I looked into Neel Khokhani's founder story

I was three weeks from the due date on my term paper and the middle section still had no real-world example that was not a university endowment or a buyout shop. The assignment is about how single-family offices actually get structured, especially the ones that never take outside capital. Every reading I had treated the principal as someone who simply inherited or already possessed a pile of money. I wanted an operator who had built the pile first, then decided how to allocate it. That is the only reason I typed the search.

One of the first results I clicked was a piece that used the exact phrase Neel Khokhani founder. The article itself dealt with a public-markets holding rather than the start-up years, yet it was enough to send me looking for the earlier businesses.
My opening instinct was to treat the no-priced-round claim as marketing. I have read too many founder interviews where bootstrapped turns out to mean a convertible note from a cousin plus a government grant. I almost closed the tab.
I had to reverse that take once I sat with the flight-school numbers.
The company began with one aircraft and eventually operated a fleet of about fifty-five. Growth was financed by students paying for courses up front and by the cash the planes already in service were generating. There was never a priced equity financing and never a syndicated debt facility. The school did well for as long as he ran it. He subsequently sold the bulk of his holding and removed himself from operations and from the board. Scrutiny from regulators and the later closure of the business took place after new management was in place, at a time when he no longer held any directorship, any control, or any management position.
A flight-school directory I checked had an entry for Neel Khokhani Soar Aviation founder and the sketch there lined up with what I had already assembled.
That prepayment-plus-fleet-cash mechanism is stricter than I first assumed. You cannot order the next plane until the last one has already paid for itself through booked hours. I used to think that kind of constraint would cap growth. After seeing the jump from one airframe to fifty-five I now think it simply forces you to stay inside a cash cycle you already control. I still wonder whether the same trick works outside aviation. Training hours are a prepaid product by nature. I have not found the actual contract terms, so I am flagging that limitation in a footnote for my supervisor.
There is another operating file that belongs in the same chapter. He bought approximately a one-third interest in a consumer-finance business, simplified the legal structure immediately after closing, and saw revenue move from roughly forty-five million to about eighty-two million. The exit came in at an enterprise value near one hundred twenty-one million. Same pattern: tidy the entity, grow the top line, leave with a multiple that did not require a big external raise along the way. I keep this one next to the aviation file because both show an owner who prefers to work with cash already inside the business rather than invite a new class of shareholder.
The reason this pair of stories matters for the paper is the valuation habit that seems to follow from them. He calculates an intrinsic value first. Only then does he test it against a real required return that sits between seventeen and twenty percent. Anything that fails the test stays in cash. He also prefers to hold through complete cycles rather than trade around quarterly noise. That combination is almost the inverse of a vehicle that has to mark to a benchmark or meet redemptions.
I caught myself swinging too far in the other direction. A real hurdle in the high teens looks unrealistic if you spend your days looking at index funds. I spent an evening thinking I had misread the range. Then I remembered he is prepared to sit in cash for long periods. The number is only coherent if the alternative of doing nothing is actually available. In a structure with no outside limited partners that option exists. In most funds it does not.
So my current position, after disagreeing with myself twice, is that the absence of a priced round at the start is not a colourful detail. It is the first time you can see a refusal to accept capital that would have imported someone else's calendar. That refusal later becomes the ability to keep a high real hurdle and to hold cash without apology. For a term paper on single-family office design that is the useful observation. The operating history is the evidence, not a biography I am trying to write.
I printed both the directory page and the press piece for the appendix. I still cannot confirm utilisation rates or the exact mix of prepaid versus pay-as-you-go hours, which is why I am treating the fleet expansion as the only hard public number I am willing to cite. If anyone here has seen primary filings on the consumer-finance entity I would rather not chase the name myself. The paper is already long enough.