Dan Case was an accomplished and cheerful battler who turned a troubled firm into one of the great success stories of the technology bull market. But the San Francisco banker could not win his final fight.
By Hal Lux
July 2002
Institutional Investor Magazine
Dan Case was an accomplished and cheerful battler who turned a troubled firm into one of the great success stories of the technology bull market. But the San Francisco banker could not win his final fight.
Last month Case, former CEO of investment banking boutique Hambrecht & Quist, died at age 44 following a yearlong fight with brain cancer. He leaves a wife, Stacey Black Case, and four children.
One month before his death, Case spoke by phone with Institutional Investor. The interview was for a planned story about how he was coping with his sudden transformation from Wall Street superstar to cancer patient. Though he preferred to discuss the new foundation, Accelerate Brain Cancer Cure, that he had just formed with his brother, AOL Time Warner chairman Steve Case, he spoke about his personal experience as well.
Drained from chemotherapy, his speech occasionally slurred from surgery to remove a tumor located near his brain’s speech center, Case retained his characteristic intelligence and ironic wit.
Acknowledging indirectly that he would die from the cancer -- an aggressive type of tumor called glioblastoma multiforme -- Case was hopeful that he could prolong his life with chemotherapy: " I think life is a pretty wonderful thing. It’s complicated, but I’ll take it.”
He also turned inward, finding solace in spirituality. At the time of the interview, he was reading an inspirational book titled A Call to Joy: Living in the Presence of God. “I’m a Christian, and I’m very lucky I had that to fall back on,” he said. “All of us have a strong feeling about what’s bigger than us. I’ve gone back to the simple things.”
Case was also reading a book on Buddhism, but he noted that there were limits to his ability to accept his situation: “People get too far on the peace side. They don’t want to fight.”
No one would ever accuse Dan Case of shrinking from a good fight. Even by the standards of the high-flying investment banking world of the 1980s and ‘90s, he put together an extraordinary career. He joined H&Q in 1979 after completing his Rhodes scholarship at Oxford. Named co-CEO in 1992 and CEO in 1994, Case restored the fortunes and reputation of H&Q following costly lawsuits related to the bank’s work with a failed disk-drive company, MiniScribe. The lawsuits had threatened to wipe out H&Q’s capital, but in 1992 Case negotiated a clever settlement with plaintiff lawyers that kept the bank alive. “The firm could have gone under,” recalls David Golden, head of West Coast investment banking for J.P. Morgan H&Q.
As other tech boutiques began selling out to large banks in the late 1990s, the early years of the tech financing boom, Case playfully mocked the mergers, famously saying that he would not trade his firm’s independence for a big bank’s “automated teller machine card and a toaster.” But in 1999 Case sold H&Q to Chase for a whopping $1.35 billion -- and a toaster, which Chase vice chairman Jimmy Lee presented to him at the closing.
He would have little time to write the next chapter in his career. He began feeling tired, and numb in some parts of his body, shortly after attending last year’s World Economic Forum in Davos. After several rounds of tests, the small but deadly brain tumor was located.
Case, who remained chairman of J.P. Morgan H&Q until his death, stressed that his family was his main motivation to fight the cancer: “This is not a great situation, but I can’t imagine my life now without my wife, Stacey, and my four kids.”
He said he had learned a lot about “love and people” from his fight, but he was adamant that facing mortality at such a young age had not made him rethink his choice of careers. “You have to do things that are professionally meaningful -- things like working with entrepreneurs.” In many ways, Case said, he still missed the fast pace of Wall Street: “You take the horse out of the race, and it still wants to run.”
Indeed, Case noted that his fight against cancer had given him insight into the cutting-edge drugs being developed. “Some of these drugs are going to be a growth story,” said the investment banker. “And I’d like to participate.”
