Last year when word leaked out that the Pegula family was looking for investors to purchase minority ownership stakes of the Buffalo Bills, Rochester native Rob Palumbo was at home in Atlanta when his phone buzzed.

“I was in my kitchen and I get a call from my brother, Rich,” Palumbo said of his older sibling who has lived in Rochester all his life. “It’s really noisy in the background and I’m like, ‘What are you, doing? What do you want?’

“He says, ‘I’m at the Pittsford Pub’ and he turned the phone and he’s got me listening (to a report on television) that the Bills are considering bringing on minority investors. And I just couldn’t believe it. My wife’s there and she’s looking at me and it’s like, ‘Oh, geez, here we go, here we go.’”

Before he had even started kindergarten in Irondequoit in the late 1960s, Rob has been a Bills fans. His love affair with the team is not unlike any other card carrying member of Bills Mafia in terms of passion – the guy is crazy about this team. But what makes him just a little different is, thanks to his tremendously successful business career, he has a bit more disposable cash. Enough to grab a piece of the team.

After that phone call from his brother, Palumbo immediately put a call into Steve Greenberg, managing director of Allen & Company which is a privately held investment bank in New York City that specializes in transactions of this nature. Greenberg, a former COO of Major League Baseball, was hired by the Pegulas to handle the recruitment, vetting, and ultimate purchase agreements of what turned out to be 10 new limited partners including former NBA stars Tracy McGrady and Vince Carter.

“I called and I said, ‘Steve, you don’t know me, but you’re not going to find a bigger fan, and I need to talk to you,’” Palumbo recalled. “He probably gets these calls all the time and thought I was a lunatic.”

Greenberg realized Palumbo was no lunatic so he scheduled a meeting and Palumbo said, “I flew to New York right after that, sat down with him and said, ‘This is what I want to do if it’s of interest to the Pegula family, and I’d love to be a part of it.’ And the rest is history.”

‘A dream come true’

So there was Palumbo the other day, on the sidelines at St. John Fisher University with his wife, Melanie, and his brother Rich, watching the team he now owns a small percentage of grinding through practice on a steamy Rochester morning. Surreal is the only way Palumbo can describe it.

“Yeah, it’s a dream come true,” said Palumbo, who set up his investment venture though an LLC he named Rock Pile Partners which he said was ‘a little nod to history’ paying homage to the Bills’ original stadium.

“There was only one team I would ever invest in, and I’ll be honest with you, if it wasn’t such good people, despite the fact that it’s the Bills, I probably wouldn’t do it. But within five minutes of meeting Pete (Guelli, the Rochester native who is the Bills chief operating officer), and five minutes of meeting Terry and the family, I knew. I just knew it was a great culture, great people doing the right things. It was perfect for me.”

How Rob Palumbo became a Buffalo Bills fan

Palumbo traces his fandom back to a day – perhaps around 1969 or 1970 – when his father broke his little heart.

Tony, who owned a company called Palumbo’s Provisions, provided fruits and vegetables to the numerous Kodak cafeterias and later to a number of restaurants including, interestingly enough, the Red Lion that operated in the Powers Building downtown and was run by Guelli’s father.

Anyway, Tony was going to a game at the old War Memorial Stadium in downtown Buffalo and he brought Rich, who is 12 years older than Rob. If you ever went to the old Rockpile, it really wasn’t the greatest place for a child for four or five years old, as Rob was.

“My brother and my dad went to see the Jets and the Bills, and I cried like a baby because they didn’t take me to the game, just to give you sense,” Rob said with a smile, casting light on how big a fan he has always been.

When Rich was asked to verify this fact, he said, “I do recall this, and oh, yeah, it was a big deal. When we could go to a game, it was special, but he was too young.”

Being left home that day did not dampen Rob’s love for the team and eventually he attended many games, though mostly at Rich Stadium which opened in 1973.

Palumbo was a lacrosse star in high school

Palumbo loved the Bills, but his athletic pursuit was lacrosse and he went on to become a star at Irondequoit High School in the early 1980s playing for legendary coach John Pratt. One of Pratt’s assistant coaches was Don Wright who these days is retired and spends a couple weeks of each summer working as a volunteer at training camp.

“I guess I didn’t know he was that smart,” Wright said with a laugh referring to the business career Palumbo has put together. “He was an awfully good lacrosse player. I hadn’t seen him (before this week at camp) since high school but I remember him as someone eager to learn, quick to learn, had all the attributes that we looked for. He played attack at Irondequoit and was a good goal scorer.

