In Pursuit of Permanent Things.
I. The Problem With the Current System
("Everything is Broken")
The modern venture ecosystem is built on a seductive narrative that promises extraordinary success in exchange for extreme risk. Yet behind this myth lies a reality most insiders already know: fewer than 5% of venture-backed startups ever return capital. The overwhelming majority quietly fail, stall, or get acqui-hired into irrelevance. This is not a system designed to build sustainable businesses. It’s designed to mint lottery tickets.
For founders, the result is a brutal binary: you either “swing for the fences” or you don’t matter. And for those who try to play the middle, building solid, cash-generating companies at a rational pace, the ecosystem offers no support. You’re either a rocket ship—or you’re on your own.
Private equity, seen as the mature counterpart to venture capital, offers no safe harbor either. Despite the language of operational excellence, most PE firms operate with the same underlying bias: extract as much value as quickly as possible. What gets praised as discipline is often short-termism in disguise. Legacy teams are cut, brands are commoditized, and cultures are reshaped to fit a spreadsheet. PE-backed businesses may grow (on paper) but they rarely endure. This is a system designed to serve investors first, not the companies themselves. What’s left behind is often a hollowed-out version of something that used to matter.
Founders today face a false choice. Raise too much capital and you quickly lose control, buried under layers of preferences, board seats, and growth expectations you never agreed to. But raise nothing and you're left underpowered, overworked, and increasingly stuck. Too much capital turns you into a pawn. Too little turns you into a prisoner. Either way, you're boxed in. The toll of operating in these environments is severe. Burnout isn’t a risk. It’s a feature of the system. Legal battles, broken partnerships, shattered cap tables—these aren’t edge cases. They are the downstream effects of misaligned structures, poor incentives, and models that treat people as means to an end.
The most tragic part is that most “bad endings” start with good intentions. Two co-founders, a shared dream, maybe an early win or two. But the moment outside capital enters, incentives diverge. Time horizons misalign. Control shifts. And eventually, one party wants out while the other is still trying to build. What started as a vision becomes a negotiation. What started as a company becomes a deal.
The current system isn't just inefficient. It’s corrosive. It pushes people to sacrifice too much, too soon, for too little. It encourages acceleration at the cost of intention, and rewards exits more than endurance. It leaves too many great businesses (and great people) broken before they ever had a chance to become what they could be.
II. The Real Question
("What if we designed something better from the start?")
The real opportunity isn’t to patch the system—it’s to replace the foundation. What if we began not with the fund structure or the return profile, but with the lived experience of the people who actually build companies? What if the primary design constraint wasn’t IRR or exit timing, but the ability to sustain meaningful work over decades? What if we built a model where founders weren’t pressured to contort their companies for investors, but instead partnered with capital that contorted itself around the needs of an enduring business?
For founders, that means a system where starting doesn’t require surrender. Where you can launch with support, without mortgaging control. Where you can grow at a rational pace, reinvest into the business, and build something enduring without having to constantly justify your existence through artificial growth metrics. It’s not about going slow. It’s about being able to go far. Founders deserve the ability to build with freedom, but also with upside. Not as underpaid stewards of other people’s capital, but as owners whose wealth compounds alongside their companies.
For investors, it means replacing the obsession with liquidity events with something more powerful: long-term economic participation. The best returns come not from flipping undervalued assets, but from deeply understanding and compounding into assets you’d want to hold forever. This means backing the right people, in the right structures, with the patience and capital to let excellence mature. Investors gain something rare: exposure to real, compounding cash flows, true alignment with operators, and ownership in durable companies that weren’t designed to sell, but to last (while still benefiting from exposure to asymmetric venture potential).
We don’t need a new flavor of venture. We need a new form. A structure designed from first principles to support both the ambition of great founders and the discipline of smart capital, without forcing either party to compromise. The question isn’t “how do we make the old models more palatable?” It’s: “what would we build if we didn’t inherit any of this?”
III. The Permanent Venture Model
("A different foundation altogether.")
Holden begins not as a fund or firm, but as a structural philosophy—a reorientation of incentives, time horizons, and ownership logic. At its core is the belief that the most enduring businesses are not built to exit, but to operate indefinitely. That premise demands a radically different architecture. One with no exit pressure. No mandatory liquidity horizon. No artificial milestones imposed by LP agreements or capital return timelines. Instead, the entire structure is built to prioritize resilience, reinvestment, and long-term alignment between the people who build and the people who back them.
The first pillar is permanence. This doesn’t mean never selling. It means never needing to. By removing exit as a structural requirement, founders regain optionality. A company can be held forever, passed on, spun out, or sold on its own terms—not because the fund’s lifecycle demands it, but because the outcome serves the mission. That flexibility changes how decisions get made. It encourages sustainable hiring, long-term product strategy, and values-aligned growth. It shifts the conversation from short-term optics to long-term substance.
The second pillar is aligned incentives. Traditional structures reward capital at the expense of contribution. Permanent Ventures rejects that. Here, ownership is shared based on value creation, not capital deployment alone. Equity is earned, not extracted. Founders retain meaningful control, even as they share upside with strategic capital. Investors participate as partners, not overlords. The power dynamic is intentionally rebalanced to support mutual compounding over time. When incentives are aligned, trust becomes structural, not situational.
