Cornelius Vander Starr

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Cornelius Vander Starr (October 15, 1892 - December 20, 1968) was an American businessman. He founded the American International Group insurance corporation.

Starr was born in Fort Bragg, California, where his Dutch father was a railroad engineer. He began his first business, selling ice-cream, at the age of nineteen. In 1914, he moved to San Francisco, where he sold auto insurance by day while studying for the California bar exam.

He joined the U.S. army in 1918 but was not sent overseas. Instead, he joined the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as a clerk in Yokohama, Japan. Later that year, he travelled to Shanghai where he worked for several insurance businesses. In 1919, the following year, he founded American International Group, then known as 'American Asiatic Underwriters'. When the Communist Party came to power in China, Starr moved the company headquarters to New York City. Today, AIG is the world's largest insurance company, and the sixth-largest company in the world according to the 2007 Forbes Global 2000 list.

The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University was named for Starr in recognition of an endowment gift by the C. V. Starr Foundation in 1981. The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley was completed and dedicated in October 2007.^[1]