Robertson Stephens

Stuart Katz serves as Chief Executive Officer and Raj Bhattacharyya is Executive Chairman (per Barron's, 2023). The firm operates as an open-architecture wealth manager, meaning individual client portfolios are constructed by the firm's advisors using third-party managers and direct securities, rather than following a centralized CIO model dictating house positions. For alternatives allocations, the firm sources external fund commitments and co-investment opportunities rather than deploying proprietary capital into a single house strategy.

The original Robertson Stephens was a San Francisco-based technology investment bank, founded in 1969, that went public and was eventually absorbed into Bank of America in 2002. The revived firm, relaunched in 2018 by Stuart Katz and Raj Bhattacharyya, is primarily a wealth management and advisory platform that also maintains a boutique investment banking practice focused on middle-market companies. The modern firm is an RIA operating on an open-architecture, multi-custodial model, not a pure-play tech investment bank.

Yes. The firm provides curated access to private equity, venture capital, private credit, and real estate through fund commitments and co-investment opportunities sourced from third-party managers. Robertson Stephens does not typically operate proprietary in-house funds, instead acting as a gatekeeper and access point for its high-net-worth and family-office clients seeking alternatives exposure alongside traditional public-market strategies.

The firm is headquartered in Ketchum, Idaho, with additional offices in San Francisco, California, and New York, New York. This distributed footprint reflects its remote-forward operating model, designed to serve technology entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and concentrated-wealth individuals across the western United States and the Northeast without requiring advisors to relocate to a single gateway city.

Robertson Stephens is structured as a registered investment advisor (RIA) serving multiple high-net-worth clients, not as a single-family office managing a single fortune. While its services resemble those of a multi-family office — financial planning, alternatives access, tax-aware investing — the firm is organized as a commercial wealth management and advisory enterprise, not a family-office entity.