Franklin Pitcher Johnson jr., or Pitch Johnson, is a founder of multiple companies. [1] [2] [3]
Franklin Pitcher Johnson jr., or Pitch Johnson, is a founder of multiple companies. [1] [2] [3]
He is the son of Franklin Pitcher "Pitch" Johnson, an Olympic track and field athlete and college coach.
Franklin Pitcher "Pitch" Johnson was an American track and field athlete who competed in the 1924 Summer Olympics.
Track and field is an exercise which includes athletic contests established on the skills of running, jumping, and throwing. The name is derived from the sport's typical venue: a stadium with an oval running track enclosing a grass field where the throwing and some of the jumping events take place. Track and field is categorized under the umbrella sport of athletics, which also includes road running, cross country running, and race walking.
Encouraged by his father, Johnson won a track and field scholarship and studied mechanical engineering at Stanford University (1946–50). [1] After attending Harvard Business School (1950–52) he joined the US Air Force (1952–54) as an aircraft maintenance officer and worked in the Inland Steel Company's Indiana Harbor Works for eight years. He married Catherine Holman in 1954.
Mechanical engineering is the discipline that applies engineering, physics, engineering mathematics, and materials science principles to design, analyze, manufacture, and maintain mechanical systems. It is one of the oldest and broadest of the engineering disciplines.
Leland Stanford Junior University is a private research university in Stanford, California. Stanford is known for its academic strength, wealth, proximity to Silicon Valley, and ranking as one of the world's top universities.
Harvard Business School (HBS) is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts. The school offers a large full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, HBS Online and many executive education programs. It owns Harvard Business Publishing, which publishes business books, leadership articles, online management tools for corporate learning, case studies and the monthly Harvard Business Review. It is home to the Baker Library/Bloomberg Center.
He has a wife Catherine, three sons and one daughter. He describes himself as an Episcopalian and a Republican. [1]
The Episcopal Church (TEC) is a member church of the worldwide Anglican Communion based in the United States with dioceses elsewhere. It is a mainline Christian denomination divided into nine provinces. The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church is Michael Bruce Curry, the first African-American bishop to serve in that position.
The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP, is one of the two major political parties in the United States; the other is its historic rival, the Democratic Party.
The US Congress passed a law in 1958 to foment the creation of venture capital under which the government would lend private capital. [1] Johnson and his friend, Bill Draper, decided to co-found a venture capital company in Palo Alto. With a combination of savings and family loans, they formed Draper and Johnson Investment Company (D+J) in 1962. Johnson then took courses at Stanford at age 35 to study molecular biology and computer science. These studies were later useful for his investments in biotechnology and informatics. He says that being "a local guy" has helped him, since he knew many local entrepreneurs, lawyers and other professionals. It was easier for him to "check out" potential business partners. [1]
Venture capital (VC) is a type of private equity, a form of financing that is provided by firms or funds to small, early-stage, emerging firms that are deemed to have high growth potential, or which have demonstrated high growth. Venture capital firms or funds invest in these early-stage companies in exchange for equity, or an ownership stake, in the companies they invest in. Venture capitalists take on the risk of financing risky start-ups in the hopes that some of the firms they support will become successful. Because startups face high uncertainty, VC investments do have high rates of failure. The start-ups are usually based on an innovative technology or business model and they are usually from the high technology industries, such as information technology (IT), clean technology or biotechnology.
Molecular biology is a branch of biology that concerns the molecular basis of biological activity between biomolecules in the various systems of a cell, including the interactions between DNA, RNA, proteins and their biosynthesis, as well as the regulation of these interactions. Writing in Nature in 1961, William Astbury described molecular biology as:
...not so much a technique as an approach, an approach from the viewpoint of the so-called basic sciences with the leading idea of searching below the large-scale manifestations of classical biology for the corresponding molecular plan. It is concerned particularly with the forms of biological molecules and [...] is predominantly three-dimensional and structural – which does not mean, however, that it is merely a refinement of morphology. It must at the same time inquire into genesis and function.
Computer science is the study of processes that interact with data and that can be represented as data in the form of programs. It enables the use of algorithms to manipulate, store, and communicate digital information. A computer scientist studies the theory of computation and the practice of designing software systems.
In 1965 he founded a venture capital company, Asset Management Company, which is still in operation. [2]
He helped found companies including Amgen, Biogen Idec and Tandem. [1] He said that as a rough estimate, of every 10 companies that he help found, one would return 20 or more times the investment, 3 or 4 doubled it, and the rest didn't lose nor win money, and they had to be sold, sometimes with losses and sometimes ending even. [1] Some don't succeed or fail and keep going: he calls them the "living dead."
He was later director of the National Venture Capital Association and of the Western Association of Venture Capitalists, and he was also a trustee of the Foothill–De Anza Community College District for 12 years. [2] He taught a class in entrepreneurship and venture capital for 12 years at Stanford Business School, and he remained active in the faculty through 2009. [2]
He is a member of the board of international advisers to the IESE Business School in Barcelona.
The Columbia Business School has a position named Franklin Pitcher Johnson, Jr. Professor of Finance and Economics, which was donated by his friend, Lionel Pincus.
William Henry Draper III is an American venture capitalist.
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Franklin Resources Inc. is an American holding company that, together with its subsidiaries, is referred to as Franklin Templeton Investments; it is a global investment firm founded in New York City in 1947 as Franklin Distributors, Inc. It is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol BEN, in honor of Benjamin Franklin, for whom the company is named, and who was admired by founder Rupert Johnson, Sr. In 1973 the company's headquarters moved from New York to San Mateo, California. As of March 2017, Franklin Templeton Investments had US$740 billion in assets under management (AUM) on behalf of private, professional and institutional investors.
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