“My son Greg works for the Bills, and he told me about Rob, so I called Rob’s brother who lives out in Pittsford and I said, ‘Is this the Rob Palumbo that I know?’ He said, ‘Yeah, it is.’ So, yeah, it was pretty cool.”

Palumbo was recruited by several of the top college lacrosse programs in the country including nearby Syracuse which at that time was at the very top of the heap in Division I, but Rich – who played lacrosse at Hobart – nudged him in the direction of the Ivy League schools and after taking a visit to Princeton, he was hooked.

“I go down on my recruiting visit, the coach then was Jerry Schmidt who had been at Hobart and knew my brother,” Rob said. “I had a great visit and the rest was history. I went to Princeton and played for Jerry and then Bill Tierney (who went on to become a coaching icon with six national championships, though that run began after Palumbo had graduated). In fact, I had to have references with the NFL so I called up Tierney. Then I sent him a (Bills) jersey after it was over and I said, ‘I’m taking you to a game.’ So he’s going to come to a game with me.”

After graduation, Palumbo – who earned an A.B. degree in the classroom and All-America recognition on the field at Princeton – went to Australia and played one season of lacrosse there in Adelaide. “I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and a guy called and asked if I wanted to come play for him. I said, ‘I’ll be there’ and so I went and played a year and then I came back because I had to start paying the bills.”

Palumbo’s business path

Whereupon he went to work on building the type of fortune that allows someone to buy into an NFL franchise. He started his career as a mergers and acquisitions analyst at Alex. Brown & Sons, then moved on to Stephens, Inc. where he directed the firm’s information technology banking practice for five years.

Next was a three-year stint at Deutsche Bank where he built the technology investment banking practice in the southeastern U.S. and later headed the software practice in Silicon Valley. Then it was on to Thomas Weisel Partners where he co-headed the software investment banking practice.

That led to forming his current company, Accel-KKR, with his partner and former Princeton lacrosse teammate Tom Barnds. Across the past two decades, the technology-focused investment firm has compiled $21 billion in capital commitments and specializes in Private Equity, Venture Capital, Leveraged Buyout, Growth Capital, Software, Technology, Financial Services, Healthcare IT, SaaS, and Procurement. It was founded in Menlo Park, California and now has four locations including Atlanta, London, and Ciudad de Mexico.

“We needed an East Coast office and at the time my parents were still alive and I needed to get closer to home,” Palumbo said of his decision to operate out of the Atlanta office. “I couldn’t do the business out of Rochester, I didn’t want to live in New York, but Atlanta had a direct flight home.”

It was in Atlanta where he met his wife Melanie and that’s where his daughter Olivia and son Wyatt were born, but with so much of his family still based in Rochester, in many ways this is still home to him.

That local connection – particularly to Rochester which is a market the Bills are always looking to tap into – in conjunction with Palumbo’s business expertise and his checkbook, made him a perfect Pegula partner as far as Guelli is concerned.

“From our end, we wanted to add resources and expertise and institutional knowledge in a number of other industries,” Guelli said. “You never know what direction you’re going. And to find guys like Rob from Rochester and other (limited partners) from Buffalo and from Toronto that we know, big picture, can help us at some point … every team has a limited partner. It’s not a big deal. It’s the right thing to do for a lot of reasons.”

Palumbo joins the Buffalo franchise at a time when the Bills are among the elite of the NFL, and one has to wonder how he’ll hold up if they ever get back to another Super Bowl when admits, shaking his head and smiling, “When (Scott) Norwood missed that kick (in Super Bowl 25), I was under a table at a bar because I couldn’t look.

“I had once in a while heard about or gotten inquiries about investing in sports,” he continued. “But the Bills are like my childhood sweetheart, my love. I mean this is my hometown, this is my team since I was a little kid. As far as I can tell, they seem to be running a pretty damn good organization so they don’t need me, right? But I’ve just said to Pete, and I’ve said it to Terry, if I can be of any assistance in any way, I’m here to help.”

Sal Maiorana has covered the Buffalo Bills for four decades including 35 years as the full-time beat writer for the D&C, he has written numerous books about the history of the team, and he is also co-host of the BLEAV in Bills podcast/YouTube show. He can be reached at maiorana@gannett.com, and you can follow him on X @salmaiorana and on Bluesky @salmaiorana.bsky.social.

This article originally appeared on Rochester Democrat and Chronicle: Rob Palumbo is minority owner of Buffalo Bills: ‘A dream come true’