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 serves as a Board Member of The New Bedford Light, having been its Founding Publisher.

 

He 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) between 2007-2012, focusing on how to finance good journalism in a digital future.

 

He 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.

 

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 former 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, he 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-2011) and Conrad Taylor (Boston College-2015). 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 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 past trustee and former 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.

 

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.