Benjamin Rosen, Who Brought Venture Capital to Tech, Dies at 93

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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

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