Victor Tsao is always on the move.
In May he travelled to Nepal for a 15-day hike to the base camp of Mount Everest, the world’s highest and deadliest peak. Two climbers in his group of 16 were overmatched by elevation and exhaustion. One was airlifted out by helicopter, the other carried down by horseback, thanks to nearby villagers.
Victor, 66, is nearly as trim as his 32-year-old son Steven, who made the trek with him, a trip a decade in the making. The two reached the peak of a nearby Nepalese mountain range topping 18,200 feet, a personal record for the elder Tsao, who’s climbed Mt. Whitney, the highest peak in the lower 48 at 14,500 feet, and trekked through the unforgiving wilderness of Yosemite, the Sierra Nevadas, the John Muir Trail and several other bucket-list locations for the serious hiker and adventurer.
Victor, who made the ascension with the help of a steady diet of vegetables and mixed nuts from Costco, didn’t even feel a faint of dizziness or a mild headache throughout the journey.
“Of course, you have to prepare your body. You have to be ready,” he says during a rare in-person interview in the early-morning hours before the food court opens at Fashion Island. “You need a little bit of willpower.”
The personal assessment, in many ways, has defined his life and career.
Victor and his wife, Janie—they met in college in Taipei—(see wealthiest profile page 30), are among OC’s most powerful couples, solidifying their position with the $500 million sale in 2003 of Irvine-based home networking company Linksys Group Inc. to Cisco Systems Inc. The sale and savvy investments since then have popped their wealth to an estimated $1 billion.
Like many entrepreneurial stories that end in generational wealth, theirs began in a garage.
Bootstrapped, with no outside funding, they sold connectors and adapters to homes and small businesses from their Irvine garage in the early 1990s. Within a few years, they developed branded switches and hubs, the backbone of the modern home network.
When Microsoft debuted Windows 95, Linksys capiÂtalized on new broadband technology with the launch of the first affordable retail router. In 2000, the company released the first wireless version.
Janie, a former IT specialist at Sears, Roebuck and a systems manager at TRW and Carter Hawley Hale, focused on business development and sales. Victor focused on product development during the day and supÂply chain management at night with Linksys suppliers in Asia.
It wasn’t uncommon to work two shifts Monday through Saturday, go home between for a few hours to eat dinner, and then head back to the office until 1 or 2 in the morning. Sunday was a half day.
The grinding schedule lasted a decade.
“Before I left Linksys, I was tunnel-visioned,” says Victor, who abandoned friendships during those lean years as Linksys became a household name with hundreds of workers and $500 million in annual sales. “I was a little bit extreme, too much work.”
Victor still works hard, traversing the globe for potential investments and philanthropic endeavors, and he plays hard—the die-hard Lakers fan shoots hoops nearly every day on his home court in Newport Coast when he’s not scaling mountaintops or hunting for deals.
After the Nepal trip, he spent a few days in the remote region outside Xi Chang in southern mainland China, an area rife with drug trafficking and abuse, poverty and AIDS. A four-hour drive outside the city brought him to the Yi people, an ethnic minority who speak their own language. The area is primitive, with no job opportunities, fueling an exodus into the city to find work, often illegal. Entire villages have been decimated by disease.
Victor, who’s sponsored a few projects for kindergarten and elementary school students in the region over the years, went there to survey the situation on the ground, to speak with grandparents taking care of their grandchildren.
“I went to their home to see if stories were true. I want to see it,” says the Taiwan native, who came to the U.S. in 1977 to attend Illinois Institute of Technology. “It’s pretty sad. You go there and look around, you get tears in your eyes.”
He’s been to the Balkans three times in the past two years, incorporating a mix of alpine snow hiking and research. He’s met with young activists in Kosovo who want to improve their economy and expand business in an area full of nepotism and tribal allegiances.
So what took him to these far recesses of the globe, far off the beaten path?
“I’ve been searching. I’m looking for some really high-impact project.”
The search often takes him to Asia, particularly Hong Kong and Taipai, where he spends about two-thirds of his time nowadays. When he’s stateside, he’s often in New York City. Catching up with Victor in OC is a rare occurrence.
About three years ago, he created an investment theme for the family office, targeting biotech, medicine and general healthcare.
“Medicine is changing from chemical-based into more cell-based,” he says. “This is one area with a lot of potential.”
Steven, 32, manages Miven Inc.’s North American public and private equities investments. Janie serves as vice president. The Newport Beach firm manages multiple families that invest in a wide array of assets, including private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, real estate, public securities and fixed income. It allocates funding through investment managers, funds and direct holdings, never publicizing a deal.
Victor avoids social media altogether.
He’s unlikely to invest in markets that lack regulations and rules—a big reason Miven hasn’t invested in bitcoin or blockchain applications. Three years ago at a luncheon in Honk Kong, he says a venture capitalist told him to invest 5% of his net wealth in bitcoin when it traded at about $275.
The value of the digital currency last week neared $8,400. In mid-December it peaked at $19,086.
“I lost my chance,” Victor says. “It’s OK.”
He considers himself a risk taker and expects the same from his money managers.
“If you don’t take risk, how can you gain profit?,” he says. “My background as a startup, you always gamble some.”
His career in tech, particularly an emphasis in computer science and IT, has kept him moving forward, constantly evolving as he evaluates economies, topography, cultures and political landscapes. He prefers to eat at local restaurants when he travels, sparking up conversations with strangers and small-business owners, and driving through remote villages and countrysides.
“To me, that’s how I survey a country, I’m on the ground,” he says. “Play, have fun, but I always have a goal I try to accomplish.”
He’s a patron of the arts, an engineer, a historian who can rattle off Chinese dynasties and their years in power, and a voracious reader. He’s studying Russian history now as he preps for an upcoming river excursion through the communist country.
“You have to re-engineer yourself all the time. You cannot stick with one thing. There’s always something new to do.”
