"Chance favors the prepared mind." - Louis Pasteur
I had a five-year head start on getting to know Frank. We rowed lightweight together at Penn, which means I’ve seen him at 5:40am in February on the Schuylkill and can confirm the composure is sound. He grew up in Vancouver, BC, with an older sister every bit as competitive as he is, and the two spent their childhood racing each other in school, in sports, in everything. What stuck wasn’t the winning. It’s that he does his best work next to people who push him.
That instinct followed him to Wharton, where he studied finance and behavioral economics and rowed varsity lightweight: four years in a boat that won an Ivy League title and took second in the nation. Rowing gave him the line he still leads with, that the right people make the longest days worth it. He came up with that one somewhere around the back half of a winter erg session. I was there. Nobody was having fun. The thing that stuck from Penn wasn’t a course, it was a process: pick a public company he’d never touched, build the full model, write the report, arrive at a thesis he could defend. He learned he loves absorbing an entire industry through the lens of a single company. He’s never really stopped doing it.
Frank started on the venture team at StepStone, working across direct investments, fund secondaries, and fund primaries. That seat let him see the industry from several sides at once, backing companies directly while sizing up the funds that back them. The job meant relocating to Baltimore, a city he’d never visited and where he knew exactly nobody, which he treated less as a hurdle than as proof he could build something from scratch. His path to Founders Circle ran through me: I’d joined a year ahead, and it turns out three years in the same boat makes for a strong reference. His erg scores were fine, but his boats always won. Anyone in this business knows which metric to underwrite.
Outside the office, Frank has swapped rowing for what he calls his retirement sports, cycling and running, plus a serious cooking and baking habit. He fell for sourdough in college, which makes landing in San Francisco, home of Tartine, feel a little too convenient. He’s also driven across the country twice in the past year, collecting favorite stretches along the Oregon Coast and through Denver. Frank would rather see the places most people fly over, find the local food, and do the kind of thinking that only comes from a long, empty road. We’re glad this road ended here.
By Dominick Richiuso
