Self Funded Search vs Investing in Portfolio of Search Deals

Hello everyone,

I'm fairly new to the Search Fund / business acquisition world, so please excuse if there is something glaringly obvious I'm missing, but I have been noticing that a lot of Searchers end up becoming investors in Search Fund deals after they exit their first deal instead of acquiring another business and repeating the process.

It made me curious if the risk/reward benefit leans more towards the investor path once you have capital in tow, and if I should potentially go to investor path instead of the self funded searcher path.

I have been working for a high growth tech company that had a successful IPO a few years back that has provided me with about $650k in personal capital that I can deploy into a business as a self funded searcher or invest in a portfolio of search fund deals.

The way I see it the benefits of going the investor path are:
- Greater diversity of deals which protects downside risk of doing a "bad deal"
- No personal guarantee
- Preference on returned capital
- Ability to continue to work my high income job
- Deal flow is brought to me vs me having to spend time and energy to create it
- Downside would potentially be the amount of time it takes to deploy all capital

When viewing the self funded searcher path I see:
- Greater upside as the majority (or single) owner of a single business
- Fulfillment from being able to run a business as the primary operator and scale it
- Risk in not finding a good deal for an extended period of time due to having to build up deal flow
- Personal financial risk due to the personal guarantee
- Risk of adverse events impacting return due to "all eggs being in one basket"

If you had $650k of personal capital to devote to one of these, which would you choose?

Appreciate all perspectives and opinions.