Hillman Portfolio Update: A New Public Bet on Reade Street

More details on a VC pioneer's portfolio

January 20, 2026

This week, we’ll revisit the portfolio for the Hillman Family Foundations, which we initially profiled in 2023. The portfolio for the combined family foundations is managed by The Hillman Company, which is based in Pittsburgh. Kevin Lavelle is the CEO of the Hillman Company and has been with the organization since 2008, following several years at Wilshire Associates. At Hillman, he leads an investment team of 10 to support the Hillman family and their philanthropic endeavors. According to the most recent tax filing, the Hillman Foundations paid $8.4 million in investment management fees to The Hillman Company.

 

Henry Hillman, the family patriarch, was an industrialist and an early investor in VC and PE through his own investments and via outside managers. He was a founding LP in Kleiner Perkins in 1972 and KKR in 1976. Sebastian Mallaby’s excellent book “Power Law” on the history of VC provides the following detail on Hillman’s funding of Kleiner:

 

"Soon after Labor Day, Kleiner and Perkins set out on a road trip to raise capital. Perkins insisted on driving because Kleiner had a habit of drifting off the road when he got absorbed in conversation. Their first port of call was Henry Hillman, a Pittsburgh tycoon who had been smitten by the success of Davis & Rock and who had tried unsuccessfully to get Tommy Davis to manage his money. Seeing in Kleiner and Perkins a chance to get a piece of the West Coast action, Hillman committed up to $5 million, provided that the partners could raise a matching sum from others. Kleiner and Perkins proceeded to raise $1 million from Rockefeller University, nearly that much from two insurance companies, and a bit more from wealthy individuals and trusts. By the first week of December 1972, they had put together a fund of $8.4 million, considerably more than Don Valentine would manage to come up with. Kleiner and Perkins set up shop in a new low-slung office park at 3000 Sand Hill Road, becoming the first partnership to occupy what was to be the epicenter of the venture industry."

 

A decade later, Hillman was described in an article in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette from May 1983 as the largest venture capitalist in the United States, investing $101 million in 39 deals the prior year.

 

Hillman’s history is evident in its portfolio, which skews heavily toward VC, tech, and biotech. More than 50% of Hillman’s manager portfolio is invested in VC/growth equity funds, including nearly 15% in Andreessen Horowitz and TCV combined. Other VC relationships include Stripes Management, FTV, Spark Capital Partners, and Cavu Venture Partners.

 

Since we last profiled Hillman, the foundation has disclosed meaningfully smaller investments in a number of well-known managers on the public side, including Viburnum, Tiger Global (long only fund), Snow Lake, and Lake Bleu, and Glynn (public equity fund). Two new public manager investments disclosed in the latest filings are Maple Rock and Reade Street.

 

Reade Street Capital

Reade Street, based in Seattle, was founded by Brian Pirie in 2016 after spending 12 years at Sansome Partners.

Brian Pirie

Reade Street describes its strategy as follows:

“Reade Street's objective is to achieve excellent multi-year returns for our partners through investing like a billion-dollar family office in the public markets. We apply philosophical tenets of private equity and family capital investing, including taking a long-term view and focusing on cash-generative companies, while seeking to capitalize on public equity opportunities in high quality, highly understandable businesses that we want to own for five years or more.”

 

Reade Street’s largest disclosed position (10% of its disclosed portfolio) is Entegris, a supplier to the semiconductor industry, which it began buying in 2022. Other larger positions include Applied Materials and Union Pacific. As a reminder, OWL users can see any manager’s publicly disclosed portfolio, including a history of buys and sells, on their “Positions” page.

 

Source: OWL; public disclosures

Source: OWL, public disclosures; excludes fundraising for an SPV

In addition to fundraising, asset growth has likely been driven by performance as well. Below we show the estimated performance of Reade Street’s disclosed holdings:

Source: OWL; estimated performance of disclosed holdings

OWL’s people data also shows that James Hernandez, Reade Street’s COO, recently left to become the COO at Shoten Capital, a new fund launched by Scott Leslie (ex-Third Point) and Mark Rogers (ex-Soroban).

 

Newsfeed Search Functionality

In addition to the managers highlighted above, Hillman’s entire profile can be viewed on its allocator profile in OWL. As a reminder, users can also get a quick view of recent changes by searching for an allocator on our newsfeed, using the All tab and typing in the name of any allocator, manager, company, or other topic of interest.

 

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About Old Well Labs

OWL is an intelligence platform built for allocators, by allocators. Leading endowments, foundations, and family offices use the system to find, monitor, and connect with thousands of fund managers globally. OWL's analytics engine has collected over one billion data points from 65 countries. We make it easy for allocators to find and track information about the managers they care about – not just positions but also performance analytics, people data, business information, and details about the manager investments of other allocators.

Disclaimers

Returns represent the return on invested capital of publicly disclosed long positions, as calculated by OWL. Actual returns may vary based on a number of factors, including (but not limited to) undisclosed positions, short exposure, non-equity holdings, cash holdings, and lagged disclosure of positions.

This newsletter and the material on the Old Well Labs platform are for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation of any particular security, manager, or strategy. Old Well Labs shall not be liable for any investment gain or loss that may occur from the use of this material. No part of this material may be reproduced in any form or used in any publication without express written permission from Old Well Labs.