Who the heck is Giants owner Duane Kurisu anyway?
Does the word mogul apply? You'll have to judge for yourself!
It’s been a while since we did one of these!
This is the thirteenth installment in our series on who exactly owns the Giants. So far, we have covered real estate mogul Scott Seligman, private equity guy Phil Halperin, real estate mogul Jed Walentas, medical technology investor David Schnell, radio station owner/former Yahoo board member Arthur Kern (now no longer listed as an owner), lady of mystery Nancy Olsen, Republican super-donor Charles Johnson, Manila business mogul George Drysdale, charter school supporter Paul Wythes, Jr., Hong Kong real estate guy Philip Morais, former professional athlete Buster Posey, Rich Tech Guy Aneel Bhusri, and private equity fund Arctos Sports Partners. Let’s take a look at the big board!
Remarkable the progress we’ve all made together.
Today’s subject: Duane Kurisu, who is certainly the member of the ownership group whose name most closely resembles Duane Kuiper’s.
Duane Kurisu was born on either January 31 or February 1, 1954, depending on which shady website you trust if you google him. He is from the Hilo coast of the big island of Hawaii, and grew up in a plantation community, with a father who was a machinist and a mother who worked for the government. He got both his undergraduate degree and MBA at the University of Hawaii, went to work for a local bank, and eventually became number two at a real estate company run by a man named Ron Petty, who had been part of a successful partnership but had wanted to strike out on his own.
After seven years there, Kurisu briefly retired, spent about three months fishing, and then came back to the business world. In 1985, he formed the real estate investment company Kurisu and Fergus, along with fellow investor Mike Fergus. When Bain Capital-esque investing (making money by purchasing a company and breaking it up) became popular around 1989 or 1990, Kurisu and Fergus instead invested in keeping local Hawaiian companies intact, acting as a bridge to get the companies financing instead of selling them off.
After taking a few months off to go fishing, Kurisu returned to the business world and started working on projects he was passionate about. The most relevant to our interests was the Hawaii Winter Baseball league, which he started in the early ‘90s. His idea was to have a winter league that was more international than other ones, that would use players from America, Korea, and Japan — Ichiro Suzuki and Buster Posey were two notable alumni.
When Kurisu traveled to San Francisco to meet with Peter Magowan on Hawaii Winter Baseball-related business, the two hit it off and Magowan invited Kurisu to become a part of the Giants ownership group, an offer which Kurisu accepted almost immediately. While the league was forced to shut down after the 2008 season, that connection gave Kurisu his inroad into Major League Baseball.
Currently, Kurisu’s portfolio includes radio stations, magazines, publishers, bakeries, and lots of real estate. Probably his most notable recent project was the Kahauiki Village in Honolulu, a community of formerly unhoused people (as of mid-2022, there were around 180 families, which consisted of 294 children and 278 adults) with reasonable rents, job placement programs, access to public transit, community centers, its own off-grid solar power source, and a feeling of community inspired by Kurisu’s childhood in that Big Island plantation setting.
Kurisu and his wife, Susan, have two children, Robert and Sarah. Robert has invested in a number of properties along with his dad, and their combined portfolio includes assets on each of the four main Hawaiian islands. Robert was also an early adopter of masking up to help fight Covid, back in March 2020 when the CDC was not yet recommending them for non-healthcare workers. Politically, Kurisu doesn’t seem to have made any recent donations, but he did give quite a bit of money to Obama in 2008, and Susan gave $5 to Act Blue in 2020, so I’m willing to guess the family leans Democratic.
Overall, I was left with a positive impression of Kurisu, and I haven’t seen anything to suggest that’s wrong, but I have to admit that most of the media outlets I’ve used as sources are owned by him. He seems to have been very successful, and if you go to the website for the aio family of companies, you can see all the things he owns and the fruits of all the success he’s had. But even with all that, he says that the Hawaii Winter League was the hardest and most rewarding thing he ever worked on. That’s a really nice sentiment, and if I ever get super rich, I will ensure my really nice sentiments are also widely broadcast in media I own.