Collab Holdings: A Different Approach to Private Equity for the Best Consumer Brands
A few months ago I was in Northern California, visiting a company we’ve known for years. They make one product. They’ve made it the same way for decades. Their customers are borderline religious about it. The business is profitable, growing steadily, and has been for a long time.
Over dinner, the founder told me something I’ve now heard in some version from at least a dozen founders over the past fifteen years.
“I have investors who need to sell. I don’t want to sell. And there’s no one in the middle.”
She didn’t want to go public. She didn’t want to get rolled up by private equity. She didn’t want a strategic acquirer who’d strip the thing down to a margin optimization exercise. She just wanted to keep building the company she’d already built, with a partner who saw the same horizon she did.
I didn’t have a great answer for her. Not yet.
I think about this problem a lot, partly because it keeps showing up, and partly because the conditions that created it are getting worse.
Right now, an enormous amount of capital is flowing toward AI. That makes sense. The technology matters and the opportunity is real. We’re investors in AI ourselves. But one consequence of that concentration is that a whole category of great businesses is being quietly starved of the right kind of capital.
These are companies that make real, physical products people love. Products you can hold, taste, wear, give to someone you care about. They tend to be profitable. They tend to have customer bases that behave less like “users” and more like communities. And they tend to be run by founders who measure their work in decades, not funding rounds.
You know these companies when you encounter them. You probably own their products. A cast iron pan you’ll pass down. A pair of socks guaranteed for life. A soap that’s been made the same way since your grandparents were alive. A bag built to outlast you. They don’t chase trends. They set a standard and hold it, year after year, until the standard becomes the identity.
If you were starting LVMH today — not as a luxury conglomerate, but as a home for brands built on craft, obsession, and generational loyalty — what would it look like?
That question has been rattling around my head for a while. It’s what led us to build Collab Holdings.
Collaborative Fund has spent fifteen years backing companies at the intersection of strong values and strong economics — Blue Bottle, Sweetgreen, Kickstarter, OLIPOP. The thesis has always been the same: companies that align what’s good for people with what’s good for business tend to outperform over time.
But venture capital, even mission-aligned venture capital, has a structural limitation: the clock. A ten-year fund needs liquidity on a ten-year timeline. For software companies growing at triple-digit rates, that works. For a beloved consumer brand growing steadily with healthy margins and fanatical customers, it can be a slow-motion disaster. The fund timeline kicks in, and suddenly there’s pressure to juice growth, dilute the product line, “explore strategic alternatives.” The thing that made the company great becomes the thing that gets sacrificed.
There’s a real gap in the capital stack, and we think we can fill it.
Collab Holdings is a new private equity strategy, purpose-built to be a long-term home for extraordinary consumer brands. No forced exits. No ten-year clock. Success measured by cash flow and customer devotion, not by how quickly we can engineer an exit.
This isn’t a roll-up. We’re not consolidating brands under one umbrella to extract synergies. We’re looking to partner with founders who’ve already built something they’re proud of and give them the capital structure to keep doing it; for five years, ten years, thirty years.
We think the best brands are built by people who refuse to compromise. Who understand that the most valuable thing they own isn’t their revenue — it’s the relationship they have with the people who buy their products. Who believe that protecting what makes something great is how you make it last — and that making it last is how you make it enormous.
Historically, that conviction hasn’t had a capital partner that matches it.
Last month, I came across a letter Warren Buffett wrote to the president of See’s Candy in 1972. He’d just bought the company for $25 million. It’s produced billions in profit since — not because he optimized it, but because he understood what it was and gave it room to be that thing for a very long time.
That’s the instinct behind Collab Holdings. We want to be the kind of partner who understands what a company is — and gives it the room and the capital to keep being that, on its own terms, for as long as the founders want to build it.
If you’re building something like this — a company your customers love in a way that spreadsheets can’t quite capture — we’d love to hear from you.
Please meet: collab.holdings