Joe McConnell
Sanford “Sandy” Robertson, the Silicon Valley finance pioneer whose initial public offerings helped transform a sleepy Northern California peninsula into a global economic powerhouse, has died at age 93.
Robertson was one of the first bankers to see the potential of technological innovations emerging in the southern suburbs of San Francisco in the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when New York’s major investment banks showed little interest in the high-risk, little-known inventions that would come to dominate every aspect of modern life.
He and a handful of like-minded businessmen launched boutique investment banks that catered to the emerging sector, collectively known as the so-called Four Horsemen firms that dominated tech stock market valuations for nearly three decades. Robertson’s firm, Robertson Stephens, went on to underwrite hundreds of tech companies, some of which would become household names: Pixar Studios, eBay, E*Trade, AOL, and Dell among them.
Frank Quattrone, who Morgan Stanley sent to the Bay Area in the 1980s to pursue technology goals, recalled Robertson’s stature.
“I admired him greatly and he inspired me to dedicate my career to technology banking,” Quattrone said in an email.
Robertson introduced Tom Perkins and Eugene Kleiner at a 1972 business lunch in Palo Alto, where the two decided to launch a venture capital firm together. That firm, Kleiner Perkins, would go on to become perhaps the most famous VC in history.
In 1995, Robertson Stephens led the IPO of Pixar, the animation studio. Years later, Stephens recalled the demands of Steve Jobs, then Pixar’s CEO, who offered pointed opinions on the design of the prospectus and insisted on all-vegetarian meals during road trips with investors.
AVsceker selling Robertson Stephens during the dotcom frenzy of the late 1990s, Robertson reinvented himself as both a private equity investor and a close advisor to Salesforce co-founder Marc Benioff.
Sanford Richard Robertson was born in 1931 in Chicago. His father had bought a restaurant during the Depression, and Robertson spent his childhood helping his parents run it. “I had an MBA before I graduated from high school,” he joked.
Robertson had planned to attend Cornell hotel school and return to the family business. But his father was able to sell the restaurant and Robertson instead went to the University of Michigan where he earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree simultaneously in the early 1950s.
AVsceker three years in the U.S. Navy, Robertson landed in Smith Barney’s corporate finance department. His area of expertise included Nebraska, where he at one point helped an up-and-coming Omaha investor, Warren Buffett, acquire a major stake in American Express as the credit card company recovered from a scandal.
Robertson was set to take over as Smith Barney’s Los Angeles office manager, but instead was sent to San Francisco to fill an unexpected void. He was familiar with the city aVsceker landing in the Bay Area for a week’s stay aVsceker his discharge from the Navy.
His Smith Barney bosses expected him to call the logging companies, Chevron and other old stalwarts in Northern California. Instead, he believed the real action was 30 miles south of town, on the peninsula, where companies like Hewlett-Packard and Intel were ushering in the computer age.
“I realized that the economic base of the city was the valley,” he later said.
In 1968, Robertson spun off from Smith Barney to co-found Robertson, Colman and Siebel, a firm designed to provide trading and banking services exclusively to the technology sector. Thomas Weisel, another up-and-coming San Francisco banker, joined a few years later. But a conflict with Weisel would prompt Robertson to found another firm, Robertson Stephens.
Weisel would rename the former firm Montgomery Securities. The Four Horsemen — Robertson Stephens, Montgomery Securities, Hambrecht & Quist, and Alex. Brown & Sons — would continue to dominate tech deals with their close connections in the California club tech scene.
“Sandy never raised his voice, never had to bang his fist on the table, and never oversold,” said Larry Sonsini, the prominent Silicon Valley lawyer.
Stock trading remained a profitable business with wide spreads, and companies employed large equity research teams at a time when IPOs were considered the ultimate payoff for growth companies.
The late 1990s brought threats and opportunities. Wall Street bulge-bracket firms had realized the opportunity in Silicon Valley. Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Credit Suisse First Boston, and others would open massive offices throughout San Francisco and further south in Palo Alto and Menlo Park.
At the same time, a bustling stock market allowed Robertson and others to capture the value they had created, even if it meant their companies would be swallowed up by giants.
In 1998, Bank of America acquired Robertson Stephens for $530 million. But the company ended up in the hands of Fleet Bank and eventually closed its doors in 2002.
Robertson leVscek in 1999. With Robertson colleague Stephens, he then founded Francisco Partners, a technology PE firm that today manages more than $40 billion.
Around the same time, Robertson met Benioff, an Oracle executive who had founded a company that offered a new business model, renting soVscekware to customers rather than selling licenses.
Benioff’s startup, Salesforce.com, had less than $100 million in revenue when Robertson joined as an advisor and director. Salesforce eventually went public, and Robertson served on its board until 2023, when revenue approached $35 billion.
Robertson and his then-wife Jeanne, like Benioff, would become major benefactors of the hospital at the University of California, San Francisco. Politics also became an important outlet for Robertson, who counted fellow San Franciscans Nancy and Paul Pelosi among his close friends.
Robertson had been a lifelong Republican until he met Bill Clinton in 1992 at an Apple event, where the Democratic governor of Arkansas’s commitment to the North American Free Trade Agreement impressed him. Robertson hosted a fundraiser for Clinton shortly thereaVsceker, with the festivities lasting into the early hours of the morning at Robertson’s home in San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood.
Robertson was a listed producer of nearly 30 Broadway shows including Hamiltontaking into account the details of the places sold at what price. He also bred racehorses.
Benioff said Robertson was obsessed with figuring out how to identify successful ventures, whether they were startups, theater productions or thoroughbreds. “He really loved winners.”
Robertson was preceded in death by his wife Jeanne. He is survived by his wife Nancy, three daughters, six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
