Elton Sherwin

Elton B. Sherwin was a Senior Managing Director at Ridgewood Capital, where Ridgewood’s archived team page says he founded the firm’s Palo Alto office in 1999. Ridgewood Capital was part of The Ridgewood Companies and described itself as investing in high-growth energy technology companies, after earlier Ridgewood Venture Funds were formed in late 1998 to invest in early-stage technology and telecommunications companies.

Before Ridgewood, Sherwin established the West Coast office of Motorola Ventures. During his Motorola tenure, Ridgewood’s profile says he led investments in Online Anywhere, later sold to Yahoo!, and SnapTrack, later sold to Qualcomm. Earlier in his career, he spent about twenty years at IBM and Motorola in sales, marketing, and product management roles; Ridgewood states that products he developed won awards and that the U.S. Patent Office granted him eight patents.

Sherwin is also the author of *The Silicon Valley Way*, which Ridgewood described as being used by entrepreneurs and university programs around the world. Ridgewood’s 2009 profile said he was working on a second book, *Addicted to Energy: How to Save our Economy and Our Climate*, and that he was an occasional guest speaker on energy policy and entrepreneurship at Stanford University. He received a BA from the University of California at Berkeley.

• Ridgewood Capital’s stated focus was to “make investments in high-growth energy technology companies.”
• The firm said it looked for “leading cleantech companies with strong underlying value and growth prospects.”
• Ridgewood positioned itself as an active, value-added investor, saying it brought industry know-how and business relationships to portfolio companies and worked closely with management teams to create and maximize value.
• Ridgewood’s earlier venture funds focused on early-stage technology and telecommunications companies, primarily wireless, semiconductor, and software companies.
• Sherwin’s own background suggests a fit with technically complex product companies: Ridgewood highlighted his patents in networking, data compression, and speech recognition, plus experience developing and introducing high-tech products into emerging markets.
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