What is Alsop Louie Partners?

Alsop Louie Partners is a partnership between Stewart Alsop and Gilman Louie designed to provide venture capital to the most promising entrepreneurs we can find. It is structured as a traditional limited partnership, where the partnership between Stewart and Gilman manages the investments of the firm and the investors are the limited partners.

Stewart and Gilman first met in 1985; it was their long relationship and friendship that led them to believe they would be good partners. We’ve taken to calling ourselves The Geek & The Gadfly; Gilman is very technical, a geek, and Stewart is well known for taking controversial positions in public, a gadfly. We work together to complement each other in these skills and that’s what makes our firm a true partnership.

What kind of investments does Alsop Louie Partners make?

Above all else, we are focused on identifying the most promising entrepreneurs. We are focused on working with entrepreneurs starting information technology companies: in traditional VC parlance, early stage technology investments. Within that sector, we would prefer to follow the instincts and experience of the entrepreneurs and invest in all kinds of technology-based ventures. We believe, however, that it is not the job of venture investors to fund companies that require large amounts of capital, more than $20M, to create a stable, validated business operation. So we’re much more interested in enterprises that don’t require much capital to prove their point and entrepreneurs who are more interested in creating more value than raising more venture capital.

Who is involved with Alsop Louie Partners?

Stewart Alsop 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. During that time, he also wrote a column for Fortune. Before he became an investor, Stewart was a business editor and pundit. He was Editor in Chief of InfoWorld, a weekly newspaper for information-technology professionals. He also published PC Letter, a fortnightly newsletter for computer industry insiders, and produced the Agenda and Demo conferences for executives of companies in the computer industry. Way back when he was young(er), he learned to be an editor at Inc. magazine, where he was executive editor.

Gilman Louie is the founder and former CEO of In-Q-Tel, a strategic venture fund created to help enhance national security by connecting the Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. intelligence community with venture-backed entrepreneurial companies. Previously Gilman built a career as a pioneer in the interactive entertainment industry, with accomplishments that include the design and development of the Falcon F-16 flight simulator as well as being the person who licensed Tetris, the world’s most popular computer game, from its developers in the Soviet Union. During that career, Gilman founded and ran a company called Spectrum Holobyte which ultimately was acquired by Hasbro Corporation, where he served as chief creative officer of Hasbro Interactive and general manager of the Games.com group.

Nancy Lee is our Chief Financial Officer and a partner. She is a veteran bean counter for venture capital firms, having spent 20 years with Walden International, a firm with a long and distinguished history and multiple funds in North America and Asia. Her job is to keep Gilman and Stewart out of trouble and help our investors make the most of their investment.

Patty Wong is our Office Manager. Once you figure out how to get to our office (see Contact), you will meet Patty and find out why she is the best office manager we could hope for! She came to us from the accounts department of Macy’s. But her critical skills were acquired when she was Executive Director of the Friends of Alamo School Foundation, where she raised money for the school and managed to keep parents, supporters, teachers and administrators happy.

John Hawksley is an Associate. We were introduced to him through his brief stint as a Campus Associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, from which he graduated in June, 2008 with bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (and a minor in Economics). While he was doing his studies at MIT, he also interned at Citigroup and Google, researched the complexity of the game Monopoly, and served as historian of the hapa club. We liked him so much, we asked him to move to San Francisco and work with us full time.

Jim Ward is a Venture Partner and is on the board of directors of Alamofire, an Alsop Louie Partners portfolio company. Jim is the former president of LucasArts, the videogame division of LucasFilm Ltd, where he was also the senior vice president of marketing, distribution and online. Before he joined LucasFilm in 1997, he spent his career in advertising where he worked closely with Apple Computer, Microsoft and then Nike over a period of 15 years.

Corey Reese is a Venture Associate. He graduated from University of California, Berkeley, with a bachelor’s degree in business management in 2007. We first hired him as our Campus Associate at Berkeley in the fall of 2006; he was so good that we hired him full time when he graduated in 2007. After six months working with the firm, he joined one of our portfolio companies as Director, Business Development.

What is your Campus Associate program?

We really like working with young people. Gilman and Stewart have been around for a long time, more than 25 years each in the computer industry. We find that working with people that are at least two decades younger than us keeps us honest since they think differently than we do and aren’t inhibited by their still-limited experience. So we designed what we call our Campus Associate program to keep us plugged into campuses where young people are working on interesting new ideas and technologies.

We find an undergraduate on campus who has a natural ability to socialize with all of the groups and classes and ask them to highlight any new companies forming up or any particularly interesting students. Our first Campus Associate was Corey Reese at UC Berkeley, who led us to Redux in December 2006. He’s been replaced by Eli Chait. And we’ve started working with students at other campuses.

Eli Chait is a Campus Associate at University of California, Berkeley where he’s a senior and intends to get a combined bachelor’s degree in operations research and business management. Eli is the son of entrepreneurs, who own and manage several chains of restaurants in southern California. He started an award winning robotics team in high school, then went to work for a social networking site based in Los Angeles. In San Francisco he joined UBS Wealth Management where he worked for a top Bay Area financial advisor before joining us.

How do entrepreneurs get you to invest in their company?

We’d prefer to hear about your company from someone else, preferably more than one other person. But we also want to know about your venture before anyone else knows about it! (Who said venture capitalists were rational?) We don’t want to compete with every other venture firm to invest in your business (since 90% of them have a lot more money than we do), so it’s kind of a conundrum about how to get us to invest in your company. Here are some clues:

* We love big ideas. It’s hard to start new companies, so why the heck even think about it unless you have something worth the customer’s time and money?

* We care a whole lot more about customers than service providers, incumbents, pundits, journalists, and anyone else involved in supporting the evolution of new companies.

* We believe that passion, authority and prior success are the best indicators of potential in entrepreneurs, not whether they’ve started or worked in a bunch of venture-backed companies.

So all you need to do to get us interested in investing is get your customers interested in a big idea that is important to them and then show us that you know and understand how to be successful. It’s easy!

Where is Alsop Louie located?

Our office is in downtown San Francisco. Both Gilman and Stewart live in San Francisco.