Stephen
E. Taylor -- Professional background
Steve is the Principal of Densefog Group LLC, which
is engaged in seed stage investing and family fiduciary management &
trusteeship. He is a current member and co-founder of SideCar Angels, in Cambridge, MA, and he serves as Founding
Publisher of The New Bedford Light.
Steve was co-founder & President of Boston
Globe Electronic Publishing (BGEP), publisher of Boston.com &
BostonGlobe.com during the first five years of those sites’ existence, and at
the same time had been Executive Vice President of the Boston Globe since 1993,
a position he held until January, 2001. He had been
Vice President of the Globe since 1991, and Business Manager since 1988. He
taught the elective course Economics and
Financing of Journalism in the MBA program at the Yale School of Management
(SOM) four times in recent years, focusing on how to finance good journalism in
a digital future.
Steve served as a director of Meridian Audio,
Ltd., a UK manufacturer of very high-end digital audio and home theater
products and software that was principally owned by members of his family until
2009. He is a past director of LaunchPad Ventures, a Boston-based seed stage
angel investor group.
At the Boston Globe for just over 20 years,
he was responsible for the newspaper’s operations, production, information
technology, and administrative services departments that collectively
represented about half of the Globe’s 2,500-person work force and a majority of the operating & capital budgets. In the
early 1990’s, he supervised the acquisition and construction of the Globe’s
automated insert production plant in addition to the printing plant for the New
York Times’ Northeast editions. Later, Steve was one of several Globe
executives who founded Boston.com, the largest regional news and information
site on the web.
Steve served on the board of directors of the
Globe Newspaper Company, which was a subsidiary of Affiliated Publications
prior to its acquisition by the New York Times Company in 1993. He is a trustee
of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution and a former director of the
Greater Boston Food Bank and of the American Press Institute in Reston,
Virginia.
Born in Cambridge, U.K. in 1951, Steve, who
is a U.S. citizen, graduated from Phillips Academy, Andover, in 1969 and
received a BA in psychology from Yale University in 1973. He has two sons, Max
Taylor (UVM ’11, now living and working in SE Massachsetts) and Conrad Taylor
(Boston College ’15, now living and working in SE Massachusetts).
Steve’s home, which he shares with his
partner, Joan Dalton, is in Dartmouth, MA.
Personal
info & sailing background
Steve was Rear Commodore (Boston Station) and a
member of the board of governors of the Cruising Club of America. He was
previously Secretary of the CCA and is a member of the New York Yacht Club and
the New Bedford Yacht Club, of which he is a past Treasurer.
Now an avid cruising sailor who has sailed
his sloop MERIDIAN from Massachusetts to Europe and back via the
Caribbean, Steve won several World, North American, & US National sailing
championships in the 420 and 505 classes in the 1970’s, including three world
championships in large fleets representing over 20 nations each time.
He was also a member of the US National
Sailing team in the 470 class during the 3-years leading up to the 1976 Olympic
Trials; and was the top-ranked boat on the US team in the Flying Dutchman class
in 1980, prior to President Carter’s boycott of the 1980 Olympic games in the
former Soviet Union.
During the late 1970’s, along with several
fellow members of the Yale sailing team, he was an original developer of the
Club 420, a rugged racing dinghy based on the International 420 design that is
now used extensively in inter-collegiate and inter-scholastic varsity racing
throughout North America. He worked in the marine industry as a sailmaker and
designer for North Sails prior to joining the Boston Globe in a 1980 career
change. He is a trustee and past Treasurer of the Yale Sailing Associates and
served on the executive committee of the U.S. Olympic Yachting Committee as an
athlete representative from 1980-1984. He served as coach of the US Women’s
National Sailing team in the summer of 1979, where the team finished second in
their World Championships.
Steve has long-standing family connections to
the sport of sailing. His maternal great-grandfather and grandfather, Edward Burgess and W. Starling Burgess, each designed three
successful defenders of the America’s Cup. His younger sister, Nell Taylor
Stuart, was U.S. Yachtswoman of the Year in 1979.