In the spring of 1979 a Morgan Stanley analyst watched a piece of software do in minutes what had taken him hours, and he bet his reputation on what it meant. Ben Rosen, who died Aug. 23 at 93, was about the only analyst on the Street who thought the machines mattered, and he could tell you what was missing: a reason for ordinary people to want one. VisiCalc, generally counted as the first electronic spreadsheet, was that reason. In his Morgan Stanley Electronics Letter he wrote that it “could someday become the software tail that wags (and sells) the personal computer dog.”
He was right. Because VisiCalc came out for the Apple II alone, the spreadsheet sold the computer; Steve Jobs said in 1990 that if the program had launched on a rival machine, Apple’s story would have been somebody else’s. Rosen introduced Jobs and Apple (AAPL) to people at Morgan Stanley (MS), which took the company public in December 1980. Bill Gates and Jobs read his newsletter and turned up at the conference he’d spun off, the Personal Computer Forum, where he was known to balance chairs on his chin.
From sketches to companies
In the early 1980s, fresh from quitting Texas Instruments (TXN), a couple of men showed him what amounted to a drawing and a plan: a computer light enough, at under 30 pounds, to carry by a handle. His new venture firm, Sevin Rosen Funds, put up the first money; the result was Compaq, which Rosen chaired from 1983 until 2000 and which by the 1990s was selling more PCs than anyone. In 1982 Mitchell Kapor turned up with a spreadsheet that beat VisiCalc; Sevin Rosen backed it as Lotus, and 1-2-3 gave people a reason to buy the IBM (IBM) PC. Compaq co-founder Rod Canion credits Rosen with what Compaq became.
The part of the obituary we’d frame is the ending. Born in New Orleans on March 11, 1933, he was raised by his mother, a secretary who did other people’s laundry at night after his father left. He followed his brother Harold to Caltech, and decades later, as a longtime trustee, he and his wife, Donna, established the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center there in 2008. Then they changed their minds — not about the gift, about the name. A building, they decided, should carry the name of the person who made it matter, not the one who paid for it — so when its director, Frances Arnold, the 2018 chemistry Nobel laureate, retires, the center will take her name, at the Rosens’ own request.
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Two lessons, and the second is the bigger one. The first is an investing habit (IN04): Rosen’s edge wasn’t spotting the hardware, it was spotting what would make ordinary people buy it — the asset isn’t the story; the reason someone else has to own it is. The second is Estate: a charitable gift is a document as much as a check, and the Rosens show how much room there is inside it. Naming, the timing of a rename, whether the gift honors a mission or a family, who decides once the donor is gone — all of it can be written into the agreement while the donor is alive to say what he meant.
If there’s a gift in your plan — a scholarship, a building, a fund at the school that gave you a start — the useful question isn’t how much but what for, and whether the agreement says so. Fifteen minutes with the letter of intent, before the check clears, saves a lot of change-of-heart later. Rosen got to change his; not everyone does.