Robin Taliaferro

Robin Taliaferro has spent more than five decades advising clients in California, and today he's a capital gains and estate tax planning executive whose work centers on Silicon Valley. He leads his practice as CEO, designing custom tax strategies for corporate officers in the region. Senior technology executives turn to him when they need to diversify out of concentrated positions in their own company stock while minimizing or deferring capital gains tax. Every one of Robin Taliaferro's clients is based in Silicon Valley, and that's where he holds his tax seminars and his personal meetings with them. When Robin Taliaferro names the high points of his career, his work with Software.com, Inc., of Santa Barbara is on the list. During 1999 and 2000, before the company went public, he structured tax strategies surrounding a private sale of $100 million of Software.com stock. His role spanned both sides of that deal. On the buying side were his own clients, who acquired shares privately before the IPO and kept them for six months before selling. They made those purchases inside charitable remainder trusts, a structure that let them minimize capital gains tax when the appreciated assets were sold. On the selling side, most of the sellers also disposed of their shares through charitable remainder trusts, ones Robin Taliaferro had structured, and that arrangement enabled them to minimize or defer capital gains tax too. Robin's client relationships reach into some of Silicon Valley's most high-profile technology companies. In San Jose, he advised the chief operating officer and director of Xilinx on $5 million of company stock. He counseled the CEO and director of Plantronics, based in Santa Cruz, on $7 million in restricted stock. Adobe Systems, also headquartered in San Jose, brought him a corporate officer, its vice president of software imaging and publishing, whose $20 million in Adobe stock and options he worked on.