Charting your course to success.

As the leader of Madeira Ventures LLC, Steve guides and mentors emerging businesses to grow and better implement their cutting-edge ideas. He brings experience in the global business world as a CEO, entrepreneur, and consultant to businesses. He has twice been a member of executive teams that developed business plans from concept to billion-dollar enterprises. He was an SVP and CHRO for the private equity firm, Knowledge Universe. His portfolio included Productivity Point, Miavita, LeapFrog, and COO for Affinity Squared, the parent of Vistage. His early career included a senior executive role with the launch of the video game company SEGA, he was with Coopers & Lybrand’s Venture Capital practice, and with the European operations of Levi Strauss & Co. He has served on eleven corporate Boards and nine community Boards. With his deep and broad expertise, he has successfully started several diverse businesses that proactively serve in the community they operate. Currently, he is a Board Adviser to the Universal Support Foundation and Board of Director for Meriwest, a 2-Billion financial institution. Steve is Chairman of the Board and of Qathex, a medical device startup. His current Board responsibilities are shaped in part by his passion for mentoring firms with diverse leadership and vastly improving the delivery of healthcare on a global scale. As a life-long learner, he received his MBA from the University of South Carolina, is a Harvard GBS Advanced Board-Certified Corporate Director, a frequent attendee of executive programmes of Oxford University, and he is a CPA and a SHRM certified Global Practitioner of Human Resources. Steve is an educator and mentor to students both inside and outside the classroom and is the author of his own curriculum on entrepreneurship, The 86400 Program. Formerly, Entrepreneur-in-Residence for Dominican University, a lecturer at the College of Engineering, University of California Berkeley, Center for Entrepreneurship, Adjunct Professor of Graduate Accounting and Ethics, St. Mary’s College of California, and mentor with John F. Kennedy University Institute of Entrepreneurial Leadership. Currently, he is an Adjunct Professor of Business at Ohlone College. His research interests include the study of the conative faculty of the mind as a predictor of entrepreneurship skills.