Brian Patterson
advisory board
A Texas native, Brian is the founder of White Star Real Estate, which has grown into one of Central and Eastern Europe's leading real estate investment, development, and management platforms over the past three decades.
Brian is a 1984 graduate of Rice University in Houston, where he was also a three-year letterman on the football team. Brian then received his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1989. He has continued to give back to both schools: he provided the naming gift for the Brian Patterson Sports Performance Center at Rice, which debuted in 2016; he served on Rice's Board of Trustees; and he served on the Management Board of the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
After graduating from Stanford, Brian moved to Poland, where he led the development of two of Poland's first modern commercial projects following its transition to a free-market economy - the Warsaw Distribution Center and the Diamond Business Park. Brian was subsequently part of the core team which founded White Star Real Estate in 1997, establishing the office in Poland, then later serving as Managing Partner of White Star Real Estate Russia, and White Star Real Estate Europe.
Since White Star Real Estate's founding, Brian has led the company in amassing a diverse development portfolio of over 50 properties and 2.5 million square meters (with 2.1 million square meters under active management). That portfolio spans office, logistics, retail, residential, leisure, and mixed-use development, such as Elektrownia Powiśle: the revitalization of a historic Warsaw power plant into one of Poland's best-performing mixed-use destinations, combining Grade A office space, a flagship food hall, entertainment and retail, residential units, and a four-star hotel. Like TexasLand, White Star believes in quality through the entire value creation process - including quality of design, quality of specifications, and quality of management and customer service, all of which protect the downside over the long term.
In recognition of his contribution to the real estate development field, Brian was presented a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2013 Central & Eastern European Quality Awards in Warsaw, Poland.
Brian's entrepreneurial activities reach well beyond real estate. He co-founded Archive Management Solutions with business partner Tom Keller - the leading provider of digital and physical record management solutions in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE), now part of Iron Mountain, the world-wide industry leader, and founded Plus Energia (PE), an energy distributor in the deregulated Poland market. In 2017, Brian founded WSVC with Peter Glusker, to combine and accelerate their respective early-stage venture capital investing activities.
Brian is also an active social entrepreneur and the founder of several foundations to level the playing field for kids facing adversity, including White Star Foundation, OpenStax Poland (OSP), Pistacja, Career Maps, Katalyst Engineering, Friends of Children's Hospitals, and Big Brothers/Big Sisters (BBBS), the world's largest mentoring program.
Brian has informally advised TexasLand since 2023 and became a formal member of the Advisory Board upon its establishment.