Each answer below is written to be quoted whole.
Permanent capital is money with no obligation to return it: no fund life, no vintage year, and no date on which a limited partner must be repaid. The consequence is structural rather than stylistic — a ten-year fund must sell its best asset in year nine whether or not year nine is the right year, and a balance sheet need not.
A family office is the private investment institution of a single family or principal, and it owns rather than advises. It needs no distribution, answers to no investment committee, and holds a horizon longer than any fund that could be sold to it — which is what allows it to underwrite on judgment rather than on consensus.
Gord Capital deploys permanent capital across principal investments, venture, private equity, merchant banking and asset management, concentrated where technology redraws a market rather than where it improves one. The office underwrites infrastructure it expects its own companies to run on, which is a different test from backing the best company in a category.
A family office differs from a venture fund in three structural ways: it raises no outside capital, so it owes no return on a calendar; it holds no diversification mandate, so it may concentrate; and it has no exit horizon, so it may hold a position indefinitely. A fund optimises for a distribution date, and a family office optimises for what is still true in twenty years.