100 Year Business Plan

The “100 Year Business Plan” is Kyle’s shorthand for the evergreen, multi-generation hold mindset — building a company to be owned and operated for a century rather than flipped on a five-year cycle. The phrasing comes from On the Nature of Long-Term Holds, where Dave Whorton (former Kleiner Perkins / TPG investor, founder of the Tugboat Institute) calls such firms “evergreen” companies and “encourages leaders to set building strategies of 100 years or more, encompassing business transfer and consistent possession.” Kyle tags this idea against the PE/VC/MBA habit of “thinking and modeling in five-year increments,” and cites century-plus exemplars like the Zildjian Company (continuous since 1623, now in its 15th generation). It sits at the center of the long-hold cluster — Compounding, Search Funds, Holding Companies, Investing 101 2.0 — and Kyle’s notes link it to Jack Ma, whose Alibaba is tagged alongside Whorton’s 100-year philosophy as a long-horizon company-building example.

Context: The “100-year” framing of corporate longevity is associated with Dave Whorton’s Tugboat Institute and its “evergreen” companies; Jack Ma separately stated an ambition for Alibaba to last 102 years (spanning three centuries), a widely-quoted long-termism slogan.

Where this appears

• On the Nature of Long-Term Holds — Whorton’s evergreen / 100-year-or-more building strategy, contrasted with five-year PE/VC modeling and illustrated by century-old firms like Zildjian.
• Jack Ma — tagged alongside the 100-year-business-plan thread as a long-horizon company-building exemplar.