Online-Travel King Brad Gerstner Wants Venture Capital Empire

Brad Gerstner is an amateur pilot who’s logged about 400 hours above New England. He’s also flown (as a passenger) to Morocco on MTV founder Bob Pittman’s private Falcon jet, and has gone heli-skiing with Expedia founder and Zillow co-founder Rich Barton. “He’s an explorer,” Barton says. This year, Barton, Pittman, and Gerstner met up for Burning Man, the famously libidinous temporary community assemblage in the Nevada desert, for a week of self-expression and survivalist living.

Gerstner also runs a hedge fund he named, fittingly, Altimeter Capital Management, launched in Boston with less than $3 million raised from friends and family in the depths of the 2008 financial crisis. The firm now has almost $1 billion in assets under management. Befitting an adventurer, Gerstner is seeking new professional thrills—taking on multibillion-dollar Silicon Valley venture capital powerhouses Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Benchmark on their own turf. In July he raised $75 million for a venture fund within Altimeter to invest in startup Internet and software companies. A month later he set up shop on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif.