Robert C. Gay

Ask a private equity investor what it would take to leave a firm with his name on the door and a $1.1 billion fund three years into its investment period, and you will not hear the answer Robert C. Gay gave. On March 31, 2012, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints sustained him as a member of its First Quorum of the Seventy, a full-time position that members treat as a religious call and that pays nothing from the firm he was leaving. Huntsman Gay Global Capital, the Palo Alto firm he had co-founded and run as chief executive, dropped his name and became HGGC in 2013. He did not go back. In April 2018 he was put in the Presidency of the Seventy, the seven-man body that oversees the Church's regional administration, and on October 1, 2021 he was given emeritus status.

The question you might have is whether 2012 was a break with his business career or the same career under another name. His own record argues for the second reading: by then he had already spent a decade building a microcredit company and a university center on economic self-reliance, and had run a mission in West Africa for three years between leaving Bain Capital and founding HGGC.

The path into Bain Capital ran through the standard credentials of the 1980s, and then some. Gay was born in Los Angeles on September 1, 1951, the son of Frank William Gay, who ran several of Howard Hughes's companies. He served a mission for the Church in Spain, took an economics degree with a statistics emphasis at the University of Utah, Phi Beta Kappa, and a Ph.D. in business economics at Harvard in 1982, where he also taught economics for two years.

The sources give the order but not the years for McKinsey, Kidder Peabody, GE Credit and Bain Capital; sixteen years at Bain is the one figure everyone repeats, and it appears in Wikipedia and in the BYU Marriott School's advisory council directory without a start or end date. Bain Capital's own Wikipedia entry does not mention him at all, which tells you something about how that firm's history gets written: around the one partner who ran for president.

The firm began in 2007 as H&G Capital Partners, the H for Jon Huntsman Sr., the chemical billionaire, and the G for Gay. The other founders were Richard Lawson and Steve Young, the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback, both of them Gay's partners from Sorenson Capital, and Greg Benson. Within a year H.I.G. Capital sued over the similarity of the names, and the firm became Huntsman Gay Global Capital. Its first fund closed in March 2009, in the worst fundraising market in a generation, at $1.1 billion against a $1 billion target; the California Public Employees' Retirement System put in $180 million. Wikipedia's summary of Gay's tenure is that the firm invested more than $1.1 billion under his leadership, which is another way of saying it deployed Fund I. The early portfolio did well on exit: the German e-commerce software company hybris went to SAP for more than $1 billion, Sunquest Information Systems to Roper Industries for $1.415 billion, Serena Software to Micro Focus for $540 million. Those sales closed after Gay's 2012 departure, so the credit is shared with the partners who stayed; Mergers & Acquisitions magazine named HGGC its mid-market private equity firm of the year for 2014. The firm, still in Palo Alto, has raised further funds since and reports more than $7 billion in cumulative capital commitments. Gay's own biography on the Church's website compresses all of this into one clause, cofounding private equity companies, and gives more room to the schools, water systems, clinics and microenterprises his humanitarian work built. The proportion looks deliberate.

Two founding years in one: a private equity firm and a microcredit company, both 2001.

In 2001 Gay co-founded Sorenson Capital and, in the same year, Unitus, a microcredit company that Fast Company and Monitor Group named a Social Capitalist three times, a list of the 45 top social-enterprise organizations in the country. With his wife, Lynette, he co-founded and funded what is now the Melvin J. Ballard Center for Economic Self-Reliance at Brigham Young University. He set up the Komart Foundation in Ghana, sat on the board of Steve Young's Forever Young Foundation and advised Ascend Alliance.

The Church assignments followed the same geography. He had served as a counselor in a bishopric and, in the late 1970s, on the Boston Stake high council under Richard L. Bushman, which is where he met Mitt Romney, later his colleague at Bain Capital. From 2004 to 2007 he presided over the Ghana Accra Mission, responsible for missionaries in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Liberia. The Church made him an area seventy in April 2008, a General Authority in 2012, chairman that September of the Perpetual Education Fund, its loan program for students in developing countries, and in April 2018 a member of the Presidency of the Seventy, in the reshuffle that followed Gerrit W. Gong and Ulisses Soares moving up to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. He toured India with M. Russell Ballard in 2019 and gave the 2011 commencement address at Utah Valley University. He was released with emeritus status on October 1, 2021, at 70, which is where the public record currently ends.