention.

Before bringing moral clarity to the financial world through his journalism and books including Money and Power, House of Cards, The Last Tycoons, and Power Failure, Bill spent nearly two decades as an M&A banker at Lazard, Merrill Lynch, JPMorgan Chase, and GE Capital.

But what many people do not know is that he has also been a search fund investor for many years, backing entrepreneurs in the U.S. and internationally, including a decades-long investment that ultimately exited to the Pritzker family.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why search fund investing appealed to Bill compared to traditional private equity, especially around incentives, fees, and alignment (00:03:30)
• Patterns he has observed across successful and unsuccessful search fund investments, and why outcomes are often unpredictable (00:06:45)
• The risk of greed creeping into search funds, parallels to SPACs and private equity, and why modesty still matters in entrepreneur compensation (00:17:52)
• Bill’s career pivot from Wall Street to journalism after being fired post-9/11, and why taking control of his work and time led to a more meaningful life (00:22:35)

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