Robert C. Gay

Robert C. Gay is a Managing Director, Co-founder, and the Chief Executive Officer of  a billion dollar plus private equity firm located in Palo Alto, California. Gay is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, sometimes nicknamed the “Mormon Church.”

Gay was born in Los Angeles, California to Frank William and Mary Elizabeth Thain Gay.  Bob graduated Phi Beta Kappa with an AB from the University of Utah.  He taught economics at Harvard University for two years, where he also received a Ph.D. in business economics in 1982.

Bob was a managing director for 16 years at Bain Capital, one of the world’s leading private equity firms with more than $70 billion under management. Prior to Bain Capital, Bob was an executive vice president of General Electric Credit Corporation Capital Markets Group, a vice president in the Merchant Banking Group at Kidder Peabody, and an engagement manager at the international consulting firm McKinsey & Company. [1]

Gay resigned his position as a full-time businessman to serve in his calling as a mission president for the Mormon Church.  During this 3-year calling (July 2004 to July 2007) Gay and his wife Lynette oversaw missionary work for the West African countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Ghana.  After being released from his missionary service, Bob Gay was called to be an Area Seventy, for North American Southeast Area.

Bob is actively involved in poverty relief and humanitarian aid in developing countries, serving as a co-founder of the BYU Center for Economic Self Reliance and as an advisory board member of Ascend Alliance, and is the founder of the Komart Foundation in Ghana, a micro-credit organization serving West Africa.

In 2001 he co-founded Unitus, a global micro-credit company, which is currently helping lift 9 million people across the world out of poverty. Unitus has been recognized world wide and for the last three years has received the prestigious Fast Company/Monitor Group Social Capitalist award naming it one of the top 45 social capital companies in the USA.  He is currently a Board member of three global charities: Right to Play, Forever Young, and Realizing the Dream.

Robert Gay and his wife Lynette have seven children.