J. Stuart Francis

Stuart Francis is a senior managing director in the firm’s corporate advisory business. Located in Menlo Park, he is the senior investment banker responsible for the firm’s relationships with many of its largest, most visible clients, primarily in the technology sector.

Since joining Evercore in 2014, select transactions on which Mr. Francis served as financial advisor include the following: Qualcomm’s strategic review and rejection of the hostile offer from Broadcom for $149 billion; EMC’s sale to Dell for $67 billion; Qualcomm’s announced and terminated agreement to acquire NXP for $47 billion; Dell’s exchange offer of Class C shares for DVMT tracking stock shares totaling $26 billion; Abbott Laboratories’ acquisition of St. Jude Medical for $31 billion; Norton LifeLock’s pending acquisition of Avast for $9 billion; Abbott’s acquisition of Alere for $8 billion; Innovalon’s acquisition by Nordic, Insight Partners and others for $7.3 billion; Qualcomm and SSW’s pending acquisition of Veoneer for $4.6 billion; Aruba Networks’ acquisition by HP for $3 billion; Tesla’s acquisition of Solar City for $2.6 billion; HTC’s engineering cooperation agreement with Google for $1.1 billion; Palo Alto Networks’ acquisition of Demisto for $560 million; Facebook’s announced and withdrawn capital stock reclassification; Qualcomm’s negotiated cooperation settlement agreement with Jana Partners; and Yahoo’s negotiated settlement agreement with Starboard Value.

Major deals he advised on before Evercore are as follows: Qualcomm – approximately 25 transactions including the acquisition of Atheros, sale of Omnitracs to Vista, sale of the infrastructure business to Ericsson, spinoff of Leap Wireless, and numerous capital raising transactions, including lead left bookrunner on its IPO in 1991; Abbott – spinoff of Abbvie for $55 billion and acquisition of Solvay Pharma for $7 billion; Yahoo – strategic review and rejection of an unsolicited bid from Microsoft for $45 billion; Seagate – structured acquisition by Silver Lake Partners and Veritas for $20 billion; Symantec – acquisition of Veritas for $13.5 billion; Motorola Mobility – spinoff from Motorola and subsequent sale to Google for $10 billion; KKR and Silver Lake Partners – acquisition of the Agilent semiconductor business to form Avago for $2.7 billion; Google – sale of the Motorola cable box business to Arris for $2.4 billion; and Scientific Atlanta – sale to Cisco for $6 billion.

Mr. Francis also advised on IPOs and equity offerings for many leading technology companies, including Amgen, Applied Materials, Avago, Cisco Systems, Facebook, Google, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsara and Workday.

Prior to joining Evercore, Mr. Francis spent about 25 years with Lehman Brothers, then Barclays after it acquired Lehman’s U.S. business. He served as vice chairman of Lehman Brothers and subsequently as vice chairman at Barclays. He started his career at Smith Barney.

Mr. Francis is president of the U.S. Golf Association and a member of the Princeton Varsity Club Board. Previously, he served as chairman of the San Francisco Ballet as well as the Menlo School Board of Trustees. He is a member of the Ohio Golf Association Hall of Fame.

He has an MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business and a B.A. in economics from Princeton University.