Viking Global Investors

Andreas Halvorsen

Andreas Halvorsen is the Norwegian-born founder and CEO of Viking Global Investors, the Connecticut hedge fund he has run since 1999. Money management was his second act: after graduating from the Norwegian Naval Academy he commanded a Norwegian SEAL team, a stint he credited with honing the discipline he later brought to investing. He then moved to the United States, earned an economics degree from Williams College in 1986 and an MBA from Stanford in 1990, and worked in Morgan Stanley's investment banking division before joining Tiger Management, where he rose to senior managing director and analyst under Julian Robertson. There he became one of the "Tiger Cubs," Robertson's protégés who went on to launch their own funds. Halvorsen left Tiger in 1999 and co-founded Viking with two fellow Tiger alumni, David Ott and Brian Olson, opening in Stamford, Connecticut with roughly $520 million in seed capital. The firm runs a long/short equity strategy built on deep, bottom-up research, with analysts covering public companies across global markets and Viking concentrating its capital in the team's highest-conviction ideas rather than spreading it thinly. It blends public and private investments, keeping a flexible mandate that follows wherever its research leads. For a manager of his size Halvorsen keeps an unusually low public profile, rarely giving interviews, even as Viking has grown into one of the world's larger independent investment firms.