When his father was three years old, Kellner’s grandparents left Hungary for America, arriving on Ellis Island in 1947. In pursuit of the American Dream, the small family lived and worked in Queens. A man aspiring to enter the tie-making business offered Kellner’s grandfather seed investment to start a company. Paul Kellner turned the $25,000 into a successful business with millions of dollars in annual revenue selling ties exclusively to Gant.
In the 1960s, Kellner’s grandfather sold the tie factory and purchased a working farm in the Hudson Valley region. Part of the property included Richmond Hill, a U.S. landmark home and farm built by the Livingston family, signatories of the Declaration of Independence. Richmond Hill’s legacy is also one of our nation’s Founding Fathers’ commitment to liberty and prosperity.
While at Princeton in the 1990s, Peter was introduced to Bill Drayton, the founder of Ashoka. Bill would inspire the rest of Peter’s career and remains one of his closest friends to this day. Catalyzed by Drayton’s pioneering efforts in social entrepreneurship, Kellner cofounded with Linda Rottenberg, an employee of Ashoka at the time, what he views as the Ashoka of private sector entrepreneurship: Endeavor Global, the largest global network supporting high-impact entrepreneurs around the world. An avid student of philosophy, Kellner was influenced by the work of Peter Drucker, Hannah Arendt, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Hayek, St. Augustine, Joseph Schumpeter, and Gary Becker.
His own family’s transformative entrepreneurial story drove Kellner to found Richmond Global in 2000. Intending to use the power of investment to further the American ideals of democracy, freedom, hard work, and productivity, Kellner named the firm after the Richmond Hill property, a representation of his own family’s journey that he could replicate by working with and helping to develop the potential of others.
Peter Kellner is Founder and Managing Partner of Richmond Global Ventures, a venture capital firm investing worldwide in early stage technology companies. After Princeton University as a Fulbright Scholar to Budapest, Hungary, he founded the Environmental Management & Law Association (EMLA), an influential NGO in environmental policy backed originally by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund. He co-founded Endeavor Global in 1997, now operating in 41 countries, and left graduate school to spearhead Endeavor’s launch—building offices and identifying entrepreneurs—in Latin America, the Middle East, and North America.
Mr. Kellner co-founded Richmond Global Sciences with global sustainability authority, HBS Professor George Serafeim, and based on his research in impacted-weighted accounting; the third co-founder and CEO, Sakis Kotsantonis, is Professor Serafeim’s closest childhood friend and also a sustainability expert. RGS is a SaaS company creating tools for managers who allocate capital inside organizations or markets, generating a systematic assessment of product impact for every industry of the economy and filling a significant gap in the current ESG data landscape.
Kellner spent over a decade preparing and was Chairman & CEO of Richmond Global Compass, an absolute return fund that integrated sustainability practices into traditional research. The period leading up to its launch was required to test whether ESG factors could positively impact securities at the company and sovereign levels. The macro fund had an average net return of 12.5% over its exactly three-year operating history, winding down in May 2020.
Mr. Kellner is a board member of several technology companies and has invested in and lived on five continents over 25 years, seeding some of the largest platform technology companies from Brazil to China. He is a member of Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and served on the boards of Endeavor Global, Endeavor Chile, Endeavor Jordan, Endeavor Louisville, and Endeavor Miami.
Kellner is a trustee of America | The Jesuit Review where he co-chairs the investment committee and served as a trustee of the Allen-Stevenson School in New York and as a trustee of International College (IC) in Beirut, Lebanon. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Pacific Council for International Policy, and International Institute for Strategic Studies. He is a Crown Fellow at The Aspen Institute and Young Global Leader at the World Economic Forum.
Kellner received his AB from Princeton University, JD from Yale Law School, and MBA from Harvard Business School. In 2007 with three alumni from the classes of 1961 and 1963, he endowed Princeton’s first visiting professorship in entrepreneurship and lectured in Princeton’s Engineering Department on entrepreneurship for 13 years. Kellner provided the funding to establish Princeton’s E-Lab for student entrepreneurship and in 2023 endowed Yale Law School’s first fund for entrepreneurial excellence.
