00:00Today on Forbes meet the billionaire investor who owns the land where Jurassic Park was filmed
00:07Billionaire venture capitalist Walter Kortschak is confident in his formula. He told Forbes quote
00:14Investing is about duration and persistence
00:16I don't know a lot of folks in our industry who have done very early stage
00:20Growth equity and private equity and done it well for this long
00:25consistently
00:27the 65 year old longtime investor owns homes in Aspen, Colorado and London plus a nearly
00:333,000 acre plot on the island of Kauai
00:37He purchased most of his Hawaii land where Jurassic Park was filmed and just down the street from Mark Zuckerberg's property in 2003
00:46Kortschak's assets are now worth an estimated 1.6 billion dollars
00:50Thanks to his tenure at growth equity firm summit partners and later
00:55Personal early-stage investments that paid off big
00:59Born in Canada to an Austrian father and an American mother Kortschak had an international childhood
01:05Raised largely in Geneva Switzerland where his father worked at the Swiss outpost of chemical manufacturer DuPont
01:13Kortschak first wanted to be a software engineer and earned two degrees in the discipline a
01:18Bachelor's from Oregon State and a master's from Caltech
01:21Then he joined a computer graphics startup in 1982 that later became MSC software a couple years later
01:29He returned to business school at UCLA where he was one of two quote venture fellows in
01:351985
01:37Through the fellowship which places students in summer roles at VC firms
01:41Kortschak interned at cross-point venture partners in early seed stage firm
01:46He joined cross-point full-time in 1986 a difficult time to break into venture capital
01:53He says there were quote probably eight
01:56associate positions across the entire industry that year
02:00Kortschak left cross-point and joined summit partners in 1989 to focus on later stage investing
02:07profitable growth stage companies mainly in the tech sector
02:10At that time summit was a five-year-old four hundred million dollar in assets under management firm
02:17He was charged with opening the Boston based outfits West Coast office
02:21One of his first major investments was in security company McAfee in 1991
02:26Which went public just a year later with a 9x return for summit
02:32During his two-decade tenure at summit Kortschak made a name for himself
02:36Landing on Forbes's Midas list of the world's best venture capital investors from 2005 through 2009
02:43He was involved in many of summits technology bets and buyouts
02:47including computer optics company etech dynamics which resulted in a 40x return and
02:53Networking company is Ilan which resulted in a 127 X return
02:59He left his active role at summit in 2010 when the firm had surpassed five billion dollars in assets and
03:05Became an advisor a position. He still holds today
03:09Armed with decades of experience and cash distributions
03:12He decided to go solo and return to early stage investing through his personal vehicles fire streak ventures and Kortschak investments
03:21Through fire streak ventures. He invests in early stage machine learning infrastructure and developer facing companies
03:28Through Kortschak investments. He invests in growth stage companies in software healthcare fintech and clean energy
03:36Kortschak was an early investor in several now public companies including the trade desk lift
03:43Palantir Robin Hood and Twitter
03:46Kortschak is also making AI bets with stakes in open AI and anthropic among other companies
03:53He says his investing career has indeed come full circle from early stage to growth equity and now back to early stage
04:01Although this time around the types of companies are different
04:04When asked about his investment advice the conversation turns to the sector many are focused on today AI
04:12Kortschak says quote. My personal advice is to be selective
04:16Invest in outlier founders and be disciplined in the number of investments you're making and the capital you're deploying to manage risk exposure
04:26For full coverage and to see our entire Q&A with Kortschak check out Phoebe Lewis piece on Forbes.com
04:34This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes
04:37Thanks for tuning in
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