Steve Denning

Steven A. Denning was a founding leader of General Atlantic, joining as the firm’s second investment professional and serving as CEO from 1995 to 2007 and as Chairman Emeritus beginning in 2021. Steve helped shape General Atlantic from its earliest days with a singular conviction: that the best investing is done in genuine partnership with entrepreneurs. His mission was to back exceptional management teams building high-growth businesses and to help them scale into market leaders. Over more than four decades, he was central to building General Atlantic into one of the world’s leading growth investing firms. Beyond General Atlantic, Steve served on the Board of Trustees of Stanford University from 2004 to 2017, including as Chairman from 2012 to 2017. Earlier in his career, he worked at McKinsey & Company and served six years as an officer in the U.S. Navy.

He received an M.B.A. from Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1978. Prior to business school, Denning served for six years in the U.S. Navy, where he also earned an M.S. degree from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He received a B.S. from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1970, and an honorary doctorate in 2019.

Denning was chairman of the Board of Trustees of Stanford University and Co-Chair of the Board of Directors of The Nature Conservancy (TNC). He was emeritus chairman of the Stanford Graduate School of Business Advisory Council, and a lifelong trustee of The Brookings Institution, the American Museum of Natural History and the Georgia Tech Foundation. Denning was a trustee of the National Parks Conservation Society. He was a life member and former member of the board of the Council on Foreign Relations. He was also a member of the board of the McKinsey Investment Office Advisory Council, the Georgia Tech Foundation and National Advisory Board, the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University Advisory Board, the Cancer Research Institute, and the Connecticut Science Center.