Sanford “Sandy” Robertson, who recently passed away at the age of 93, played an outsized role in the first Silicon Valley boom well before co-founding the tech-centric Francisco Partners in 1999. He closed more than 500 deals in his lifetime. Along the way, he funded Bill Clinton, endured Steve Jobs’ strictly vegetarian road show ahead of Pixar’s IPO, introduced Eugene Kleiner to Tom Perkins and had a falling out with Thom Weisel.
“The harder you work, the luckier you get,” Robertson told the Computer History Museum in 2019 when asked about his guiding philosophy. He was participating in the museum’s oral history of Silicon Valley.
Robertson died Saturday, the San Francisco-based firm announced.
“Sandy Robertson was a visionary tech pioneer, an active citizen who worked for more inclusive economic and social conditions, and a very good man,” former President Clinton tweeted. “I’ll always be grateful for his steadfast support, especially hosting my first San Francisco fundraiser in his home. My thoughts and prayers are with his family.”
Robertson said he raised $450,000 at that Clinton fundraiser.
“I got the credit for delivering Silicon Valley to Clinton,” Robertson said of his transformation from “liberal Republican” to full-blown Democratic supporter in 1992.
He also estimated he closed more than 500 deals over his career as an investor, advisor and and investment banker, including Dell (NYSE: DELL), Applied Materials (Nasdaq: AMAT) and Salesforce (NYSE: CRM) to name just three of a myriad of homeruns.
He served on the Salesforce board of directors between 2003 and 2023.
“Sandy stood by my side and served as an amazing lead director of the Salesforce board of directors,” Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff tweeted. “He was a great leader in our industry.”
Throughout his investment career, Roberstson said he was always guided by the thesis that “it’s the jockey, no question” rather than the horse.
The education, experience and creativity of the founder-owner are vitally important to investment decisions.
“At Francisco, we use an outside consultant to interview our prospective managers,” he said. “If the man doesn’t come with the right grade, we back away.”
Blackstone (NYSE:BX) and Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS) each made minority investments in Francisco.
Robertson was born in Chicago and grew up in nearby Evanston, Ill., living above and working in the family’s Hearthstone Tearoom.
“I think I had an MBA even before I got out of high school,” Robertson said. “What I saw was my father making a myriad of small decisions all the time. I can see what the decision process was.”
After earning an MBA at the University of Michigan, Robertson served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean War.
His mid-management job with Smith Barney landed him in San Francisco in the late 1960s. Robertson and two other Smith Barney refugees in 1969 launched the precursor to Robertson Stephens & Co., which would become one of the four fabled investment banks dubbed the “Four Horsemen of Silicon Valley.”
Roberston said Kleiner and Perkins each ponied up $100,000 as initial investors in his first firm. Three years later, he brought the two together during a four-hour breakfast at Hyatt Rickey’s in Palo Alto, Calif. and helped them form Kleiner Perkins and raise its first $8.4 million fund in 1972.
“There was electricity between them right away,” he said.
Thom Weisel joined in 1971. Weisel’s rise to CEO in 1978 prompted Roberston and others to leave to launch what would become Robertson Stephenson & Co. Weisel dubbed his new venture Montgomery Securities.
The split wouldn’t be his last clash with Weisel.
Among the clients of “Robbie Stephens” include Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU), Sun Microsystems, the retailer Ann Taylor and Pixar. Pixar went public in 1995.
“It was great working with Steve Jobs. He was fascinating but difficult,” Robertson said. “He was a very difficult client but always fascinating. The roadshow was vegetarian, they had to find the right restaurant to serve us the right food.”
He said Jobs was the rare combination of a detailed-oriented micromanager and big-picture visionary.
For instance, Jobs’ idea was to take Pixar public just as its first movie, “Toy Story” was premiering.
“The sense of the market he had…he knew what the world wanted,” Robertson said. “He knew the world wanted another Disney-type thing in Pixar.”
Jobs was also intimately involved in designing and wording the prospectus.
“He had a broad vision. He was also paranoid about details,” Robertson said. “You usually find people are one of the other, not both. He was both.”
Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) bought his firm in 1997 for about $540 million in cash, about five times book value. A year later, BankBoston paid about $575 million for it in a sale motivated by tensions between Robertson Stephens and Weisel’s Montgomery Securities, which was owned by NationsBank and was merging with BofA at the time.
Roberston left the investment bank shortly afterward to launch Francisco in 1999 “to buy back the companies we took public,” he joked.
Three years later, amid the tech bust, the San Francisco shop attempted to buy the money-losing Robertson Stephenson from its owners, FleetBoston Financial. Fleet shut it down instead.
“They were afraid they would look bad,” Robertson said. “They just shut it down. They left some value on the table. It was a very bad decision. They left a lot of money on the table.”
Francisco, which seeks out underperforming tech companies, has grown to $24 billion AUM from the $10 billion it had under management during Stephenon’s 2019 interview.
Stephenson is survived by his wife, Nancy, three daughters, Laura, Brett and Lee Ann, and six grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
