Sandy Robertson is worried about what’s happening in the markets these days, and that matters. Few people in the financial world have seen more than he has.
Robertson is best known as a pioneering dealmaker in Silicon Valley, where he helped start two of the “Four Horsemen” investment banks that dominated technology underwriting in the 1990s — Robertson Stephens and Montgomery Securities. But his career dates to the 1960s, when as a Smith Barney broker covering Nebraska and Iowa, he helped an Omaha client named Warren Buffett build a position in American Express.
Now, preparing to celebrate his 90th birthday on Friday, Robertson is still surveying the scene as a director of Salesforce, and a founding partner of private equity firm Francisco Partners. While he does not detect the kind of mania that prompted him to warn about lofty internet valuations in 1999 — only months before the bubble burst — he believes “we are in a very frothy period here, too”.