Kevin Hartz runs A* Capital, a $300M venture fund in San Francisco. He is also chairman of Sauron, a home security startup whose tech roster includes the U.S. Marine Corps and Department of State. He co-founded Eventbrite, the event ticketing platform that went public at $1.8 billion. He co-founded Xoom, the money transfer company PayPal acquired for $1.1 billion. He seeded PayPal, Airbnb, Uber, Pinterest, Palantir, Square, Stripe, and Slack - mostly before anyone had a thesis for why those things would work.
None of this is what makes him interesting. What makes him interesting is the pattern underneath it all. He has a Stanford history degree and an Oxford masters in 18th-century British monarchy, and he talks about both with the same intensity he brings to seed-stage AI companies. He thinks the best investors are the ones who actively seek out what looks ludicrous. He handed the CEO chair at Eventbrite to his wife - the woman he'd met at a wedding nine months before they co-founded the company - and describes the decision as straightforwardly correct. He uses his firm's capital to back founders who are, in some cases, still in high school.
In 1999, after selling his first startup for roughly $10 million, Hartz moved virtually all of his liquid capital into the seed round of a payments company then called FieldLink. The logic was not financial. It was entirely qualitative: he trusted Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. FieldLink became Confinity, then PayPal, then a $1.5 billion acquisition by eBay. The bet paid off. But what's more revealing than the outcome is the reasoning - pure conviction in people, no spreadsheet required.
He has been wrong, too. In the early days of Airbnb, he was positioned to invest at seed stage and lost the deal because he delivered what the industry calls an "exploding term sheet" - an aggressive tactic that gives founders an artificially short deadline to accept. The founders went elsewhere. The company became one of the most valuable consumer businesses in the world. Hartz estimates the miss cost him somewhere around $10 billion in paper returns. He talks about it freely and without apparent bitterness, which says more about his character than most LinkedIn posts ever could.
His firm A* Capital - co-founded with Gautam Gupta (formerly Uber's finance head) and Bennett Siegel (ex-Coatue) - backs companies from pre-seed through Series B, with a sweet spot around $3M checks. The fund's limited partners include Max Levchin and Peter Thiel from the PayPal years. More recently, A* has developed an unusual thesis: approximately 20% of the fund goes into founders who are teenagers. Not twenty-three-year-old prodigies. Actual teenagers. A* invested in one company whose founder was too young to legally drive a car at the time of the check. Hartz describes what he's looking for: "bright kids who are bored in school."
His current operating project is Sauron - named, yes, after the all-seeing villain of Tolkien's Ring cycle - a perceptual home security platform that uses the same sensor fusion and object detection technology developed for autonomous vehicles. Co-founded with Jack Abraham (who also co-founded Hims & Hers), Sauron has built a client list that spans Restoration Hardware, Tesla, Zoom, and the United States Special Operations Command. Hartz calls it "a love letter to my wife, Julia." Whatever you make of that framing, the product is real: a camera system that can distinguish a deer from a person from a package, in the dark, in the rain, continuously.
"Ingenuity comes out of scarce resources."
- Kevin HartzHartz grew up in Orinda, California, a small town in the East Bay hills. He went to Stanford, where he studied history and applied earth science - not computer science, not economics. He was a member of Phi Delta Theta and, through student politics, met a young Peter Thiel. At the time, neither of them had any idea what that connection would eventually be worth.
After Stanford, he went to Oxford on a masters program and spent a year studying King George III. Not for career leverage. Not for any reason he could articulate cleanly at the time. He calls it "an opportunity to learn how to learn," which is the kind of thing people say when the actual answer is harder to explain. He returned to California in 1993 with a sharper mind and no immediate plans.
His first real job was at Silicon Graphics, where he worked on Cosmo Player, an early virtual reality browser. He described the company as "a Disneyland for research scientists," which means it was brilliant and impractical and fun to work at until it wasn't. He stayed two years and left to build his own thing.
