The coming Succession Reckoning

An entire generation of business owners is heading for the exit. Most have no one to hand the keys to. We are building the media, the tools, and the capital to meet them there.

The Silver Tsunami

The largest transfer of
private business ownership
in American history

Baby boomers built the backbone of the American economy — the HVAC companies, the machine shops, the accounting practices, the distributors. Now they are retiring at a rate of roughly 10,000 people a day, and the businesses they spent forty years building are going with them.

The buyers are not there. Most of these companies are too small for private equity and too unglamorous for venture capital. They are profitable, essential, and quietly disappearing — closed rather than sold, because no one showed up.

2.9M
Businesses owned by baby boomers in the United States
Project Equity
32M
Americans employed by those boomer-owned businesses
Project Equity
$6.5T
Estimated enterprise value set to change hands this decade
Industry estimates
70%
Of small businesses listed for sale never find a buyer
Exit Planning Institute

Roughly three in four owners intend to exit within ten years. Fewer than one in three have a written plan for how. That gap is the single largest untapped opportunity for a generation of operators willing to buy rather than build — and it is the reason The Deall exists.

If No One Shows Up

What a failed handoff
actually costs

A business that cannot find a buyer does not get acquired at a discount. It closes. The equipment is auctioned, the customer relationships evaporate, the institutional knowledge walks out the door with the owner, and the payroll simply stops. Multiply that by hundreds of thousands and it stops being a private tragedy and becomes a macroeconomic event.

I
Jobs That
Don't Come Back
These are not fungible positions in a growth market. A closed machine shop in a town of 8,000 does not get replaced by a startup. The jobs disappear, and so does the tax base that funded the schools around them.
II
Wealth Erased
at the Exit
For most owners, the business is the retirement plan. A company that closes instead of selling converts a lifetime of equity into scrap value — transferring nothing to the next generation and pushing a cohort of would-be retirees onto public support.
III
Consolidation
by Default
Where buyers do appear, they are increasingly roll-ups optimizing for extraction. Independent Main Street businesses become line items in someone's portfolio, and the decisions that shaped a community for forty years start getting made elsewhere.
The Warning

Japan already ran
this experiment

Japan hit its succession wall first. Its Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry projected that roughly 1.27 million business owners over seventy — about a third of all Japanese companies — would reach retirement with no successor identified. Not failing companies. Profitable ones. In a single recent year, more than 42,000 businesses closed while still in the black, and 2024 set a record for century-old firms going under simply because no one was left to run them.

1.27M
Owners over 70 projected to have no successor — a third of all Japanese companies
6.5M
Jobs at risk if the trend continued unaddressed
¥22T
GDP projected to evaporate — roughly $150 billion, lost to retirement rather than recession

Japan's government responded with subsidies, tax relief, and national successor-matching programs — and still struggled, because succession is a relationship problem dressed up as a transaction. The United States is roughly a decade behind on the same curve, with more businesses and no equivalent policy apparatus. The difference is that the buyers can still be created. That is the window we are building inside.

Built in Phases

How We Get There

Search funds and ETA are still an insider's game — the knowledge lives in group chats, closed cohorts, and a handful of podcasts. We are building in the open, in three deliberate stages.

Phase I · Now
The Media House
The Deall Show, turned toward acquisition. We sit down with the fund managers, searchers, sellers, and investors actually doing these deals — and publish the playbook they built the hard way. Media first, because trust and deal flow come from the same place.
Phase II · Next
Tools & Resources
A portfolio of practical instruments for every side of the table — diligence and deal-sourcing tools for searchers, LP and reporting infrastructure for funds, and honest preparation resources for the owners deciding whether to sell at all.
Phase III · The Horizon
Our Own Search Fund
Then we put our own capital where our conviction is: our own search fund and a permanent portfolio of acquired businesses. Not a flip — stewardship of companies worth keeping, run by operators worth backing.
Current Priority

Everything right now goes into the media house. It is the cheapest way to earn a reputation in a market built on trust, the fastest way to meet every serious participant in it, and the most honest way to learn the business before we ever ask anyone for capital. The fund comes after the relationships — not before.

THE DEALL
The Long View

A generation spent forty years building companies worth keeping. Someone has to be ready to keep them.

