Ben Rosen, Wall Street analyst who championed personal computers, dies at 93

Caltech will rename Rosen-funded center for Nobel laureate Frances Arnold

Benjamin Rosen saw the future in the spring of 1979. An analyst at Morgan Stanley, he was the rare figure on Wall Street who saw the potential in personal computers. He also understood why PCs were primarily used by techies and dismissed by Wall Street: there wasn’t yet a piece of software compelling enough to convince the masses that they needed a computer.

Rosen believed that changed in 1979 with the introduction of VisiCalc, considered to be the first electronic spreadsheet. For Rosen, it was a revelation. People didn’t have to manually calculate number after number on paper. In minutes, he could do what used to take him hours. He wrote in his newsletter, the Morgan Stanley Electronics Letter, that VisiCalc “could someday become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.” Dan Bricklin, one of VisiCalc’s co-creators, said: “If you showed it to a businessperson who did business-type calculations all the time, they would start shaking and start saying: ‘Oh, my God, here’s a credit card. I want that. I need that. I spend hours every week doing what you just did in minutes.’”

Through his newsletter and the Personal Computer Forum conference he organized, Rosen became one of the earliest Wall Street champions of the personal-computer industry, with readers and attendees that included Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. He was an early champion of the Apple II and was known in the industry as the analyst on Wall Street who took the personal computer seriously.

Rosen had a hand in many of the seminal companies and events in the early years of the personal computer. VisiCalc was a hit, but it was only available at first on the Apple II, so customers who wanted to make electronic spreadsheets also had to buy the machine. VisiCalc’s success changed the perception of the personal computer and the fortunes of Apple. “If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer,” Steve Jobs told an interviewer in 1990, “you’d be interviewing somebody else right now.” Rosen introduced Jobs and Apple to colleagues at Morgan Stanley, and the firm took Apple public in December 1980, a watershed moment for the personal-computer industry. By the time of the offering, Rosen had already left Morgan Stanley, but he was just getting started with the personal computer and the spreadsheet.

Then in January 1981, a couple of guys who had just quit their jobs at Texas Instruments came to him with an idea — little more than a sketch and a business plan, really — for a computer that was portable, weighed less than 30 pounds, and could be carried around in a case with a handle. Through his new venture-capital firm, Sevin Rosen Funds, he led the round of funding that put them in business. The company called itself Compaq. Rosen became chairman, a position he held from 1983 until 2000. “Compaq wouldn’t have done what we did without Ben,” said Rod Canion, Compaq’s co-founder.

In 1982, entrepreneur Mitchell Kapor showed Rosen a spreadsheet program that was even better than VisiCalc. Rosen loved it, and Sevin Rosen led the round of funding to get Lotus going. The company called its product Lotus 1-2-3. Rosen became Lotus’s chairman, though his tenure there was short-lived. Lotus 1-2-3 became one of the primary reasons people bought the IBM PC, helping to bring the personal computer into American homes and offices. Compaq grew into the world’s leading manufacturer of personal computers in the 1990s. Other notable companies Rosen funded through Sevin Rosen included Electronic Arts and Silicon Graphics. “What’s most gratifying to me is to take sketches or ideas and create a living company employing thousands of people — and creating new industries,” Rosen told Businessweek in 1999. “It’s an exhilarating feeling.”

Rosen was born on March 11, 1933, in New Orleans to Anna and Isidore Rosen. His wife, Donna, said his father had been a dentist who wasn’t the same after he served as a medic during World War II; he left the family when Ben was a child. His mother worked as a secretary and took in laundry at night to support the family. After high school, Rosen followed his brother, Harold, to the California Institute of Technology, where he studied electrical engineering. He received his master’s at Stanford University. He worked as an engineer for a few years, but could see that he didn’t have the chops of, say, his brother, who became a pioneer in the field of satellite technology. So he switched to the business side. He received his MBA at Columbia Business School before eventually joining Morgan Stanley.

Rosen’s first marriage, to Alexandra, produced two sons, Jeffrey and Eric, before the couple divorced. He married Donna Rosen in 2002. She survives him, along with his sons. In the 21st century, Rosen focused more on philanthropy and the arts than on venture capital.

At Caltech, where he was a longtime trustee, Rosen and his wife established the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center in 2008. The couple later changed their minds about naming institutions after donors, deciding it made more sense to name them after those who made the institutions great, to inspire people to explore their lives and contributions. At their request, the name of Caltech’s bioengineering center will be changed to honor its director, Frances Arnold — who was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2018 — after she retires. “We live near Lincoln Center, and when we go to the ballet, we go to David Koch hall, and when we go to the Philharmonic, we go to the David Geffen hall,” Rosen told Bloomberg in 2019. “But if a person could go to a ballet at the Balanchine hall or a concert at the Leonard Bernstein hall, it would have such a different impact.”

Rosen didn’t take himself too seriously. He loved to perform and liked to get a laugh. At conferences, he was known to balance heavy objects, like chairs, on his chin. For two decades, he was one of the most important, powerful people in the industry. He was 93.