Walker Stapleton is the President and CEO of SonomaWest Holdings. Most recently, Mr. Stapleton was twice elected to serve as Treasurer of Colorado, holding the office from 2011 - 2019. He was also the Republican nominee for Governor of Colorado in 2018.
Mr. Stapleton led the effort to take SonomaWest from a publicly traded company, specializing in the processing and drying of produce, to a successful private real estate holdings company. Today, SonomaWest controls more than 750,000 SF of industrial warehouse and agricultural processing space in the wine growing region of Northern California and has the second largest wastewater storage capacity in Sonoma County.
Mr. Stapleton serves as a Director of Micro Precision LLC, a Compass Partners Capital portfolio company and served as a Director of AGRO Merchants Group, an Oaktree Capital Management portfolio company, until it was acquired by Americold for $1.74B in October 2020. He is also a Limited Partner in the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team.
Mr. Stapleton remains passionate about public service and serves on the Board of Directors for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Denver and the Denver Metro Council of the El Pomar Foundation. He was named a 2015 Hunt Keane Leadership Fellow and a Rodel Leadership Fellow by the Aspen Institute in 2014. Mr. Stapleton is also a strong supporter of music and the arts and has served as an advisor to the Tipitina’s Foundation and Trombone Shorty Foundation in New Orleans.
Mr. Stapleton holds a BA degree from Williams College, a graduate diploma in Business Economics from the London School of Economics, and an MBA from Harvard Business School.
He is an avid outdoorsman and loves to ski and watch baseball games with his wife Jenna and their three kids.