Interview With Dev Kantesaria – Valley Forge Capital Management

ValueWalk’s Raul Panganiban interviews Dev Kantesaria, the Managing Partner at Valley Forge Capital Management.

Q2 hedge fund letters, conference, scoops etc

Dev Kantesaria – Valley Forge Capital Management

Transcript

Good morning podcast listeners. Today’s very special episode with Dev Kantesaria, Managing Partner at Valley Forge Capital. Dave is a graduate of Harvard Medical School. He began his career at McKinsey and Company where he was a senior associate. He was then principal at TL ventures. After this, he was general partner at Devon Park bio ventures. I want to welcome Dev to the show. And I want to welcome all the listeners to a very special episode.

Welcome to ValueTalks with Raul.

Alright, so just wanted to welcome our listeners to a very special episode. I have Dev Kantesaria Managing Partner at Valley Forge Capital Management. Dev, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me.

All right. Yes, you just tell me about your background and what led you to finance and investing?

Yeah, I’ve loved equities since I was eight years old. So it’s been something that has been a favorite hobby of mine for a long time. Although I took a circuitous route, you know, I would say that my investment career began, you know, in early 2000. When I, when I joined the venture capital world. It was a great learning environment for me, you know, to understand all aspects of businesses. I work with hundreds of CEOs and on many boards of directors. And so that operational experience that I got into venture capital world, I think that’s fairly rare in the public equity investment space. And that has allowed me to better assess the public equities that I’m analyzing.

So cool. Yeah, can tell me more about your time as a venture investor in biotech, and the kind of approach you took and what you like most about it?

Yes. So, you know, for the listeners, you know, I actually went to medical school, I was top of my class at Harvard Medical School and fancied myself becoming a renowned surgeon. But as I continued in medical school, I realized that although I love the intellectual aspects of medicine, the day to day practice was was very challenging and that, you know, I had more passion for finance. And so when I finished medical school, I joined McKinsey and Company I was a management consultant for a couple of years before joining the venture capital world. And so I worked at two different funds. During my venture capital days invested, you know, four to $500 million are co invested with my partners in biotech startup companies. These were companies that were developing pharmaceuticals. And, you know, it was it was something that I did did very much love. I would say that the thing about venture capital investing is that there is a portfolio strategy there, where you know, you’re hoping for one or two home runs on a portfolio of say 10 to 12 names that didn’t resonate, you know, with me as much as public equities where, you know, I wanted my batting average to be nine out of 10. I wanted, you know, almost every one of my investments to be a winner, and not to be subject to the luck factor that many venture capitalists face when they’re trying to find the next unicorn. And so, you know, for me, it was a great learning ground because you know, more than anything, a startup biotech company has a large number of different risks, regulatory risk, patent risk management risk, and I had to distill all of that into a single pre money valuation, a single, you know, figure of what I would be willing to pay for a business and that sort of future risk assessment is something that I think is a fundamental part of the edge that I think that we have today. In a public equity company. It’s great to look, you know, at what the company did over the last 10 years, but we need to try to figure out what the company is going to do for the next 10 years and so from a lot of different angles, it was a great learning, learning, you know, stepping stone for me to the public equity world.