Frank Quattrone

Frank Quattrone
Frank Quattrone at Moët Hennessy Financial Times Club Dinner, San Francisco, September 2011
Born	1955 (age 60–61)
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania Stanford Business School
Occupation	Investment banker
Spouse(s)	Denise

Frank Quattrone (born 1955) is an American technology investment banker who started technology sector franchises at Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, and Credit Suisse First Boston. He helped bring dozens of technology companies public during the 1990s tech boom, including Netscape, Cisco, and Amazon.com. Later, he was prosecuted for interfering with a government probe into Credit Suisse First Boston's behavior in allocating "hot" IPOs. The case was eventually dropped. He was earning roughly $120 million a year during his peak at the firm.^[1] Quattrone is now head of investment banking firm Qatalyst Group, which he founded in March 2008.^[2]

Life and career

Quattrone grew up in Philadelphia and attended St. Joseph's Preparatory School on an academic scholarship. He was admitted to the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and graduated with honors. Following business school at Stanford University, he began work at Morgan Stanley's technology investment banking group.

In 2003, Quattrone was confronted with evidence of allegedly incriminating emails in a widely publicized series of trials. The first trial resulted in a hung jury. The second trial resulted in a conviction.^[3] On appeal the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed Quattrone's conviction, ruling, based in part upon the Supreme Court case Arthur Andersen LLP v. United States^[4] that Quattrone's jury had been given erroneous jury instructions.^[1][5] The appeals court also agreed with the defense that in the interest of justice, subsequent proceedings should take place in front of a different judge.

On August 22, 2006, Quattrone reached a deferred prosecution agreement and will not face prison time, "leading legal observers to label the agreement an exoneration."^[6] The National Association of Securities Dealers also dropped their charges. He now "plan[s] to resume [his] business career."^[7] According to reports, Mr. Quattrone will receive $100 million to $550 million in overdue compensation, so long as he abides by an agreement and does not break the law for a year. Credit Suisse already paid for Quattrone’s legal costs.

Since 2004, Frank Quattrone and his wife Denise have supported the Northern California Innocence Project (NCIP)^[8] based at Santa Clara University School of Law. Quattrone is Chair of the NCIP Advisory Board and an active fund-raiser for the project. At the NCIP inaugural Justice for All Awards Dinner in March 2008, Quattrone accepted the Leadership Award. In his acceptance speech, he referred to his motivation for supporting the Innocence Project—that at the very moment he was found guilty of the government's charges, he realized that there must be other innocent people who were in prison but unlike him they lacked the resources to fight for justice.

Qatalyst Group

In March 2008, Quattrone founded Qatalyst Group, a high-end corporate advisory firm focused on technology. Almost immediately after the firm issued its founding press release, it was reported to be advising Google on the Yahoo takeover deal pending with Microsoft.^[9] The article reporting the collaboration said: "That Mr. Schmidt (CEO of Google Inc.) would call on Mr. Quattrone is no surprise. The two men have worked together for years, and Mr. Schmidt was even quoted in the press release announcing the creation of Qatalyst (Mr Quattrone's new consulting and investment banking venture^[10]) 'I look forward to working with him again and am very enthusiastic about Qatalyst’s prospects for success.'"

Qatalyst has since advised on some of the most high-profile assignments in the industry. It represented Data Domain on its sale to EMC, nearly doubling the firm's purchase price, and represented struggling mobile device maker Palm in its sale to Hewlett Packard.

The success of Data Domain sale was followed by the bidding war for 3Par, which concluded in Hewlett Packard paying more than double the 3Par's value on the public markets. Netezza (on its sale to IBM) and Isilon (on its sale to EMC) were other storage clients advised by Qatalyst in 2010.

The success of 2010 was overshadowed by Qatalyst's assignments in 2011. Qatalyst advised Riot Games on its sale to Tencent, Kosmix on its sale to Wal-Mart, Atheros on its sale to Qualcomm, Zong on its sale to eBay, PopCap on its sale to EA, National Semiconductor on its sale to Texas Instruments, Autonomy on its sale to Hewlett Packard, Motorola Mobility on its sale to Google, and Netlogic on its sale to Broadcom, among many others.

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