Walter Buckley (businessman)

Walter White Buckley III (born 1960) is an American businessman who co-founded Internet Capital Group (now Actua Corporation).

Walter White Buckley III grew up in a prominent Philadelphia-area family. His father ran a money management business called Buckley & Meuthing and his grandfather ran Buckley Brothers, also a money management firm. Buckley attended Episcopal Academy, an expensive private school, for kindergarten through high school. He then attended University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, grading with a B.A. in political science. While in school, Buckley was motivated more by sports than business, starring on the North Carolina soccer team. His coach recalled "He played with wonderful, physical, reckless abandon", leaving it all on the field.

Buckley co-founded a medical supply company called Centralized Management Systems, which was sold in 1987. He spent the next three years working as a Commercial Loan Officer at CoreStates Financial Corporation before joining the venture capital firm Safeguard Scientifics. From 1991 to 1996, Buckley was the Vice President of Acquisitions at Safeguard. There, he oversaw the acquisitions of a number of companies including ChromoVision, Diamond Technology, Video Server, and XL Vision.

Buckley and fellow Safeguard executive Ken Fox noticed an emerging market in e-commerce business-to-business, or B2B as it would become known as, and left Safeguard in February 1996 to found their own venture capital firm, Internet Capital Group (ICG). The pair asked Safeguard head Pete Musser for $5 million in funding, but he insisted on investing $15. By May when initial funding completed, Buckley and Fox had raised $40 million to start ICG, twice what they had hoped for. In addition to Safeguard, major investors included Comcast, Compaq, and BancBoston Ventures.

Buckley served as the company's president from March 1996 to December 2001, at which time he became the company's Chairman, a position he continues to hold as of 2015. He has served as the CEO since its founding. By the height of the dot-com bubble in early 2000, ICG had invested $1.4 billion in 61 start-up firms, leading Business Week declared that "Buckley put B2B on the map". As dot-com excitement began to fade, Buckley refocused the company to find strategic partnerships with traditional industry leaders. For example, a joint venture with DuPont called CapSpan in early 2000.

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