Benjamin M. Rosen, a Wall Street analyst and venture capitalist whose early efforts to rally investors behind companies like Apple, Lotus and Compaq — where he served as chairman for almost 20 years — made the revolutionary promises of personal computing a reality, died on Aug. 23 in Manhattan. He was 93.
His wife, Donna Perret Rosen, confirmed the death, at a nursing facility.
There are many gods in the pantheon of the personal computer: Bill Gates for software, Andy Grove for processors and Steve Jobs for design. Mr. Rosen is often mentioned, too, for marshaling the financial resources necessary to help the industry take off.
Decades before the term “venture capital” became inextricably tied to the tech world, Mr. Rosen was among the first in the field to connect its deep pools of private money with risky but promising start-ups like Apple.
He met Mr. Jobs, Apple’s co-founder, in 1977, soon after the release of the Apple II. Mr. Rosen, then an analyst at the financial services company Morgan Stanley, became an early and eager apostle for Apple — and for personal computers in general — at a time when Wall Street was steeped in analog conservatism.
“I used to take my Apple II on visits to clients, trying to demonstrate that this playful-looking product had a potential far greater than its then perception as a toy for hobbyists and gamesters,” he wrote on his blog in 2011.
After much effort — including a demonstration of an early spreadsheet program that caused jaws to drop in the Morgan Stanley boardroom — he persuaded the company’s partners to underwrite Apple’s initial public offering in 1980.
By then, he was already making his exit from Morgan Stanley, where he had started a successful tech-industry newsletter and conference division.
In 1981, Mr. Rosen joined an engineer in Texas named L.J. Sevin to form Sevin Rosen, one of the first tech-centric venture capital firms. After an unsuccessful run at building a semiconductor company, they threw their weight behind Compaq, a Texas start-up intent on creating lightweight, inexpensive computers that could run the same operating system as the bulkier, pricier IBM models. Mr. Rosen became chairman of the company.
Compaq’s earliest “portable” computers weighed nearly 30 pounds and cost the equivalent of about $12,000 in today’s dollars, but they were revolutionary. Within a few years, the company was struggling to keep up with demand. By its 10th anniversary, it was the world’s leading PC maker, outpacing even IBM.
Sevin Rosen provided initial funding for dozens of other tech companies in the early 1980s, including Lotus, the developer of Lotus 1-2-3, a spreadsheet program and the first easy-to-use application for the IBM operating system.
As chairman of Compaq, Mr. Rosen never involved himself in the daily workings of the company, but there was no doubt about who was in charge. He twice ousted the chief executive, in 1991 and 1999, to make way for someone who better fit his vision for the company and the industry.
For four months, he served as interim chief executive. After taking the post, he announced a new direction for the computer maker, anticipating how much the internet was changing the tech industry.
“In 1991, we were just a PC company,” he told The New York Times in 1999. “Now we’re a broad information technology company.”
Benjamin Maurice Rosen was born on March 11, 1933, in New Orleans, one of three children of Jewish immigrants who met in Canada before moving to the United States: His father, Isadore, a dentist, came from Germany, and his mother, Anna (Leibof) Rosen, came from Latvia.
His parents divorced when he was 7, and his mother had to support the three children. She worked as a secretary and took in laundry to pay their tuition at the private Isidore Newman School.
Ben started his first venture, a mail-in photofinishing company, when he was 13. He received a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from Caltech in 1954 and a master’s in the same subject from Stanford a year later.
After working as an engineer at Raytheon, he quit in 1959 to travel around France on a Vespa. When his money ran out after six months, he moved to New York and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Columbia in 1961, before moving to Wall Street, where he worked as an analyst.
His first marriage, to Alexandra Ebere, ended in divorce. He married Donna Perret in 2002. In addition to her, he is survived by two sons from his first marriage, Jeffrey and Eric; a stepdaughter, Melanie Perret; and six grandchildren.
Mr. Rosen retired as chairman of Compaq in 2000. The company was already foundering because of changes in the PC market and a series of cumbersome acquisitions; in 2002, HP bought it. The Compaq brand was retired in 2014, though it is still licensed in some foreign markets.
During the early 1990s, Mr. Rosen and his older brother, Harold, founded Rosen Motors to bring a new type of car engine to market. Harold Rosen was already renowned for leading the development of the geostationary satellite, a critical link in the chain of modern telecommunications. (He died in 2017.)
The engine, based on a hybrid-electric powertrain, showed promise, but the Rosens decided it was too far ahead of its time and closed the company in 1997.
It was one of Benjamin Rosen’s few failed investments, though he demonstrated the technology’s promise and that paid off in the long run: Today, many electric and hybrid cars use engines similar to the one the Rosen brothers developed.
