Richard Blum

Richard Charles Blum was born July 31, 1935 in San Francisco and earned both his B.S. in Business Administration (1958) and M.B.A. (1959) from the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He joined the San Francisco investment brokerage Sutro & Co. at age 23 and became a partner before turning 30. One of his early signature deals involved acquiring the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus for about $8 million and reselling it to Mattel for roughly $40 million.

In 1975 Blum founded Blum Capital Partners, L.P. (also operating through the general partner Richard C. Blum & Associates), a long-term strategic equity investment management firm headquartered in San Francisco. He served as chairman and president throughout the firm's history, and the firm pioneered a hybrid approach combining private equity with large "strategic block" positions in undervalued public companies. In 1994 he co-founded Newbridge Capital, an Asia-focused private equity venture, and served as its co-chairman.

Blum served on and chaired numerous corporate boards, most prominently CB Richard Ellis (CBRE), where he was a long-time investor and served as board chairman until 2009. His board seats also included URS Corporation, Northwest Airlines, Korea First Bank, Playtex Products, Glenborough Realty Trust, Career Education Corporation (of which he was the primary owner until 2015), and Collective Brands.

Beyond investing, Blum was a prominent philanthropist and public servant. He founded and chaired the American Himalayan Foundation, supporting schools, clinics, and cultural preservation in Nepal, Tibet, and the Himalayan region, and endowed the Richard C. Blum Center for Developing Economies at UC Berkeley (initial funding of ~$15 million, with an additional ~$12 million in 2019). He served as a University of California Regent from 2002 until his death, was a trustee of The Carter Center, and sat on the boards of the World Wildlife Fund and the Wilderness Society. He was married to U.S. Senator Dianne Feinstein of California. Blum died of cancer on February 27, 2022, at age 86.

• Strategy: Leveraged buyouts, growth capital, and PIPE investments in small-cap and middle-market companies — a control- or large-block-oriented, long-horizon approach rather than early-stage venture or angel investing.
• Signature "hybrid" model: Blum Capital was known for pioneering a strategy that blended private-equity discipline with sizeable strategic block stakes in public companies, seeking undervalued businesses where the firm could actively drive value creation.
• Company profile: Generalist across sectors, favoring established small-cap and mid-market companies (public and private) rather than pre-revenue startups.
• Scale: The firm managed on the order of $4.5 billion in assets and acted as general partner for a series of investment partnerships, also providing investment advisory services.