Ben Rosen saw the future in the spring of 1979.
An analyst at Morgan Stanley, he was the rare guy 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 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.
"VisiCalc," he wrote in his influential newsletter, Morgan Stanley Electronics Letter, "could someday become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog."
He was right. As 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.' "
For two decades, Rosen, who died Aug. 23 at the age of 93, was one of the most important, powerful people in the industry.
Everybody listened
Rosen was covering semiconductors at Morgan Stanley when he started covering PCs in his newsletter. He also made the PC part of the conferences that he organized, then spun off a separate conference called Personal Computer Forum. Everyone from Bill Gates to Steve Jobs read his newsletter and attended his conference. He was an early champion of the Apple II and was known in the industry as the guy on Wall Street who took the personal computer seriously.
"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," he told Businessweek in 1999. "It's an exhilarating feeling."
Rosen had a hand in many of the seminal companies and events in the early years of the personal computer.
VisiCalc, for instance, was a hit, but 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," Jobs told an interviewer in 1990, "you'd be interviewing somebody else right now."
Rosen introduced Jobs and Apple to people at Morgan Stanley, and the company took Apple's stock public in December of 1980, a watershed moment for the personal computer. By then, Rosen had left Morgan Stanley, but he was just getting started with the personal computer and the spreadsheet.
Then in January of 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.
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.
In the 1980s, Lotus 1-2-3 became one of the primary reasons people bought the IBM PC, which helped bring the personal computer into America's homes and offices. In the 1990s, Compaq became the world's leading manufacturer of personal computers.
"Compaq wouldn't have done what we did without Ben," said Rod Canion, Compaq's co-founder.
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.
The Big Easy
Benjamin Maurice Rosen was born in New Orleans on March 11, 1933, to Anna and Isidore Rosen. Ben Rosen's wife, Donna, said that Ben's father was 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 M.B.A. at Columbia Business School before eventually landing at Morgan Stanley.
Rosen's tenure as chairman of Lotus was short-lived, but he was chairman of Compaq from 1983 until 2000. Other notable companies he funded with Sevin Rosen included Electronic Arts and Silicon Graphics.
Rosen and his first wife, Alexandra, had two sons-Jeffrey and Eric-before they divorced. He married Donna Rosen in 2002. She survives him, along with his sons.
Rosen focused more on philanthropy and the arts than venture capitalism in the 21st century. At Caltech, where he was a longtime trustee, he and Donna established the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center in 2008.
Later, the couple had a change of heart about naming institutions after donors. They decided that 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."
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