Reply
by a searcher
2w ago
from IE Business School
in Seoul, South Korea
Hi everyone. I'm Laura Valls Álvarez, based in Seoul, South Korea. Spanish, from Sabadell in Catalonia originally, 17 years on the ground in South Korea.
Before anything else, a note on the profile. I am not the thirty-two-year-old freshly minted MBA arriving with a thesis deck, though I do have an IE Executive MBA, and an MSc in International Business from Dundee (UK) and BA in Management and Public Administration from the University of Barcelona (Spain) underneath it. I come to the search fund model from the long way around. From the operator side. After seventeen years in the Korea-Europe corridor, the Korean SME succession crisis is the thesis I am now mapping seriously, and the numbers are what they are: 56,000+ heirless companies, a third of owner-operators over sixty, 83% with no succession plan, and a 50% inheritance tax waiting on the other side.
My track record sits in the Spain-Korea-Europe corridor: €350M+ in accumulated sales for my clients across deals and industrial partnerships. This year I am moving that experience into M&A, and the search fund is the structure pulling me there.
What those years gave me is harder to put on a CV: time across the table from Korean SME founders in their sixties, second-generation sons who don't want to inherit, factory owners deciding whether to sell or shut the doors. I sat in those rooms in Korean. That part is not theory.
Where I need the most help right now:
The hardest problem is raising search fund capital at the seed stage from foreign investors. My relationships with European family offices are genuinely weak. I never needed to interacted with them before, and frankly it never crossed my mind to until I started looking at the search fund structure seriously. That is the gap I am here to close.
Raising locally in Korea, in my honest assessment, is not viable at the seed stage. The model is not imprinted here yet. When I describe it to Korean investors, the reaction is either polite confusion or, more often, quiet excitement that I might be bringing them a foreign buyer, which is an entirely different conversation. The education curve to get a Korean LP comfortable with a twenty-four-month search and a no-deal scenario is too long to build a fund on. I have compared notes with the small handful of search funders in Japan, but mine in Korea is a different starting point entirely. For a foreigner in Korea, I believe the realistic seed base has to be foreign.
The second problem is downstream of the first. Without a committed LP base, walking into a Korean SME chairman's office is harder than it should be. Korea opens doors on names. As an individual I can get the meeting. The door opens wider when there is institutional weight behind the card.
Where I can help others: anything on the Korea side. Institutional navigation: KITA, GDIN, and some other institutions that I have standing built over years. Cultural and operational diligence done in with Koreans in Korean or English. Introductions to businesses to expand yours and of course introduce my legal anchors in Spain and Italy for the European leg of any cross-border deal that you might need.
Buy box: Korean lower-mid-market, owner-operator, succession-driven, profitable. Boring is fine. Manufacturing, B2B services, industrial-adjacent. No tech moonshots. Not acquired yet.
If you are an LP, a search funder who has raised internationally, or someone who has cracked the foreign-capital-into-unfamiliar-geography problem, I would genuinely like to talk.
Laura Valls