"It was entirely qualitative with PayPal. I just knew that Peter and Max are great, phenomenal people."
ConnectGroup, his first startup, sold high-speed internet to hotels using Linux servers. He co-founded it in early 1998 and sold it to LodgeNet for roughly $10 million before the year ended. Less than ten months, start to exit. He later admitted: "We never built a company. We flipped something." It was a useful distinction to carry forward.
In 1999, with the dot-com bubble at maximum inflation, Hartz took the ConnectGroup proceeds and put them into the seed round of a company that was barely a company yet - a payments startup called FieldLink. His reasoning: Peter Thiel and Max Levchin were the founders. That was enough. The company eventually became PayPal. The PayPal seed investors who held on did extraordinarily well. Hartz was one of them.
Xoom came next. In 2001, Hartz co-founded an international money remittance service with Alan Braverman. The original premise: build the first real application on PayPal's new API. He served as CEO until 2005, when he stepped back to the board. That early departure was something he later described as a mistake - leaving the operating role before the company had a strong enough foundation. He learned the cost of transitioning away from a company before it's ready for you to leave.
Eventbrite began in January 2006, less than a year after Kevin got engaged to Julia Hartz at a Santa Barbara wedding. They co-founded it with a French engineer named Renaud Visage and initially called it a rudimentary ticketing side project built while exploring payment applications. Nine months after founding, Kevin and Julia got married. Two years after that, Eventbrite was a real business. By 2018, it was a public company on the NYSE.
"As we grew, my job really became talent acquisition. Always more than half my time was spent recruiting and finding great people."
The handoff to Julia is worth sitting with. Kevin stepped back as CEO and Julia stepped in. He says he made the decision because it was correct, not because it was gracious. Julia built the company into a billion-dollar enterprise. Kevin went to Founders Fund as a venture partner for two years, then left to co-found A*. The marriage survived and apparently thrives. They have four daughters, they prioritize family dinners five to six nights a week, and they've appeared together on podcasts about genomic embryo screening, which they used for their younger two children. They are, it appears, doing exactly what they want to be doing.
A* Capital launched in 2020 with a first fund backed by Levchin, Thiel, and other founders from the PayPal orbit. The second fund raised exclusively from institutional LPs. Hartz's investment philosophy has crystallized into something specific: find the founders who look like outliers to everyone else, give them real capital at the earliest stage, and get out of the way. He categorizes founders as "Greek" (visionary architects who see the structure before the parts exist) and "Roman" (executors who build the empire the visionaries sketch). He prizes the rare ones who are both.
"I look for the real odd ducklings that are in a very odd category and run by brilliant people."
- Kevin Hartz, on what he looks for in foundersStay very lean, don't become reliant on the addictive drug of investment capital, really focus on building a sustainable business.
When focusing on talent, great things happen.
Typically when you see something that is non-standard, instead of kind of turning away or rejecting it, really try to understand.
Product and engineering as a core part of the business is critically important. Don't outsource it.
I went overseas and got a Masters in British history at Oxford. It was an opportunity to learn how to learn.
I get extremely frustrated when somebody is not really tackling a problem that matches their intellect and skill.
My theory is not to listen to your parents - or do exactly the opposite - because parents have this need to protect their children.
[AI is] the Mother of All Bubbles. But the market is still underhyped relative to the long-term opportunity - especially at the application layer.
[Sauron is] a love letter to my wife, Julia.
Where he met Peter Thiel through student politics. His unusual dual major - humanities plus hard science - mirrors the way he thinks about companies: narrative and data, people and systems.
He went to Oxford with no career plan. "An opportunity to learn how to learn." His thesis subject - a monarch who presided over both the American Revolution and the loss of the colonies - was chosen for its complexity, not its relevance to Silicon Valley.
"When focusing on talent, great things happen."
- Kevin Hartz on building Eventbrite