BEN ROSEN HAS HAD several careers—technology analyst, early
venture capitalist, entrepreneur—any one of which would have
made him notable. A New Orleans native educated at the California
Institute of Technology, Stanford, and Columbia Business School,
Rosen introduced Steve Jobs to Morgan Stanley and financed
Compaq Computer, Lotus Software, and Electronic Arts. With his
older brother, Harold, Rosen co-founded in 1992 an electric car
company that employed J.B. Straubel—long before Straubel helped
start Tesla Inc. In an interview at his home in Kent, Conn., Rosen,
86, looks back over his pathbreaking career and describes what
excites him today. Here are some highlights.
MARTY SCHENKER: You were there at the crossroads of some
historic developments.
BEN ROSEN: The timing was fortunate. I just happened to cross
paths with some people who were really important in our lives.
Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were 22 years old. And then
Gordon Moore. He was my teaching assistant—when I was a fresh-
man at Caltech, he was a first-year graduate student. So I’ve known
him since 1950, and we stayed in touch. Later, Compaq was Intel’s
No. 1 customer. The inventor of the spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin, and
his associate Bob Frankston, I knew. They showed it to me in the
beginning. And Mitch Kapor, who took it to the next step. Bob
Noyce and Jack Kilby, who invented the integrated circuit. Kilby
got the Nobel. Bob didn’t get it—only because he was dead.
MS: And Morgan Stanley’s position as an underwriter of technology
company initial public offerings [IPOs] started with your introductions.
BR: First was the Apple IPO [in 1980]. They’d done one
[ technology IPO] many years ago, decades earlier. I don’t even
remember the name of it. They apparently lost their shirts on it.
They were embarrassed. It violated their rules, which was to be
the banker for the No. 1 or No. 2 major companies in the major
industries. They took a chance on this company. It was a disaster,
so they decided no more technology.
MS: But then you introduced Steve Jobs?
BR: To Bob Baldwin. And it was funny to watch them. This was
at a small trade show at the Hilton a few blocks from Morgan
Stanley. And Steve knew nothing about the financial world, and
Bob [who led Morgan Stanley from 1973 to 1983] knew less about
technology. And the two of them were each trying to sell them-
selves. Neither heard the other or understood what they were
saying. But anyway, they [Morgan Stanley] became a big technology
underwriter. I had just left Morgan Stanley, and I was a one-year
consultant before I moved out altogether.
MS: You could have been an early investor in Apple?
BR: Mike Markkula, who is the original investor in Intel—he bought
a third of the company in 1976, I believe, for $91,000—one might
call it really good venture investing. I knew him when I was an
analyst. I used to see him at Intel. And he met Steve at a home-
brew computer club in 1975. We were good friends, and he offered
me $1 million of Apple stock at the time. I thought that somehow
this was a conflict, even though Apple was a private company. I
was an analyst. I was never on the banking side.
MS: So do you follow technology now? What interests you?
BR: Well, there are a lot of things that interest me. But to what
extent? I’m an optimist. I got the optimism from my brother. He
was the inventor of the geostationary communications satellite.
He would always see the glass half full.
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