Henry Hillman — investor who funded major equity firms
Henry Hillman, a billionaire who diversified his family’s Pittsburgh coal and coke fortune and provided startup funding for private-equity firm KKR & Co. and Silicon Valley venture-capital company Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, has died. He was 98.
He died Friday at Shadyside Hospital in Pittsburgh, daughter Audrey Hillman Fisher said in a statement.
Mr. Hillman amassed an estimated net worth of $2.6 billion, according to Forbes magazine, making him Pittsburgh’s richest person. He generally shunned publicity, explaining, “It’s the spouting whale that gets harpooned.”
Through the Hillman Co., where he was chairman until 2004, Mr. Hillman steered the industrial fortune made by his father and grandfather into real estate, venture capital and private equity.
He was one of the “bestknown passive investors” in New York-based KKR from its founding as Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. in 1976, George Anders wrote in “Merchants of Debt,” his 2002 book on the firm. On the other coast, Mr. Hillman’s $4 million investment provided half the startup money in 1972 for Kleiner Perkins, the Menlo Park venture capital firm that invested in some of the most successful U.S. technology companies, including America Online Inc., Netscape Communications Corp. and Amazon.com Inc.
In 1994, Goldman, Sachs & Co.’s Whitehall Real Estate partnership agreed to pay $450 million for part of Mr. Hillman’s commercial real-estate holdings, consisting of 39 incomeproducing properties with about 5.3 million square feet of industrial, office and retail space. Mr. Hillman had tried without success to create a real estate investment trust.
With his wife, Elsie, who died in 2015, Mr. Hillman was among Pittsburgh’s most active philanthropists. The Hillman Family Foundations mainly support Pittsburgh and its surrounding communities. The 18 affiliated charitable-giving organizations distributed about $29 million in grants in 2014, according to a tax filing.
Mr. Hillman’s major gifts over the years, with his family and their foundations, included $20 million to establish the Hillman Fellows Program for Innovative Cancer Research at the University of Pittsburgh, $10 million for a computer-sciences building at Carnegie Mellon University and $10 million to support pediatric transplantation at Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh.
Henry Lea Hillman was born Dec. 25, 1918, in Pittsburgh, to John Hillman Jr. and the former Juliet Cummins Lea.
In 1945 he married the former Elsie Hilliard, who served as a member of the Republican National Committee for about two decades. His survivors include the couple’s four children — Lea Simonds, Audrey Fisher, Henry Hillman Jr. and Bill Hillman — 10 grandchildren and 16 great-grandchildren, according to a statement from the company.