Rob Hansen

Rob Hansen is a Utah-based investor and operator affiliated with Peterson Partners, the Salt Lake City investment-management firm founded in 2003 by Joel Peterson (a longtime consulting professor at Stanford's Graduate School of Business). Public directory listings (Bloomberg) identify Hansen as a Partner tied to Peterson Ventures, the firm's seed-stage venture practice, using a petersonpartners.com email. Peterson Partners today manages more than $2 billion across private equity, venture, and search-fund strategies.

Before his Peterson affiliation, Hansen built a career in private equity and growth investing, with prior roles reported at Vector Capital, Symphony Technology Group, and Cambium Networks — firms focused on technology buyouts and growth equity. He holds an MBA from Stanford University's Graduate School of Business (2003–2005), which places him squarely inside the Stanford-GSB network that is central to Peterson's deal sourcing.

Hansen's most prominent current operating role is as Co-CEO and Owner of Big Cartel, the Salt Lake City–based e-commerce platform that helps independent artists, makers, and small brands build and run online stores. This operator seat reflects the Peterson pattern of pairing capital with hands-on company-building.

Note: Hansen does not currently appear on the public Peterson Partners or Peterson Ventures team pages, so his day-to-day emphasis appears to be his Big Cartel operating role alongside his investing activity. Details specific to his personal deal-by-deal track record are thinly documented in public sources; firm-level facts below are attributed to Peterson Ventures/Peterson Partners rather than to Hansen individually.

• Invests at seed and pre-seed through Peterson Ventures, the seed arm of Peterson Partners; the firm is comfortable going in pre-revenue and pre-product.
• Leads or co-leads rounds, with first checks up to ~$2.5M (firm-stated), and typically reserves for follow-on.
• Sector interests span consumer/D2C, e-commerce enablement, fintech/insurtech, digital health, and collaboration/enterprise SaaS — the firm has explicitly evolved "from direct-to-consumer investments to enabling technologies and related verticals."
• Strong bias toward the Utah and Stanford GSB ecosystems; the firm markets "seed-stage expertise with an open-door policy."
• Firm ethos, per Managing Director Ben Capell: *"We're willing to jump in with founders and be all in with them."*