Stewart Alsop
Stewart is a partner at Alsop Louie Partners. He spent the first 20 years of his professional career as a business journalist and commentator. It did not start well: he earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Occidental College in Los Angeles in 1975, but had to stay the summer to complete his credits. Then he couldn’t find a job, so he went to bartending school. But bars weren’t hiring. He persisted and, from 1975 to 1996, had a series of jobs in which he learned how to be a business editor, including Executive Editor of Inc. Magazine, where he became fascinated by both entrepreneurship and personal computers and as the third editor of InfoWorld, the job that got him moved from Boston to Silicon Valley in 1983.
In 1985, having been fired from two jobs, he started his own business, a newsletter called P.C. Letter, which became widely read in the executive ranks of the major hardware and software companies that formed and grew the personal computer industry. He also started two conferences, Agenda and Demo and published the “Social Register to the PC Industry”.
In 1996, Stewart changed careers to become a venture capitalist, joining New Enterprise Associates, a top-tier venture capital firm with a long track record of success in investing in early stage and growth companies. He was a general partner with New Enterprise Associates and led that firm’s investments in companies such as TiVo, Portola Communications (sold to Netscape), Netcentives, Glu Mobile, and Xfire. From 1996 to 2003, he wrote Alsop On InfoTech for Fortune.
Stewart left NEA in 2005 and invited Gilman Louie to become his partner in a new venture capital firm designed to put to use everything the partners had learned about entrepreneurship, technology and innovation over the prior 25 years. From 2005-2013, Stewart was a member of the board of directors of Sonos Inc., which has become a thought leader in the world of digital audio and the digital living room.