Bob Grady is a Partner and Managing Director for Cheyenne Capital Fund, a private equity investment firm which manages a $250 million commitment to alternative assets for the State of Wyoming and other Limited Partners. Cheyenne Capital Fund has been the star performer of Wyoming’s portfolio, achieving a gross IRR of 21% since 2004, during a time at which the S&P 500 has achieved only a 2% return per year.
Mr. Grady also serves as Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, and as Chairman of the New Jersey State Investment Council, which oversees the state’s $73 billion pension system.
Prior to joining Cheyenne Capital, Mr. Grady worked for almost a decade as a Partner and member of the Management Committee at The Carlyle Group, which is today the largest private equity firm in the world. At Carlyle, he served as the global coordinator of venture and growth capital (which had $200 million in assets under management when Bob took the job, and grew to $5 billion in assets under management by the time he left in 2009). He was Fund Head of Carlyle Venture Partners I, II, and III, three successful venture capital funds which backed companies which together created thousands of jobs; and he was on the investment committees of Carlyle Venture Partners, Carlyle Asia Growth Partners, and Carlyle Europe Technology Partners, and was a Director of multiple Carlyle portfolio companies.
Mr. Grady also served as a Director and was Chairman in 2006-2007 of the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), which represents over 400 venture capital firms in the United States.
He also served on the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he taught second year MBA courses for 11 years on environmental policy, regulation, and “Investing in Highly Regulated Industries”.
Previously, Mr. Grady was a Managing Director and Member of the Management Committee at Robertson Stephens & Company, the San-Francisco-based emerging growth investment bank, which was the number one underwriter of technology and life sciences IPOs in Silicon Valley in the 1990s. Robertson Stephens managed the IPOs for such well known technology companies as eBay, Dell Computer, Sun Microsystems, Intuit, E-Trade, Compuware, AOL, and many, many others. While at Robertson Stephens, Mr. Grady served as the lead investment banker on over 150 IPOs and merger transactions.
Bob served in the White House from 1989-1993 as Deputy Assistant to President George H.W. Bush, as deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and as Associate Director of OMB for Natural Resources, Energy, and Science, a position in which he oversaw both budget and policy development for Federal land management agencies like the National
Park Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the Forest Service. In that position, he worked closely with Jackson’s own John Turner, who served as head of the FWS. Bob was widely credited with drafting and helping to steer through Congress the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990, a law which still stands on the books today and which helped spur the development of clean, low-sulfur Wyoming coal — and a project on which he worked closely with Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson.
Bob originally joined the senior Bush as speechwriter in the Office of the Vice President, and went on to serve as the Chief Speechwriter and Senior Policy Adviser in the successful 1988 Bush-Quayle Presidential campaign.
Earlier in his career, Bob was the Director of Communications for New Jersey Governor Thomas H. Kean and Legislative Director and then Chief of Staff for U.S. Congresswoman Millicent Fenwick – where he was the youngest Chief of Staff on Capitol Hill at the age of 23.
Mr. Grady is a Director seven companies: two pubic companies — Maxim Integrated Products (Nasdaq: “MXIM” – the world’s second largest producer of analog and mixed signal semiconductors) and Stifel Financial (NYSE: “SF” – a leading asset management and brokerage firm) — and five privately-held companies eScreen ( which provides instant drug testing), Viator (a fast-growing online travel site), Symbio LLC (a China-based software development and testing company), Eleutian Technology (a company which uses Wyoming teachers to teach English over the internet to students in China, Japan, and Korea, — and which is one of Wyoming’s fastest growing employers), and the Jackson Hole Mountain Resort (which of course is the biggest business in Teton County).
In the academic world, Bob is a member of the Board of Governors of the RAND Graduate School in Los Angeles, a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, and a Member of the International Advisory Board of the Harvard Center for Environmental Economics.
Bob is very active here in Wyoming. In addition to managing funds for Cheyenne Capital and chairing the board of Eleutian Technology, one of Wyoming’s most exciting companies, Bob has served as the Finance Chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party and is the Treasurer and a member of the Executive Committee of the Jackson Hole Land Trust. Bob is also a frequent speaker at such events as TEDx Jackson Hole and the joint Rotary Club-Jackson Chamber of Commerce economic luncheon. Most importantly, he is a volunteer coach for both Jackson Youth Hockey and Jackson Youth Baseball.
Mr. Grady received a A.B., cum laude, from Harvard College, and a M.B.A. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
Bob and his wife Colleen live here in Jackson and have two young children, Matthew and Katie.