Founder of Ross off-price chain

Stuart Moldaw, 81, who founded the Ross Dress for Less retail clothing chain and was a leading philanthropist in the San Francisco Bay Area, died May 24 from cancer in Atherton, Calif.

Moldaw saw a niche in the affordable clothing market and started Ross, now one of the country’s leading “off-price” retailers, in the early 1980s. The chain began with six stores in the Bay Area and now has more than 900 locations in 27 states.

He was also a co-founder of U.S. Venture Partners, a Menlo Park, Calif., venture capital firm, and a founding investor in the Gymboree Corp., Pic-A-Dilly and Athletic Shoe Factory.

The son of Russian immigrants, Moldaw was born in Boston and grew up in Massachusetts. He served in the Navy on a troop transport ship during World War II and studied marketing and economics at Syracuse University on the GI Bill. He moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in the mid-1950s and later started his own retail clothing business in Palo Alto.

A leading philanthropist in his later years, Moldaw also served on the boards of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, public television station KQED and the San Francisco Ballet.