Valley Forge Capital Management

Valley Forge

Dev Kantesaria, a doctor who never practiced medicine, runs Valley Forge Capital Management out of Wayne, Pennsylvania. He set out to be a surgeon, earning a biology degree from MIT in 1994 and entering Harvard Medical School, but during his third-year hospital rotations he realized the day-to-day work was not what he had imagined and walked away to invest instead. He spent time as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and then roughly eighteen years in venture capital, backing biotech companies and serving on more than twenty boards, before founding Valley Forge in 2007. The firm began as a small vehicle for friends and family, launched with $300,000 of their money. Kantesaria, who runs it as managing partner, follows a concentrated, long-biased strategy built on the thinking of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. He looks for what he calls "toll-booth" businesses — companies with durable competitive advantages, the pricing power to raise prices faster than inflation, and little need to pour money back into the business to keep growing. He holds very few positions and rarely trades, rejecting broad diversification on the argument that diluting a portfolio with weaker businesses only adds risk once you have already found the best ones. He steers clear of speculative biotech, commodity producers, and acquirer-happy technology names.

based on 7 of 9 closed positions