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Mr. Byrne learned some of his first business lessons as a teenager from value investor Warren Buffett. Mr. Byrne knew the legendary investor through his father, John Byrne, who once ran Geico Corp., an insurer now owned by Mr. Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Corp. Among the principles Mr. Buffett imparted to the younger Mr. Byrne: The essence of value investing is trying to buy dollar bills for 30 cents. Mr. Byrne took that advice to heart, applying it to a string of deals. In the mid-1990s, he bought an old shoe factory in downtown Manchester, N.H., that had been converted to office space. The building's previous owners had stopped making payments on the mortgage on the property, and Mr. Byrne was able to pick it up for $3.5 million. Earlier this year, he sold it for $10 million. With one of his brothers, Mr. Byrne acquired the ailing Inn at Jackson Hole, in Wyoming, in 1987. He also has acquired distressed strip malls and apartment buildings across the West. Then there's the Grease Monkey oil-change outlet in Florida Mr. Byrne bought from an airline pilot who needed money to settle a divorce. "I realized in the last couple of months that there's a certain theme to my life -- bottom-feeding," Mr. Byrne says.
'Like Buying That Bank'
One of his biggest successes came in the early 1990s, when Mr. Byrne and a group of investors that included his father and two brothers, purchased New Dartmouth Bank, a collection of five failed New Hampshire savings banks. On its investment of $7 million, Mr. Byrne's family reaped a $20 million profit when the banks were later sold to another institution. Buying Internet retailers is "like buying that bank in New Hampshire," says Mr. Byrne. "It's the same principle."
Between his forays into business, Mr. Byrne earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Stanford University over the course of nine years, two of which he spent battling testicular cancer. He also says he is fluent in Mandarin and holds a black belt in tae kwon do. For a time, he says, he trained to become a professional boxer but quit because chemotherapy had so weakened his lungs. Nonetheless, Mr. Byrne, who is a muscular 6-foot-5, has a pugilist's profile -- his nose was broken during a bout
Not Bad for a crazy person!!...I want to be crazy like Patrick
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