The third pillar is the platform. Holden isn’t a single company. It’s an ecosystem. Every new venture benefits from shared infrastructure: customer networks, systems, capital, and talent. This reduces startup friction and creates a flywheel effect. As the portfolio grows, each subsequent business is easier to launch, de-risk, and scale. Synergies emerge, not from forced integration, but from optional collaboration. Founders are never forced into a holding company mold, but they can plug into a shared engine when it helps them go further.
The final pillar is compounding outcomes. Our model doesn’t bet on a single asset class or growth stage. It operates across a deliberate risk curve. Some businesses are low-risk and cash-flowing from day one, like high-margin services. Others may pursue software economics or operational scale. Still others may anchor long-term value in hard assets. Together, they produce a layered portfolio of income, equity, and enterprise value. Profits are recycled into new ventures or into external yield-generating assets, creating an internal reinvestment loop that powers the system forward without external pressure.
This is not venture capital. It’s not private equity. It’s not a traditional family office. It’s a structurally distinct model built for founders and investors who want to create durable economic engines. And for those who have the patience, discipline, and alignment to let them mature. The Permanent Ventures path isn’t about building faster. It’s about building right.
IV. Welcome to Permanent Ventures
("This is the company you don’t have to sell.")
Permanent Ventures isn’t just our model—it’s a mindset. It’s a rejection of the assumption that all great companies must eventually be sold, flipped, or IPO’d. It’s an invitation to build something different: a business that grows with time, compounds with intention, and creates value beyond any single liquidity event. For founders who have felt trapped by the binary nature of the traditional startup path (raise or die, exit or fail) this is an alternative route. A third path that rewards execution, endurance, and ownership without compromise.
Holden is a platform designed for the people who care more about what they’re building than how fast they can sell it. It’s for the operators who want to own their time, their decisions, and their upside. It’s for the investors who are tired of short-term capital gymnastics and want to participate in real, long-duration value creation. It’s for the builders who would keep doing the work even if the exit came and went, because the work itself still matters.
Permanent Ventures are built to be held, not flipped. Built to support great people over decades, not discard them when the spreadsheet demands it. Built to create wealth that is earned through contribution, not simply acquired through capital. It’s a platform that welcomes ambition without forcing acceleration, and that protects vision without capping growth. In a world that increasingly rewards noise, speed, and superficial scale, building Permanent Ventures is quiet commitment to quality. To intention. To control.
This is the company you don’t have to sell. It’s the one you get to keep. Built to last. Built together.
V. A New Class of Investment
("An alternative instrument for a new kind of investor.")
Holden is more than a company builder. It is a vehicle for a new kind of capital allocation—a hybrid between operating company, holding company, and platform fund. It doesn't sit cleanly within existing financial categories because it was designed for a different purpose. Where traditional asset classes prioritize liquidity, scale, or yield in isolation, Holden blends them. It offers something structurally rare: participation in long-term, operationally controlled businesses without the constraints of venture, private equity, or public markets. This is a different kind of instrument built for permanence and performance.
The timing couldn’t be more relevant. Capital is migrating. Investors are leaving behind the 60/40 public equity model, searching instead for resilience, yield, and uncorrelated upside. The fastest-growing asset class in this shift is private credit, especially in an environment where inflation remains high, trust in public markets has eroded, and yield is hard to find. Credit offers stability and cash flow, but it’s inherently constrained. It preserves wealth but doesn’t compound it at scale. Investors want more than protection. They want participation.
At the same time, a growing class of post-economic founders, early employees, and private wealth allocators are encountering a new problem: where to put the money. They’ve played the venture game. They’ve taken their chips off the table. But now they face the limits of diversification. Real estate is stable, but increasingly competitive and illiquid. Public equities offer liquidity, but less and less efficiency. Venture capital has become crowded and often detached from real returns. Private equity returns are attractive, but the investor is merely a passenger. In all of these, the same issue persists: capital is deployed, but not directed. It works, but it doesn't do enough work for you.
Eventually, many of these investors reach the same conclusion: the most asymmetric, controllable, and satisfying use of capital is to own and operate great businesses directly, especially when you have a personal edge. Holden was designed to formalize that insight. It gives investors a structured way to own meaningful positions in enduring companies, alongside operators they trust, with the ability to shape the outcome. It’s not about passive exposure, it’s about strategic participation, without the burden of day-to-day execution.
This is where Holden sits. At the intersection of cash-flow and control. Of upside and duration. Of stability and strategic engagement. Our Permanent Ventures behave like credit when you need income. They behave like equity when you want to grow. They behave like real estate in its resilience. And they behave like a platform when you want to compound.
More than a model, this is a new category. It’s the anti-VC venture firm. The anti-PE holding company. The anti-fund fund. A structure for long-term thinkers who want to build great businesses and keep them. It’s capital for the next generation of owners—people who’ve moved beyond exits and are now solving for alignment, leverage, and legacy.
In Pursuit of Permanent Things.
—Holden