Kevin Kinsella is founder of the venture capital firm Avalon Ventures, which has offices in Cambridge and La Jolla, Calif. An MIT graduate, he is also founding chairman of Boston-based Vertex Pharmaceuticals and has helped finance and develop more than 100 other early-stage biotech and high-tech companies.
1. From 1969 to 1970, Kinsella taught algebra at American Community School in Beirut, a job that gave him a front-row view of the political upheaval in the Middle East. He says he learned an important lesson from the Lebanese refugee camps that for decades housed displaced Palestinians, some of whom became involved in resistance and terrorist movements.
“Unlike in the US where refugees historically got absorbed and become citizens and the next generation felt more allegiance to the US than their parents did, these refugees were kept bottled up, so their hatred for Israel just continued. From the standpoint of business, I learned you need to nip problems in the bud because otherwise they’ll fester and have unimaginably bad consequences. When it’s obvious something needs to be done, you need to do it. You can’t sit around wondering, ‘Is this the right thing to do?’ Make a decision.”
2. Kinsella was an early investor in “Jersey Boys,” the Tony Award-winning Broadway musical about Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons. When he met the show’s executive producer, he was impressed by the man’s warning that it could be a risky business proposition.
“The first thing he said was, ‘I need to tell you that you could lose all your money,’ and I said, ‘I’m in!’ In venture capital, nobody ever tells you that. It’s always some line of BS about making 10 times your money in 18 months or something like that. It was completely different than the dishonesty you often face when entrepreneurs trying to get your money are pitching you deals, and I found it enormously refreshing.”
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3. In 1975, Kinsella traveled to Peru for the consulting firm TransCentury Corp. to study the feasibility of exporting a then-obscure Andean crop called quinoa. That seed, of course, is now widely touted as a superfood, expensive, and highly in demand in the United States.
“There was obviously a potential international market for it, but the nutrition craze and gluten-free craze were decades away from starting, so who knew? I suspected it might be sold globally as a niche product, but I had no idea it would sort of take over the world. I wish I’d bought long-term contracts to buy up all the production for over 50 years!”
4. Kinsella owns the private Kinsella Library in La Jolla, an ivy-covered red brick building that he says “looks like it was dropped out of Harvard Yard.” It houses his collection of California Plein Air art (which depicts landscape and nature scenes), one of Elton John’s red pianos, and other items Kinsella has purchased, including a woolly mammoth tusk.
“It was found in a Siberian bog years after the bog had dried up and become petrified. So when the animal died, its tusk was bathed in an aqueous solution with lots of leaves that gave it interesting colors, and the tusk took on those interesting colors. I bought that at an auction — for $25,000, I think.”
5. Kinsella earned a bachelor’s degree in management from MIT in 1967 and says he is particularly proud of what being an MIT graduate represents.
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“MIT has never given an honorary degree or athletic scholarship, so it’s all about making it academically on your own. It’s a very tough culture of competition, and you have to measure up every day among some of the brightest minds in science and tech. But there is no better place on the planet, I think, to do that. And once you get out, you’re at the cutting-edge of things, you know how to grasp complicated concepts, and you build up a network of friends and associates who have gone through the same boot camp, if you will.”
Sacha Pfeiffer can be reached at pfeiffer@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @SachaPfeiffer.