Ho Nam has needed to start over twice in his lifetime. The first time was at nine years old when his family immigrated from Korea, leaving the upper echelons of Korean society. They landed in Southern California, where Ho’s parents started their entrepreneurship journey with a burger joint and then greeting card stores. The second time was during the dot-com crash. Ho had co-founded Altos Ventures — a technology investment firm — in 1996, and the early years looked promising; several investee companies had IPOs on the horizon. But things took a turn beginning in 2000, and it would be five years before Altos raised another fund.
“We were this feeder fund that operated with other mainstream VCs,” Ho recalls on the Aconic podcast, “and, after the crash, we went back to the drawing board.” Ho began attending Warren Buffett’s meetings in Omaha, where he says he went down a “rabbit hole” on value investing and fundamentals investing. That’s when Altos decided to pivot toward founder-oriented, long-term investments to help build early-stage companies from the ground up, supporting them through the full business lifecycle. And that unique strategy has paid off. Today, Altos has more than $10 billion in regulatory assets under management and has backed nearly 250 companies worldwide, including Roblox and Coupang. Ho serves as managing director, and the company operates out of dual offices in Silicon Valley and Seoul, South Korea.
Meanwhile, Ho has remained active in the GSB community as both a guest lecturer in finance and a supporter of the GSB Asian Alumni Chapter. “Ho has provided his voice, resources, and office facilities to many of our events and has never asked for any recognition or acknowledgment,” says Chris Loh, MBA ’91 and executive producer of the Aconic Podcast. “Without him, many of our events would not be as successful, and we are grateful for his quiet support during these last couple of years.”
