About Us

Ed Johnson
Ed Johnson
Ed Johnson is President & Chief Executive Officer of Beechtree Ventures, Inc., a private investment company. Beechtree's primary investment focus is in companies applying new technologies to the delivery of professional information, educational materials and training. Johnson currently serves on the boards of directors of several companies in which he has an investment interest, and is an active member of the San Francisco Bay Area Band of Angels.

Until 1996, Johnson was a Senior Vice President and Sector Executive with the Times Mirror Company, a Los Angeles-based information and media company. As Sector Executive, Johnson had full strategic, operational and P&L responsibility for Times Mirror's $1.1 billion professional information and book publishing sector. The sector included Matthew Bender (legal information), Mosby-Yearbook (health sciences), Jeppesen Sanderson (flight information), Richard D. Irwin and William C. Brown (college publishing), CRC Press (scientific publishing), and Times Mirror Training (skills training).

During Johnson's tenure, the sector grew dramatically through a combination of internal development, over 40 line-extending acquisitions, international expansion and conversion of print products to computer-based and electronic forms of delivery. After Johnson's departure, Times Mirror's strategic focus shifted back to newspapers and magazines; consequently, all companies in the sector have been sold for approximately $4.5 billion, generating after-tax gains of more than $2 billion. (In June 2000, the no-longer-diversified Times Mirror Company was itself acquired by the Tribune Company.)

Earlier Times Mirror assignments included supervision of the Company's $300 million consumer and trade magazine publishing group, and as Vice President Planning & Development, leading a major restructuring in the mid-1980s that redeployed more than $1 billion from non-strategic into core businesses.

Prior to joining Times Mirror in 1984, Johnson was with the American Can Company in Greenwich, Connecticut, where he last served as Vice President, Operations of American Can International. In this role, he had direct P&L responsibility for seven companies with aggregate sales of $145 million in Japan, Canada, Venezuela, Brazil, France, the Philippines and Korea.

Still earlier in his career, Johnson was a member of the Executive Office of the President of the United States in President Ford's administration. Prior to his Washington experience, he was a management consultant with McKinsey & Company in San Francisco and overseas.

Johnson holds a bachelor of science degree cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and an MBA with distinction from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Johnson retains strong ties to both Rensselaer and Stanford, having served on Rensselaer's Board of Trustees, and on advisory boards at both universities. He currently serves on the Board of Harvey Mudd College, one of the Claremont colleges.