lit a candle 2d agoWhat strikes me is how he named his gifts after others, not himself. That kind of generosity of spirit, especially from someone who had so much to be proud of, says something. Caltech will remember him.
Their story
Benjamin Maurice Rosen was born on 11 March 1933 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Isidore (also spelled Isadore) Rosen, a dentist, and Anna (Leibof) Rosen, a secretary. He was the youngest of three children in a Jewish family that included sister Ruth and older brother Harold A. Rosen, later celebrated…
Benjamin Maurice Rosen was born on 11 March 1933 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to Isidore (also spelled Isadore) Rosen, a dentist, and Anna (Leibof) Rosen, a secretary. He was the youngest of three children in a Jewish family that included sister Ruth and older brother Harold A. Rosen, later celebrated as a father of geostationary satellite communications through the Syncom program. Benji, as the family called him, grew up with an early aptitude for math and science and graduated from Isidore Newman School in 1950. Inspired by Harold, he followed his brother to the California Institute of Technology. At Caltech he earned a B.S. in 1954, taking introductory chemistry from Linus Pauling and working with Gordon Moore as a teaching assistant. He completed an M.S. at Stanford in 1955, then worked as an electronics engineer at Raytheon and at Sperry Gyroscope. A personal sketch he later circulated recalled a cheap Malibu beach cottage and a used Austin-Healey before a rent hike pushed him east to a Manhattan walk-up, a European beach interlude, and a resolve to go "legit" with coat, tie, and career.
An M.B.A. from Columbia Business School in 1961 opened a second career on Wall Street. After Coleman and Company he became senior technology analyst and vice president at Morgan Stanley, repeatedly ranked by Institutional Investor among the top electronics analysts. In the late 1970s he carried an Apple II to client meetings as what he later called "the self-anointed evangelist of personal computers in general and Apple in particular on Wall Street." When Morgan Stanley sought new business beyond blue-chip names, colleague Jack Wadsworth recalled Rosen summoning bankers to see what the machine could do. Rosen introduced Steve Jobs to Morgan Stanley president Robert Baldwin at a small trade show near the firm's Manhattan offices; neither man, Rosen later joked, seemed to listen to the other. Morgan Stanley led Apple's December 1980 IPO at $22 a share. By then Rosen was already pivoting toward venture capital.
In 1981 he co-founded Sevin Rosen Funds with L. J. Sevin, the Mostek semiconductor veteran. Their first fund backed Compaq, Lotus Development, Electronic Arts, and Silicon Graphics. For Compaq's 1982 birth Rosen lent about $20,000 to three disgruntled Texas Instruments engineers whose portable IBM-compatible PC began as a sketch on a restaurant placemat. He chaired Compaq for roughly eighteen years (news sources differ on whether the chairmanship is dated from 1982 or 1983; he stepped away around 2000), intervening at moments that kept the company off the forgotten-maker list, and served about four months as acting CEO in 1999 after the board, with Rosen leading, parted with CEO Eckhard Pfeiffer. Compaq became the world's top PC maker in the 1990s before Hewlett-Packard acquired it in 2002. Later Sevin Rosen investments included Cypress Semiconductor, Cyrix, Citrix, and Ciena. By the firm's 2006 twenty-fifth anniversary it had raised more than $1.8 billion across more than sixty portfolio companies. Separately, Rosen's Rosen Electronic Letter, distributed through Rosen Research, was sold in 1983 to Esther Dyson and reinvented as Release 1.0, a touchstone of tech commentary.
With Harold he founded Rosen Motors in 1993 to pursue a hybrid-electric car that paired a gas turbogenerator with a flywheel energy store. After what they called a successful January 1997 road test and no commitment from a major automaker, the company closed that November. Rosen labeled it "an artistic success but a commercial failure." Among its employees was a young J. B. Straubel, later a Tesla co-founder. The episode became part of Rosen's legend as a financier willing to fund hard engineering even when markets said no.
