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“Our Advisory Board Member and friend, Warren Hellman, passed away on December 18 at age 77. Warren was well known as the brilliant founder of Hellman & Friedman and as an extremely generous philanthropist and community supporter. Warren passionately supported his broad range of causes and was respected and loved by the community. His eclectic interests covered everything from building a garage in Golden Gate Park to sponsoring a free annual bluegrass festival to underwriting health clinics in underserved areas to assuring the survival of local media news coverage in an era of failing community newspapers. He was an old-school community activist, putting his resources and energy relentlessly behind issues that he passionately believed in.

I, and our organization, will miss Warren. His friendship, advice and guidance on our Advisory Board is well known. What is less known is that Warren’s father was a major influence on my father and was a key reason for his settling in San Francisco following WW II. Warren’s dad, Mick Hellman, was Walter’s commanding officer and mentor.  Walter often said he got his MBA under Mick Hellman because that was when my father learned the art of negotiation, as a quartermaster at Travis Air Force Base during the war.  Mick saw Walter’s potential and encouraged him to settle in San Francisco, and the rest is a wonderful history.”

~ Douglas W. Shorenstein

Warren Hellman was a director of Osterweis Capital Management, Inc., Sugar Bowl Corporation, D.N. & E. Walter & Co., Hall Capital Partners, LLC; and was an advisory board member of Rosewood Capital and Shorenstein Properties. From 1962 to 1977, he was a Partner of Lehman Brothers in New York, where he served as head of Lehman’s Investment Banking Division, president and director of Lehman Brothers, Inc., and chairman of Lehman Corporation (a closed-end investment company). From 1977 to 1989, he was general partner of Hellman, Ferri Investment Associates in Boston. From 1982 to 2011, he had been a General Partner of Matrix Partners, with offices in Menlo Park, California and in Boston, Massachusetts.

In October of 1981, Mr. Hellman, in addition to his activities with Matrix Partners, renewed his relationship with Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb as a managing director and relocated from New York to San Francisco. In March of 1984, he left Lehman Brothers and, with Tully Friedman, formerly a managing director of Salomon Brothers Inc., formed Hellman & Friedman, a firm engaged primarily in the investment of its own capital.

Mr. Hellman’s civic activities included: president, Voice of Dance; former chairman and current trustee emeritus, The San Francisco Foundation; member, the Committee on JOBS; member, board of directors & executive committee;  Jewish Community Federation; former chair, Jewish Community Federation Endowment Committee; member, advisory board of the Walter A. Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley; trustee, UC Berkeley Foundation; member, board of directors of the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce; member, board of directors of the Bay Area Council; chair, San Francisco School Alliance Business Advisory Council; trustee emeritus of The Brookings Institution; member and Fellow, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; founder and chair, The Bay Citizen; and founder and principal sponsor of the annual Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco.

William Poorvu is the Class of 1961 Adjunct Professor in Entrepreneurship Emeritus at Harvard Business School. For several decades he was responsible for and taught the real estate courses at the School.  He is the author of several books and articles on real estate, including Creating and Growing Real Estate Wealth and The Real Estate Game.

Mr. Poorvu has been managing partner in a number of real estate companies and has served as consultant for various organizations in the private and public sectors. He is a founder and past chairman of the Baupost Group L.L.C., an investment advisory firm, of which, he currently serves as co-chairman of its board of advisors; he formerly served as an independent trustee of the MFS Group of Mutual Funds; and as director of CBL & Associates, Trammell Crow Realty Investors, and Connecticut General Mortgage and Realty Investments. He is also a past vice chairman/treasurer of Boston Broadcasters, Inc., licensee of Channel 5, WCVB-TV Boston.

Mr. Poorvu is a life trustee and former vice chairman and treasurer of the Boston Symphony Orchestra; life trustee and former treasurer of the Gardner Museum, trustee and vice chairman of the National Public Radio Foundation; member of the investment committee of the Carnegie Corporation of New York; former member of the Yale University Council and its Investment Committee. He has also served on the board of other non-profit and community organizations.

T. Gary Rogers is currently chairman of the Rogers Family Foundation.  He was previously chairman and chief executive officer of Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, Inc., a company he and his partner purchased in 1977, took public in 1981, and sold to Nestlé in 2006.  He is the past chairman of Levi Strauss & Co. and the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.  Mr. Rogers is a director of Safeway, Inc., and Stanislaus Food Products, and an advisory board member of Shorenstein Properties.  He is a member of the Chancellor’s Executive Advisory Council of the University of California at Berkeley and a member of the Investment Advisory Group for The Regents of the University of California.  He is chairman of the Oakland Chief Executive Officers Council and the Oakland Dialogue and is a former chairman of the Bay Area Council and the Oakland Partnership.

