Billionaire UVA Alum David Walentas Has a Simple Message About Pursuing Success

Want a better chance at success in business and life? Learn from new experiences and people. Stay flexible. Add value to anything you take on. And get comfortable taking risks.

This simple-but-timeless advice came across clearly during a fireside chat Monday at Carr’s Hill between real estate developer and University of Virginia alumnus David Walentas and UVA President Scott Beardsley.

“Have courage,” Walentas said simply to summarize a core lesson from his decades of experience.

A self-made billionaire recognized as one of America’s most successful entrepreneurs, Walentas is widely known for his vision across the 1980s and ’90s to redevelop a left-for-dead section of Brooklyn known as DUMBO (Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass).

That experience helps define the themes of Walentas’s new memoir, “Fortune Favors the Brave,” which traces his ascent from humble beginnings through a series of ambitious wins and losses as a developer and through wisdom-building life experiences.

“He is a self-made man with an extraordinary story that began in the farms of upstate New York, continued here at UVA, and ultimately reshaped the world’s most dynamic city,” Beardsley said in introducing Walentas at the Monday discussion.

Asked about some keys to success in real estate, Walentas recounted how he secured $12 million in 1981 to buy the entire Brooklyn DUMBO neighborhood – 2 million square feet. To attract residents and businesses, he often provided merchants, artists, and tenants free or reduced-price space to generate activity in what had been described as a “ghost town.” Getting a return on the investment didn’t happen overnight. In fact, it took the better part of two decades before DUMBO would cement its status as one of New York’s most desired areas.

Having already gained valuable experience on many other major projects, Walentas again was reminded that in real estate, wins depend on getting a good initial price, on adding value to the area, on location, and on patience. Recently, Walentas’s company sold a single DUMBO apartment for $12 million – the same price he originally paid for the entire neighborhood.

“Nobody wanted to be me for 15 years,” he said with a chuckle. “Now they all want to be me.”

David Walentas and UVA president Scott C. Beardsley during a fireside chat at Carr’s Hill

Beardsley shared with the audience that Forbes magazine recently ranked Walentas No. 14 on its list of “The Greatest Living Self-Made Americans.” Also on the list: Oprah Winfrey at No. 1, former Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, and professional basketball star LeBron James.

As he writes in “Fortune Favors the Brave,” Walentas on Monday shared highlights of his adventurous life, which started humbly in upstate New York, led to UVA almost by chance, took him across Europe where he worked to pay off student loans, and back to the States where he once famously sold a pint of blood so he could buy lunch and gas up his car.

“I was always working, always hustling, trying to do better,” he said of his formative years, which included one job of scraping excrement off the inside of septic tanks. “You can’t feel sorry for yourself. You have to keep hustling.”

In 1968, Walentas founded Two Trees Management, which today oversees a $4 billion real estate portfolio, and is now principally managed by his son, Jed. Following the successes before and during the DUMBO rejuvenation, David and Jed Walentas in more recent years focused on another major rejuvenation project, this time at the historic Domino Sugar Refinery site in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg area.

“Long after Jed and I are gone, our work will continue to matter,” he writes in his memoir. “It’s been a great trip.”

Walentas’s generosity to UVA will also matter far into the future for the University.

The first member of his family to attend college, Walentas, 88, earned his undergraduate engineering degree from UVA in 1961 and an MBA from the Darden School of Business in 1964. While earning his fortune over the decades as a trailblazing developer who embraced a motto of “No guts, no glory,” Walentas believed as fervently in the importance of a college degree.

As often as he is quoted about his adventurous entrepreneurial spirit, he is frequently quoted saying “education is a great equalizer.” His belief in that maxim has provided tremendous benefits to the University, its students, and its faculty over the years.

In 2019, Walentas and his wife, Jane, committed $100 million to the Jefferson Scholars Foundation, including $50 million to establish the Walentas Scholars, a merit scholarship program for first-generation UVA students directed by the Foundation.

Another $25 million allowed Darden to create a fellowship program for first-generation MBA students. The remaining $25 million supports fellowships and professorships through Jefferson Scholars and Darden.

Some of the UVA Walentas Scholars were in Monday’s audience and among those lining up afterward on a Carr’s Hill portico to chat with Walentas and have him sign copies of his book.

Asked by Beardsley during the program for his advice to students who often feel pressured to have their career plans fully charted at a young age, Walentas reiterated the importance of adding value but he also seemed to be relishing the idea of chucking the roadmap and just going for it in life.

“You don’t have to know what you’re going to do,” he said. “There’s a whole world out there. You have to try things.”