The Stanford conference highlighted the practices, by any other name, that build teams and returns.
I just finished two days at the Stanford Search CEO Conference. This conference is dedicated to entrepreneurs who acquire businesses through the traditional or core search fund model, where an enterprising entrepreneur spends up to two years searching for a company to buy, backed by a pool of investors. Once a purchase is made, the searcher steps in as CEO to grow the business.
It’s remarkable how much the community of investors, CEOs, and service providers has grown in the ten years I’ve been part of it. Today’s Search CEOs take on a difficult challenge: leaping from student or employee to entrepreneur/new CEO/business owner with IRR targets north of 30%. In session after session at the conference, it was clear: these CEOs need a high level of support to be successful, and some are not receiving as much as they’d like. They need runway, scaffolding, and truth-telling.
Here’s the rub. The very practices investors and CEOs recommended to address these needs—structured hiring, mentoring and sponsorship, psychological safety, clear standards and criteria, developing feedback cultures, belonging—are core to what is called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). The term has been toxified by politics to mean almost the opposite of its original intent. “Woke” took the same path. Even Critical Race Theory (CRT)—an academic analytic framework—was turned into a scare word. The stigma hides the harms of systemic racism, xenophobia, and bigotry while slowing practical progress in business.
Notably, no panelist or guest speaker used the term “DEI”—yet the solutions they championed mapped directly onto its evidence-based practices. The politics around the label are so charged that many do not feel safe using it, lest they be accused of being “woke” or pushing “CRT indoctrination.” This current moment is as mind-blowingly illogical as discovering a useful tool, say, a hammer, and deciding we don’t want to use hammers anymore.
Becoming anti-DEI is not a neutral vocabulary shift—it’s a tax on performance. When a label or an area of inquiry becomes radioactive, the body of work it names also gets sidelined and efforts begin to stall. Yet Search CEOs don’t have the luxury of waiting for the political morass to sort itself out like a large corporation might: they either build teams now that can execute at a high level or they miss their IRR targets—and potentially their bank covenants.
At the conference, I heard solution after solution that maps directly to proven, inclusive best practices:
- Structured interview processes that reduce noise and bias.
- Feedback practices that raise quality and set a norm for a feedback-based culture.
- Norms that let CEOs surface problems and risks to their boards before they hit the P&L.
- Sponsorship and mentorship that open opportunity, accelerate leadership skill, and drive growth.
And the data behind those solutions is striking. Three takeaways stood out:
- Outcomes track board structure: search-led companies with >5x MOIC were far more likely to have a named lead director; in lower-MOIC companies, only about half of CEOs felt they were getting the right level of board engagement. This is governance as inclusion: clarity of roles, executive sessions, and “no surprises” norms create psychological safety and better decisions.
- Access and trust are the constraint: investor bandwidth is thin (some sit on 12–20 boards), and the compressed, Zoom-enabled search timeline has reduced quality time between entrepreneurs and investors. The best-performing CEOs countered that by pre-wiring every board meeting (1:1 calls with directors beforehand), meeting in person early, and running consistent executive sessions—practices straight from the DEI playbook on building trust and upward feedback.
- Talent standards drive value creation: Methodical hiring, strong onboarding, and sponsorship of rising leaders aren’t “nice-to-haves”; they’re how you hit IRR. They also recommended that boards spend an hour on the org chart in the first meeting, used scorecards with anchored rubrics. In one example, raising the hiring bar early saw significant impact within two months.
A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet. So I suspect that once major corporations realize they’ve thrown the hammer out of their toolkit, they’ll bring these practices back under a new name. I’ve spent my entire career learning and applying these tools to build high-performing teams. That’s why I’ll continue to use them in our training with fellows in the EtA Launch Hub and the Challenge Point CEO Roundtable—because they deliver results. Especially since traditional search investors and CEOs are acknowledging the need for optimally growing their businesses, I know that searcher CEOs outside that rarefied echelon need the same or even greater levels of support to be successful.
If you’re looking for next steps, I’d recommend:
- Read The Outsiders and The Manager’s Handbook—both repeatedly cited at the conference as highly influential.
- Brush up on inclusive practices (structured hiring, feedback cadences, sponsorship norms).
- Apply to the Challenge Point CEO Roundtable, where we combine support, thought leadership, and accountability.