Posted on: Friday, June 28, 2002

Punahou grad, venture capitalist Daniel Case

By Frank Cho
Advertiser Staff Writer

Since his middle school days at Punahou, Daniel H. Case's curiosity and a thirst for adventure pushed and pulled him from one entrepreneurial venture to the next until he found the perfect match in California's high-flying technology sector.

Case, chairman of J.P. Morgan Chase's JPMorgan H&Q division, played a key role in forging Wall Street's fascination with young Internet companies in the late 1990s and was one of its best-known investment bankers.

He died Wednesday morning at his home in the Bay Area among his friends and family after a yearlong battle with brain cancer. He was 44.

Case was just 34 when, in 1992, he became chief executive officer of the fabled San Francisco-based technology investment bank, Hambrecht & Quist, and presided over some of the Internet economy's most efflorescent IPOs, including Netscape and Amazon .com.

Born in Honolulu, the Rhodes scholar graduated from Punahou School and earned a bachelor's degree in economics from Princeton University.

When William Hambrecht, co-founder of Hambrecht & Quist, asked faculty at Princeton to recommend the school's "smartest student" for a summer internship, they sent him Case.

Case worked his way through Hambrecht & Quist's corporate finance, venture capital and mergers and acquisitions departments before becoming co-chief executive in 1992 and sole chief executive in 1994. He was named chairman in 1998. In 1999, two years after an aborted attempt to sell Hambrecht & Quist to Merrill Lynch & Co., Case sold the 31-year-old firm to Chase Manhattan Corp., now called J.P. Morgan Chase, for $1.2 billion.

While struggling with cancer, Case created a foundation called Accelerating a Brain Cancer Cure, with his brother Steve Case, chairman of AOL Time Warner, and their wives.

Case is survived by his wife, Stacey Black Case, and his four children, Alexander, Winston, John Daniel and Charlotte. In addition, he leaves his parents, Dan and Carol Case, his brothers Steve and Jeff, and his sister, Carin.

Funeral services will be held at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco July 2 at 3:30 p.m. The family has asked that any gifts in Case's honor be made to ABC2. The family, which is in San Francisco, had not yet planned a Honolulu service.

Bloomberg News Service contributed to this report. Reach Frank Cho at 525-8088, or at fcho@honoluluadvertiser.com