Robert Smelick:  

Left Central for Stanford, where I graduated in 1964. Then off to Australia where I attended a graduate program in economics at the University of Melbourne while I worked as a computer systems analyst. Returned to the U. S. to attend the Harvard Business School...graduate with an MBA in 1968. Moved to the field of investment banking and worked with Kidder Peabody in New York in the Investment Banking Department. After about five years in New York was asked to go to the West Coast and run the Kidder Investment Banking group in San Francisco. In 1978, moved to First Boston as a Managing Direct of the Firm and head of the First Boston Investment Banking group in the West. After years of bachelorhood, I married the sister of a great friend of mine and we had three children in the eighties. Her maiden names was Gail Sterling and she also was born and grew up in the Phoenix-Scottsdale area. In 1989, when First Boston merged with Credit Suisse, I formed my own firm with a friend. Name of the firm was Sterling Payot (the maiden names of our wives...sounded better than Smelick and Jesse!!). During the nineties our small firm (about a dozen people) had great fun and success investing in very, very early stage cellular and Internet companies. Because of an early investment in Wired Magazine we became the founding outside investors in HotWired, the first advertising supported Internet Site. We also were involved in the first Web Analytics firm, Accrue Software; the first wide area wireless data network service provider, Metricom; one of the first Internet Search companies, Yahoo; and a variety of other early stage companies. In 2000 I decided it was time to retire and change careers, and I became a business school professor at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I still teach a course entitle Leadership and Cultures of Trust and Innovation. Since the seventies I have been actively involved in both Corporate Boards and non-profit Boards. My corporate Boards have included Kaiser Steel, Willamette Industries, King Broadcasting, Metricom, HotWired, Accrue Software, the Wine Group, etc. My non-profit Boards have included Town School for Boys, Hamlin School for Girls, the San Francisco Ballet, the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, etc. In addition to teaching in Virginia, I have a real estate development company in Sun Valley Idaho, Stilwyn Inc., and we have built out the first section of the forth phase of a development named Weyyakin. Our family still has a small venture fund, focused principally on early stage bio-science companies. Our three children are all in the field of Medicine: son Chris is an MD and a resident in neurology at the Mayo Clinic in Florida; daughter Alexandra is working on her Doctorate Degree in Chinese Medicine at the National College of Natural and ...Expand for more