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Rick Ruback

Rick Ruback

Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance, Emeritus at Harvard Business School; expert in entrepreneurship through acquisition and co-author of HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business

Jul 19, 2026

12:21
How do you decide between the two as a potential entrepreneur?
12:25
as a searcher, well, it's something that we talk a lot about.
12:28
And we have a few of our episodes in our very first season of our podcast in which we talk to our students who are just graduating and ask them that question, how they're deciding on whether they should search, whether they should take a traditional job.
12:43
And if they're going to search, are they going to do a funded search or an investor-funded search or a self-funded search? Generally, it has to do with what works for that human and their family, that person.
12:57
It could be that she has a family and has daycare needs and just doesn't have any savings and so can't afford to fund the search herself.
13:06
And so she needs investor capital just to do it.
13:11
Sometimes the searcher might have in mind that They're not really interested in acquiring a smaller business, but want to acquire a bigger business, something in which they can professionalize.

8 MINS LATER

21:08
Who are the searchers? Are they almost nearly all recent college grads with a little bit of work experience?

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