Who the heck is Giants owner Paul Wythes, Jr?
With bonus content about just who the heck was former Giants owner Paul Wythes, Sr
This is the ninth installment in our series on who exactly owns the Giants. So far, we have covered real estate mogul Scott Seligman, private equity guy Phil Halperin, real estate mogul Jed Walentas, medical technology investor David Schnell, radio station owner/former Yahoo board member Arthur Kern (now no longer listed as an owner), lady of mystery Nancy Olsen, Republican super-donor Charles Johnson, and Manila business mogul George Drysdale. Time to look at the big board!
The work we’ve done together is incredible. I’m proud of all of you.
Today, we look at Paul Wythes, Jr.
We also look at his father, also named Paul Wythes, because Wythes Senior lived a much more visible life than his son. But we’ll do our best with Paul Jr, because he’s a current owner and his father, who passed away in 2012 and left his share in the team to his son, is not a current owner.
Paul Sr. was born in Camden, New Jersey in 1933. He graduated from Princeton in 1955, spent a couple years in the Navy, and got his MBA from Stanford in 1959. After a few years in sales and market research, Paul Sr started a venture capital firm called Sutter Hill Ventures with a man named Bill Draper, and that firm went on to be wildly successful, as evidenced by its current portfolio value of around $10 billion.
Wythes made a name for himself with Sutter Hill, but more importantly, he made a name for venture capital as an idea. His company was among the first to exist — he would later recall that when they started, they only had two competitors on the West Coast — and Wythes would end up sitting on at least 27 corporate boards and he also became a founding director of the National Venture Capital Association.
Paul Wythes donated money to Republican candidates for office, including John McCain in his presidential run in 2008, and passed away in 2012. The official cause was complications from an infection, but that infection came after years of fighting cancer, so that was probably related. His wife was named Marcia, and he had three children: Jennifer, Linda, and Paul Jr. Jennifer and Linda not being on the Giants’ ownership masthead, we’re going to ignore them and move on to Paul Jr.
Paul Wythes Jr., though, is harder to find information on. He has a wife, Mei Mei, and two children, Alexandra and Thomas. He is around 55 years old and lives in San Francisco. He attended Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management in Evanston, Illinois and graduated in 1997. At one point he ran a firm called Wythes Consulting, which may or may not have been involved in construction or construction management (I’m not 100% on that, and I’m doing this for free so you get what you get). Wythes Consulting was dissolved in 2018.
Paul Wythes Jr has made, as far as I can tell, no political donations of any kind. According to his LinkedIn, he is a board trustee at San Francisco University High School and spent six years on the board of managers of the Presidio Community YMCA. As for what he’s doing now, well, who knows? Not me!
Here’s a picture of Paul and Mei Mei, by the way:
Now, just because I didn’t see any political donations doesn’t mean the Wythes haven’t been active in philanthropy, because oh boy, there is a long list of donations that they have given out. Either Paul and Mei Mei or just Paul or just Mei Mei have been thanked for their generosity by the following organizations:
KIPP Public Schools Northern California (a charter school network)
Gateway Public Schools (another charter school organization)
SPUR (The San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association)
That’s probably not all of them, but it gives you a good idea of where their priorities are.
So who the heck is Paul Wythes, Jr? It’s not easy to find out. He inherited his share in the Giants from his (extremely wealthy) father and presumably currently has an occupation, though it’s not one that is easy to uncover. He has been active in supporting educational causes and mostly seems to care about local causes. Of those donations, only Northwestern is located outside of the Bay Area, and he's an alum, so that’s not exactly uncommon.
This is probably as typical a story of a rich son as you’ll find. In an interview in 2006, Paul Sr. said that Paul Jr “has never cut a lawn in his life.” This, then is the result: success, apparently, opaque as it is. A share of a Major League Baseball team. Enough money to give tens of thousands of dollars away to charities he supports. He seems to have a nice life, outside of the public’s notice. Good for him, I guess.