He is the primary benefactor of the University of California Men’s Crew, the T. Gary Rogers Rowing Center, and the California Rowing Club.  He also is a member of the High Performance Committee of U.S. Rowing.

Mr. Rogers has a bachelor’s degree from the University of California at Berkeley and an M.B.A. from Harvard Business School.

Richard Rosenberg is the retired chairman and chief executive officer of BankAmerica Corporation. He was appointed as chairman and chief executive officer in 1990 and served until 1996. Prior to joining Bank of America in 1987, Mr. Rosenberg worked at Wells Fargo Bank for 22 years, his last years serving as vice chairman and director.

Mr. Rosenberg is a retired commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, a member of the California Bar Association, a trustee of the California Institute of Technology, a past president of The Bankers Roundtable, the Bank Marketing Association, the Federal Advisory Council of the Federal Reserve System and a past chairman of MasterCard International. He is a member of the boards of directors of the Buck Institute for Age Research, Health Care Property, Inc., the San Francisco Symphony, and the Naval War College Foundation and is chairman of the University of California San Francisco Foundation and the executive council of the University of California Medical Center. He has served as the chairman of the board for ABX Air, and as a director of Airborne Express Corporation, SBC Communications, UCSF-Stanford Health Care, Chronicle Publishing Company, Copia (American Center for Wine, Food & the Arts), Northrop Grumman Corporation, Pacific Life Insurance Company, Premier Pacific Vineyards, and Exigen Group.

Michael Rossi is a retired vice chairman of BankAmerica Corporation, serving from 1993-1997. Prior to serving as vice chairman, Mr. Rossi was BankAmerica’s chief credit officer. Prior to that post, he held various executive positions which included running the Bank’s Commercial Banking Division, Global Private Bank, the Asia Division, and the Latin America Division. He also served as senior credit officer of the World Banking Group. From 2005 to 2007, Mr. Rossi was chairman and CEO of Aozora Bank, taking it public in November 2006. He also spent eight months as chairman of GMAC/ResCap.

Mr. Rossi is a member of the board of the Special Olympics Committee of Northern California, and the North Hawaii Community Hospital, as well as senior advisor to the San Francisco 49ers, and a director of BAWAG Bank Vienna, Austria. He is a former member of the board of Pulte Homes, the American Banker’s Association, Claremont University Center and Graduate School, the American Graduate School of International Management, University of California at Berkeley Art Museum, Del Webb Corporation, the San Francisco Opera, the National Urban League, Union Pacific Resources, the United Way of Northern California; chairman of the board of trustees on the Monterey Institute of International Studies; chairman of the board of Lifesavers. He also served on the President’s Campaign Cabinet for University of California at Berkeley, was a member of the nominating committee of the Bankers Association for Foreign Trade (BAFT) as well as past president of the board of BAFT and chairman of the American Diabetes Association of California.

David Swensen, Yale’s Chief Investment Officer, oversees $18 billion in Endowment assets and several hundreds of millions of dollars of other investment funds. Under his stewardship during the past 25 years the Yale Endowment generated returns of 13.9 percent per annum, a record unequalled among institutional investors. Mr. Swensen leads a staff of 28, located near the University’s campus in downtown New Haven.

Prior to joining Yale in 1985, Mr. Swensen spent six years on Wall Street – three years at Lehman Brothers and three years at Salomon Brothers – where his work focused on developing new financial technologies. At Salomon Brothers, he structured the first swap, a currency transaction involving IBM and the World Bank. Mr. Swensen authored Pioneering Portfolio Management: An Unconventional Approach to Institutional Investment and Unconventional Success: A Fundamental Approach to Personal Investment, both published by The Free Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.  His books have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, French, Spanish, and Italian.

Mr. Swensen has won numerous awards, including: in 2008, a fellowship in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences; in 2007, the Mory’s Cup for conspicuous service to Yale; in 2007, the Hopkins Medal for commitment, devotion and loyalty to Hopkins School; and in 2004, the Inaugural Institutional Investor Award for Excellence in Investment Management.  At Yale, where he teaches students in Yale College and at the School of Management, he is a Fellow of Berkeley College, an Incorporator of the Elizabethan Club, and a Fellow of the International Center for Finance.

Mr. Swensen advised President Barack Obama of the United States as a member of the President’s Economic Recovery Advisory Board.  He served as a Trustee or advisor to Cambridge University, the Carnegie Corporation, the Carnegie Institution of Washington, the Hopkins School, TIAA, the New York Stock Exchange, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Courtauld Institute of Art, the Yale New Haven Hospital, the Investment Fund for Foundations, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and the States of Connecticut and Massachusetts. Mr. Swensen is a Trustee of The Brookings Institution.