Sandy Paige: The Late-Blooming Unicorn Breaking ETA Molds at 48

In the ETA ecosystem, the standard archetype of a searcher is well-defined: a 28-to-32-year-old MBA graduate, usually from Harvard or Stanford, with a few years of consulting or finance experience, looking to buy their first company. They are young, unencumbered, and fit a pattern that investors have backed for decades.

Sandy Paige was none of those things. At 48, with four teenagers and a degree from Babson rather than the Ivy League, Paige struggled to raise capital. Investors told him he was too old, his geographic constraints were too tight, and his background didn't fit the "top decile" mold.

Yet, less than four years after acquiring a niche biotech services firm, Paige sold the company for $295 million. The deal achieved a roughly 27x to 28x MOIC, cementing it as one of the most successful outcomes in search fund history.

Sandy Paige’s journey to entrepreneurship was a slow burn spanning nearly two decades. Growing up in Maine as the youngest of four boys, he was exposed to business early. His father was a bank CEO, and his grandfather ran a woolen manufacturing company. However, his early career was defined by politics rather than profits. He served as a personal assistant and driver for Angus King during King’s successful run for Governor of Maine. From King, Paige learned the art of communication and the importance of likability; skills that would later prove essential in raising capital.

Paige was first introduced to the concept of a "search fund" in 2002 while earning his MBA at Babson College. He interned for Maurice Pinto, a member of the so-called "Search Fund Mafia" (a group of early investors who pioneered the model). Pinto encouraged Paige to launch a search immediately upon graduation.

Paige declined. With a pregnant wife and a two-year-old child at home, the risk profile of a funded search felt like hubris. Instead, he spent the next 15 years building an "operating resume," working in general management roles across finance, sales, and operations. He attempted a self-funded search years later, getting two deals to the closing table before walking away due to diligence findings.

Tragedy struck when Paige’s wife was diagnosed with cancer. Her passing left him a widower with two children, putting any entrepreneurial dreams on indefinite hold. It wasn't until years later, after remarrying a former CEO who encouraged him to stop talking about it and finally do it, that Paige decided to launch his search fund, Seabright Fund, at the age of 48.

Raising capital for Seabright Fund was a grueling nine-month process. In the search fund community, patterns matter, and Paige broke all of them.

Age: At 48, investors worried he wouldn't have the energy for the "grind" of sourcing deals or managing interns. One investor bluntly told him, "If you were really top decile, you would have made $10 million by now," Paige revealed in one appearance on Acquiring Mind Podcast.

Geography: Paige restricted his search to Northern California to avoid uprooting his blended family of four teenagers. Geographic constraints are often a red flag for investors who want searchers to chase value anywhere in the country.

Pedigree: While Babson is number one in entrepreneurship, the search fund world is heavily biased toward Stanford GSB and Harvard Business School graduates.

Despite these headwinds, Paige closed his fund on December 15, 2017. He scraped together the capital, often in "half units," from skeptical investors who were betting on his resilience rather than his profile.

If Paige’s profile was unconventional, his target acquisition was even more so. Investors in the search space typically avoid biotechnology. The industry is viewed as high-risk, capital-intensive, and binary: either a drug works, or the company fails.

However, Paige found a loophole. Through proprietary outreach to former clients from his previous role at The Jackson Laboratory, he connected with the founder of Explora BioLabs in San Diego.

Explora was not a drug developer. It was a pre-clinical contract research organization (CRO) that offered "Vivarium-as-a-Service" (VaaS).

In simple terms, Explora was the "WeWork for mice." Biotech startups need expensive, regulated spaces (vivariums) to conduct rodent research. Building these facilities costs $700 to $800 per square foot, a massive capital expenditure for a startup with limited runway. Explora built and managed these high-tech facilities, renting out rooms and cages to biotech companies on flexible 1-to-3-year contracts.

When Paige acquired the business in February 2018 (just seven weeks after closing his fund), Explora had the following profile:

While it operated in the risky biotech sector, the business fundamentals were pure search gold: high recurring revenue, high switching costs (you can't easily move live research animals), and strong margins.

Under Paige’s leadership as CEO, Explora BioLabs underwent an explosive transformation. The core insight was recognizing that Explora wasn't just a service provider; it was a two-sided real estate marketplace.

On one side were the biotech tenants who needed flexibility. On the other side were massive life science landlords (like Alexandria Real Estate Equities and BioMed Realty). These landlords wanted vivariums in their buildings as amenities to attract tenants, but they didn't want to manage the complex regulatory compliance of animal research.

Paige struck a brilliant bargain. Landlords would pay for the expensive Tenant Improvements (TIs) to build the facilities (often millions of dollars) and amortize that cost into Explora's long-term lease. Explora would then manage the facility and collect high-margin service revenue from tenants.

This model allowed Explora to grow without diluting equity.

The strategy worked. Explora expanded from 7 facilities to over 25, entering new markets like San Francisco and Boston. The headcount grew from 30 to over 125 employees.

By late 2021, the market for life sciences real estate was white-hot. However, Paige sensed a shift. Large strategic players like Charles River Laboratories (CRL)—a $12 billion market cap giant at the time—were eyeing the VaaS space. Paige realized that if CRL decided to compete directly, they could use their massive balance sheet to squeeze Explora out of prime real estate locations.

Although his investors wanted to hold the asset longer (it was the best performer in many of their portfolios), Paige convinced the board that the timing was perfect for an exit.

In 2022, after a hold period of just 3 years and 10 months, Explora BioLabs was acquired by Charles River Laboratories.

This outcome is a statistical outlier in the search fund world, where a 3x to 5x return is considered a success.

Reflecting on the success, Paige attributes much of it to the very factor investors used against him: his age.

"It wasn't my first rodeo in hiring a senior team," Paige notes. "I was able to hire the right three, four, five senior leaders really quickly and not have to replace and try again."

In a hyper-growth environment where revenue was growing 40% year-over-year, a 28-year-old first-time CEO might have drowned in the operational chaos or made fatal hiring errors. Paige’s 15 years of general management experience allowed him to stabilize the culture, manage a complex board, and navigate high-stakes negotiations with billionaire real estate developers.

Sandy Paige’s story is a rebuke to the pattern-matching that dominates private equity and search funds. He proved that the "perfect" searcher isn't necessarily the young MBA with a pristine spreadsheet, but perhaps the battle-tested operator who has navigated real-life adversity.

Today, Paige serves as co-Managing Director of Seabright Ventures, investing in the next generation of searchers. He specifically looks to broaden the aperture of who gets funded, advocating for more diversity in age, gender, and ethnicity within the search community. His advice to mid-career professionals is simple: "If you can talk 12, 15, 20 people into filling out your cap table... get on it. There's just no better time than now."