By James R. Hagerty
Philip Erdoes, a prolific entrepreneur and venture capitalist whose interests ranged from movie production and children's furniture to artificial-intelligence tools, died Jan. 7 at Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. He was 62 years old.
Erdoes, husband of Mary Callahan Erdoes, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase's fund-management arm, died of complications from an infection, the family said. His death came two weeks after that of his wife's mother, Patricia Callahan.
Erdoes, who earned a Harvard M.B.A. after working as a mergers-and-acquisitions lawyer in Texas, founded Bear Ventures in 1996 and invested in logistics, movie production and energy analytics, among other areas. He established the ducduc brand of children's furniture and was a lead investor in PowerAdvocate, an energy-analytics service sold to Verisk Analytics for $200 million in 2017.
More recently, he was a co-founder and chief executive of Bear Cognition, which provides AI-powered analytical tools to logistics, manufacturing and energy firms. He was managing partner of Last Rodeo Studios, which invested in several independent films.
Power couple
Erdoes met Mary Callahan when they were Harvard Business School students in the early 1990s. They married in 1997. In a 2005 essay in the New York Times, she described him as a "natural risk -taker" and entrepreneur. "He was invaluable in getting me through the first time I lost a lot of a client's money," she wrote. He persuaded her to fly to Louisiana to meet the client in person and explain the situation.
Philip Gregory Erdoes, the youngest of three sons, was born on July 3, 1963, in Pittsburgh and raised in Oklahoma City.
His father, Ervin G. Erdoes, was a Hungarian-born Jew who survived imprisonment at a Nazi concentration camp during World War II, emigrated to the U.S. and became a medical professor and authority on the role of enzymes and peptides in controlling blood pressure. His mother, Irene Meyerhof Erdoes, was born in Germany, served as a United Nations interpreter and later worked at the Internal Revenue Service.
As teenagers, Philip and his brother Peter were bused to high school in a predominantly Black neighborhood as part of an integration program, an experience that Peter said helped both of them learn to deal with a wider range of people. Philip was on the basketball and track teams.
Medical and legal studies
He majored in biology and biomedicine at Oklahoma State University, where he graduated in 1985. Though his father had urged him to study medicine, he earned a law degree at the University of Oklahoma. After two years of working as a lawyer, he felt the tug of entrepreneurial life and enrolled at Harvard Business School.
He and Peter funded scholarships at Oklahoma State for low-income students. He completed a 50-kilometer race at age 50.
Erdoes loved costumes and on various occasions dressed up as Santa Claus and Mrs. Doubtfire, a character from the 1993 Robin Williams movie. He and his wife held regular Sunday evening barbecue dinners, featuring freewheeling debates, at their Battery Park home in Manhattan. He once hired a polka band to follow one of his friends around on his birthday.
Survivors include his wife and three daughters.
His motto was "play offense, or don't play."
Write to James R. Hagerty at reports@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
January 10, 2026 15:18 ET (20:18 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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