Secretive Indian Twitter investor Rivzi, 47, makes $4.7 billion with 15.6% stake

November 13, 2013 Leave a comment

Secretive Indian Twitter investor makes $4.7 billion

TNP-1111-2013-IPO-Twitter

Wednesday, Nov 13, 2013

The New Paper

The man is so secretive that he is reported to have an assistant who scrubs the Internet of his personal photographs and information, the Times of India reported. So who is the secretive India-born Twitter investor who earned an estimated US$3.8 billion (S$4.7 billion) in the tech titan’s recent initial public offering (IPO)? The India-born Mr Rizvi, 47, owns a 15.6 per cent stake in the IPO darling, but what is known about him would barely fill a 40-character tweet.On the Rizvi Traverse investment firm website, its founder’s biography is poetically brief, reading only: “Mr Rizvi is the co-founder and Chief Investment Officer of Rizvi Traverse Management and related entities. Mr Rivzi is a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the school’s Executive Board.”

Other facts known about the man are that he moved with his parents to the US in 1971 and that his father, Mr Raza Rizvi, was teaching psychology at a college in Iowa Falls, the New York Daily News reported. His brother Ashraf is a hedge fund manager.

Also, according to Rizvi Traverse’s website, the firm holds large-scale equity investments in several other well-known brands, including Facebook and Playboy.

The New York Times labelled the investor as a “strategic power broker who prefers to operate behind the scenes”.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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