Billionaire venture capitalist Walter Kortschak is confident in his formula: “Investing is about duration and persistence. I don't know a lot of folks in our industry who have done very early stage, growth equity and private equity and done it well, for this long, consistently,” Kortschak, 65, told Forbes from Colorado. The longtime investor owns homes in Aspen and London—plus a nearly 3,000-acre plot on the island of Kauai. He purchased most of his Hawaii land, where Jurassic Park was filmed and just down the street from Mark Zuckerberg’s property, in 2003. Kortschak’s assets are now worth an estimated $1.6 billion, thanks to his tenure at growth equity firm Summit Partners and, later, personal early-stage investments that paid off big.

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Born in Canada to an Austrian father and an American mother, Kortschak had an international childhood, raised largely in Geneva, where his father worked at the Swiss outpost of chemical manufacturer DuPont. Kortschak first wanted to be a software engineer, and earned two degrees in the discipline: a bachelor’s from Oregon State and a master’s from Caltech. Then, he joined a computer graphics startup in 1982 that later became MSC Software. A couple of years later, he returned to business school at UCLA, where he was one of two “Venture Fellows” in 1985. Through the fellowship, which places students in summer roles at VC firms, Kortschak interned at Crosspoint Venture Partners, an early seed-stage firm. He joined Crosspoint full-time in 1986, a difficult time to break into venture capital. He says there were “probably eight” associate positions across the entire industry that year.

Kortschak left Crosspoint and joined Summit Partners in 1989 to focus on later-stage investing: profitable, growth-stage companies mainly in the tech sector. At that time, Summit was a five-year-old, $400 million (assets under management) firm, and he was charged with opening the Boston-based outfit’s West Coast office. One of his first major investments was in security company McAfee in 1991, which went public just a year later with a 9x return for Summit.

During his two-decade tenure at Summit, Kortschak made a name for himself, landing on Forbes’ Midas List of the world’s best venture capital investors from 2005 through 2009. He was involved in many of Summit’s technology bets and buyouts, including computer optics company E-Tek Dynamics (a 61x return) and networking company Xylan (a 127x return).

He left his active role at Summit in 2010, when the firm had surpassed $5 billion in assets, and became an advisor, a position he still holds today. Armed with decades of experience and cash distributions, he decided to go solo and return to early-stage investing through his personal vehicles, Firestreak Ventures (through which he invests in early-stage machine learning infrastructure and developer-facing companies) and Kortschak Investments (through which invests in growth stages companies in software, health care, fintech and clean energy).

Through them, Kortschak was an early investor in several now-public companies, including The........

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