Philanthropy and civic life ran in parallel. Appointed to Caltech's Board of Trustees in 1986, he chaired the board from 2001 to 2005 and was elected a life member of the Caltech community. With his siblings he established the Anna L. Rosen Professorship in 1989. He co-chaired the Institute's Biological Sciences Initiative, endowed graduate fellowships later renamed for Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, and in 2008 joined wife Donna in creating the Donna and Benjamin M. Rosen Bioengineering Center under director Frances Arnold. Compaq endowed a Benjamin M. Rosen Professorship in 2002; in 2020 he asked that it be renamed for Harold. He received Caltech's Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007 and the Robert A. Millikan Medal, the Institute's highest honor, in 2018. The IEEE awarded him the Founders Medal in 1999 for nurturing more than eighty electronics and computer firms. Computerworld had already listed him among twenty-five people "who changed the world" in 1992. He also served Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, the New York Philharmonic, the Metropolitan Opera, and Columbia Business School's board of overseers. In 2015 he and Donna founded KentPresents, a nonprofit ideas festival in Kent, Connecticut, directing profits to local charities.
Rosen's first marriage, to Alexandra, produced sons Jeffrey and Eric. He later married Donna Perret, longtime New Orleans gallery director; NOLA.com dates the marriage around 2002 after they met while she promoted artists in New York. They made Kent, Connecticut, their primary base while keeping a downtown New Orleans home and deep New York cultural ties. Friends in the New Orleans startup community remembered him rolling up his sleeves at Entrepreneur Week and driving an early Tesla Roadster. He appears in the 2016 documentary Silicon Cowboys and sat for a Computer History Museum oral history in 2017. Benjamin M. Rosen died in Manhattan on 23 August 2026 at the age of 93. Caltech and Bloomberg-family obituaries gave no cause of death. Resting place and funeral details were not made public in the open news sources relied on here. He is survived by Donna, sons Jeffrey and Eric, and stepdaughter Melanie Perret.
Biography adapted from EN Wikipedia (Benjamin M. Rosen); Caltech obituary (2026-08-24); Silicon Valley / Bloomberg (Laurence Arnold, 2026-08-25); Mercury News (same wire); NOLA.com (Rich Collins); Pasadena Now; Caltech Mill.
In their own words
“an artistic success but a commercial failure.”
Rosen Motors hybrid-electric car shutdown, 1997. Source: Bloomberg / Silicon Valley.
“an innovator who helped shape how the world computes, and a leader who drew others into his orbit.”
Caltech president Ray Jayawardhana on Rosen, Caltech death notice, 2026-08-24. Source: Caltech.
“For the support and nurturing leading to the creation of more than 80 leading electronics and computer firms, resulting in significant contributions to the engineering discipline, industry and society.”
IEEE Founders Medal citation about Rosen, 1999. Source: IEEE founders-rl.pdf.
“The timing was fortunate. I just happened to cross paths with some people who were really important in our lives.”
2019 interview on career luck. Source: Bloomberg / Silicon Valley obituary.
“the self-anointed evangelist of personal computers in general and Apple in particular on Wall Street and at Morgan Stanley. 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.”
Recalling late-1970s analyst years. Source: Bloomberg / Silicon Valley.
“For the next 20 minutes, the following weird situation took place: Steve engaged in a monologue about how insanely great the Apple PCs were, and simultaneously Bob delivered his own monologue of why Morgan Stanley was the nonpareil banker of the financial world. Neither seemed to listen to, nor care about, what the other was saying.”
On the Jobs-Baldwin meeting; 2011 HuffPost recollection quoted in Bloomberg. Source: Bloomberg / Silicon Valley.
“Just as we had the digital revolution in the last century, we are having a biological sciences revolution in this century. And Caltech is the place to be.”
Rosen Bioengineering Center founding / gift remarks. Source: Caltech.
He really did care about lifting up the whole community, not just tech.