In 1967 a movie called To Sir, With Love starring Sidney Poitier came out. Poitier played Mark Thackeray, an unemployed engineer who takes a teaching job at a tough secondary school in the East End of London while he’s otherwise out job hunting. He’s assigned a class of rowdy, disrespectful working-class teenagers nearing the end of their schooling, who’ve run off previous teachers. Rather than sticking to the standard curriculum, Thackeray, who was classically well-educated, scraps that curriculum and instead treats the students like adults, teaching them about life, respect, and dignity. He challenges them to think for themselves and earns their trust and admiration through patience and unconventional methods rather than discipline. Over the course of the film, the class transforms, and so does their view of him. The film became a touchstone of the “inspirational teacher” genre and was a major commercial success, though it’s also remembered for its era-specific handling of race and class in postwar Britain. When I think of my friend Frank, I think of that movie for several reasons. First of all, when his grandkids (all eight girls) came along, he was asked what he would like them to call him. The usual array of names like Gramps or PopPop of some such endearing name never occurred to Frank. He suggested they should call him Sir, just as Mark Thackeray suggested to his students. So Frank became Sir to his bevy of lovely granddaughters. The second reason I think of Frank when that movie comes up is that Frank was a Marshall Scholar and attended the London School of Economics at a time before the MBA had become the currency of the educational realm in business and finance. He was classically educated to say the least and it came through every time he delved into any topic of global economics. He was, in a word, a brilliant man.
I first met Frank when I bought my first home in Utah in 1991. It was a condo in a small mountainside development and Frank and his wife Sally owned the condo next door. Frank didn’t just own the condo, he had bought out the unfinished development after the 1986 Tax Act crushed the second home market. He finished the condos and sold them off to friends, keeping the best one for himself at a cost basis of about zero. During those early years of knowing Frank, I literally worshipped at his altar. I was a senior Wall Street Executive and he was a venture capitalist before venture capital was in vogue. He had come and gone from Wall Street on his path and was more knowledgeable about finance than anyone I knew…and in a very cerebral and worldly way. He understood things about technology and new-fangled stuff like the internet that blew my mind and did a wonderful job of preparing me for the coming tech boom. I never had a conversation with Frank that didn’t educate me in the extreme. As I rose through the Wall Street ranks during the 1990s, Frank was my personal advisor. He was 15 years my senior and was some combination of father-figure and older brother to me, which was something I had never had in either form. I have always found myself walking that fine line between the life of the mind and the pragmatic achievement-oriented real world and Frank embodied all sides of those programs in a way that gave me a sense that the balancing of those two was not strange, but rather a distinct positive. I knew I was no academic, but I also knew that I did not have the raw steel of business as my only guide rail. Frank showed me that you could successfully blend the two and turn that into an advantage.
Whenever I had major decision points in my life, I would find myself calling Frank and talking it over with him. At the time I found myself wishing that he would give me more pointed advice rather than framing the issues and reminding me that I had a decision to make. With hindsight I realize that such a guiding hand was more valuable than specific suggestions because it forced me to become a better decision maker and, more importantly, left me with complete accountability for my own career and life choices. While I never thought of myself as modeling my life after Frank’s, a few things sometimes make me wonder if I did more of that than I realize. When my oldest son matriculated at Cornell (my Alma Mater), Frank gave him his prized economics textbook by Paul Samuelson. Frank’s son was not so academically inclined and I found it a poignant reminder that his son Tom took a very different path than what his father might have imagined. I’m not sure my son Roger ever cracked open that book and after a few years at Cornell, he found himself on the same sort of alternative path as Frank’s son Tom, a path that had less academic pursuit in favor of more worldly endeavors. My second son’s name is Tom and I’m not so sure an economics textbook book would have been better embraced by him. I’ve never connected that choice of name for my son to Frank, but who knows…
As the tech boom raged and all of us bankers were caught up in the frenzy of this new-fangled beast called private equity, I made numerous investments in start-up companies, always checking in with Frank about what he thought. Frank and I even went in on a few deals together. It seemed pretty natural that when my first round with Wall Street management came to a logical end, I would start my own venture firm with some friends and Frank would become one of the anchor investors. One of the great pleasures of my career was to be able, at the end of the day, to say that Frank’s investment in my VC fund was highly successful and paid out something like 8.5X multiple of invested capital (MOIC) to him. It seemed fitting to repay the support and wisdom he had given me over those years and during that transition.
During those years, Frank and I saw each other the most during the winter ski season in Utah. He stayed in his condo and I moved from condo to ranch house and eventually to the big Frank Lloyd Wright inspired ski house, which I thought might be my full-time home once I left Wall Street. We also saw each other during the summers as people always suggest that Utah is a place where people come for the winters and stay for the summers. I even visited him at his beautiful pre-colonial apple farm in the Shenandoah Valley, called Avenel in the small burg of Berryville, Virginia. In fact, it was a visit to Avenel with my son Tom that allowed me to spend a last visit with his dear wife Sally, who had been stricken with terminal cancer. During my farewell with her, she held my hand and asked that I take care of Frank. It was a very spiritual moment for me.
As Frank recovered from the loss of his forty-year partner, I suggested to him that he might want to reach out to the ex-wife of my old college best friend, someone that he had gotten to know through me out in Utah. She was a free agent by then and had a joi de vivre that seemed compatible with Frank’s zest for life. They became a couple and in my own personal way, I felt that Sally would feel that I had helped take care of Frank as she would have wanted. At one point Frank chose to move up to New York City, a place he had experienced briefly in his youth. He bought my apartment, a duplex in an old turn-of-the-century brewery down by Gramercy Park, and spent a few years enjoying the city before moving back to the town where he connected to the most, San Francisco. Frank’s father had lived out the end of his life in San Francisco and I always reckoned that Frank wanted to do the same.
Frank has now passed on, ending his days in his beloved City by the Bay, where his apartment, shared with our old mutual friend and now his wife, sits atop Nob Hill and looks out at the Golden Gate Bridge and Coit Tower, where he first me Sally. I feel like Frank has been a bigger part of my life than almost any friend I have had over the years. It’s a bit strange that he even has a connection to the person who was my best friend before him for thirty years. He was my mentor, my father-figure, my older brother, my dear, dear friend. I will miss him greatly and I write this final story about him to Sir with love.