The Thesis
Boring Is
Beautiful
The best businesses in America are not startups. They are cash-generating, unsexy, essential companies with decades of customers and no succession plan. Buying one is the most direct path to ownership that exists — and almost nobody talks about it.
The Method
Learn Loudly,
Then Buy
We are documenting the entire education in public: every conversation with a searcher who closed, a fund manager who raised, a seller who let go. The media is not marketing for the fund. It is the apprenticeship for it.
The End State
A House of
Held Companies
A permanent portfolio of acquired businesses, a fund that backs other searchers into their first deal, and a body of work that made the path legible for everyone who comes next. Media, tools, and capital feeding each other.
The Deall Show

Deal Makers On the Record

All Episodes →

The operators, investors, and fund managers we have sat down with — from the lawyers papering a billion dollars of ETA deals to the first institutional backers of the search fund model.

Eric Pacifici
Eric Pacifici
Co-Founder, SMB Law Group

The most-read lawyer in small-business acquisition. Eric and his firm have papered over a billion dollars of ETA transactions, and his writing has become required reading for an entire generation of searchers learning how these deals actually close.

Listen to Episode →
Jon Staenberg
Jon Staenberg
Founder, Agate Hound Fund

A venture veteran who has managed $325M across his career and went on to found Agate Hound, one of the first fund-of-funds built specifically for search funds — institutionalizing an asset class most investors still have not heard of.

Listen to Episode →
Geoff Ralston
Geoff Ralston
Former President, Y Combinator

Ran YC's 2,500+ company portfolio — Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, DoorDash — to a combined valuation north of $800B. Built Yahoo Mail from his startup Four11, then sold Lala to Apple before returning to back the next generation of founders.

Listen to Episode →
Chris Haroun
Chris Haroun
Early Investor, Facebook & Palantir

Ex-Goldman Sachs and Citadel, Chris raised and managed over $1 billion across his career, with a venture stake in Facebook and Palantir before either went public. Now teaches the deal-making playbook to 2 million+ students worldwide.

Listen to Episode →
Matt Wilson
Matt Wilson
Early Investor, Pinterest & Lyft

Founder of Allied Venture Partners, Matt caught Pinterest and Lyft on the way up and has since backed 100+ early-stage companies — building Western Canada's largest angel syndicate along the way.

Listen to Episode →
Martin Tobias
Martin Tobias
Backer of 6 Billion-Dollar Startups

Founder of Incisive Ventures, Martin has backed six separate unicorns — including early stakes in Google and DocuSign — after building three VC-backed companies and taking two of them public.

Listen to Episode →
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In Partnership With

Built Alongside
the Deal Lawyers

The Deall Show is produced in partnership with LexMergers, the M&A law firm that lives inside these transactions every day. Their vantage point keeps the show honest: not theory about acquisition, but what actually shows up in the purchase agreement.

LexMergers M&A Counsel
The Founder
Berk
Founder · The Deall
Berk, founder of The Deall
LinkedIn → berk@reverielux.com →

Berk has been building businesses since he was thirteen. He helped take a startup that raised $2.5M in VC funding to exit, then served as VC in Residence at Lvlup Ventures, working with 15+ funds to source deals and helping VCs raise capital from new LPs.

Along the way he hosted a podcast interviewing figures like Geoff Ralston, former president of Y Combinator, alongside early investors and backers of Google, DocuSign, Facebook, Pinterest, Lyft, and Palantir — guests who have collectively raised and managed billions of dollars across funds spanning diverse industries worldwide.

Search funds are where all of that work pointed. Venture taught him how capital finds founders; the sell side taught him how rarely it finds the companies that actually keep the country running. There are millions of profitable businesses about to close for want of a buyer, and an entire generation of capable operators who never learned that buying one was an option. Closing that gap is the most useful thing he knows how to do — so he is documenting it in public, building the tools, and raising toward the fund.

The Cortés Series — Rêverie Cigars
Rêverie Cigars · Cortés Series
A Side Brand

Rêverie Cigars

Deals get made in the unhurried hour — over dinner, after the room clears, when there is finally time for the real conversation. Rêverie Cigars is built for that hour: a working instrument for the dealmakers we sit across from, not a souvenir.

It began as the house's first venture and remains a brand of its own — the cigar house, The Deall Show's original home, and the Cortés Series, our first release.

Visit Rêverie Cigars → Explore the Cortés Series →
Join the Founding Circle

Early is the
whole advantage

A media house, a toolset, and a search fund — being built right now, in a market most institutional capital has not priced yet. The early names on this list won't just watch the transfer happen. They'll own a piece of what meets it.

We're opening a small number of conversations with investors and partners who move before the consensus does. If you've ever wished you'd been in the room early — this is the room, and it's early.

Option I
Start a Conversation

Tell us how you see yourself in this. Every partnership we've built started with a single, unhurried email.

berk@reverielux.com→
Option II
Sit Down With Us

Book thirty minutes with the founder. Bring your questions, your vision, or just your curiosity — and hear where this is going.

Book a Call→

Fortune favors commitment.