NORTH : Who

Alex Bernstein, Managing Partner

Whether wearing a jersey for a billion dollar mega-corporation, a garage-sized start up venture, or an NFL team, Alex has relentlessly focused on business strategy, data driven decision making, business planning, and operational execution.

Prior to the conception of North, Alex checked out of the NFL and started using his head for more than just a battering ram (always a far better student than an athlete) as an executive and investor in various technology and media ventures. His past academic success, passion for learning, and the absence of repeated concussions, has led to senior management roles at a handful of high-profile entertainment and technology ventures.

Most recently Alex served as Senior Vice President of Corporate & Business Development at Virgin Digital, a new media technology venture of Richard Branson’s global Virgin empire. For Virgin, Alex built a portfolio of strategic software, hardware, content, and distribution partnerships designed to enable rapid, highly-efficient growth for the Virgin platform in both the UK and US markets. Before joining Virgin and almost two full years before iTunes launched, Alex co-founded a digital music company called Echo. Echo was a collaborative development platform for a digital media distribution system which was both politically backed and funded by the industry leaders in media retail including: Best Buy, Virgin, Borders, Tower Records, TransWorld Entertainment, Hastings, and Wherehouse. Prior to Echo Alex worked in business development roles with both enterprise software providers and the system integrators who carry the unwieldy task of implementing these massive enterprise solutions across large groups of corporate users.

Over the past 11 years Alex has completed the Harvard Business School executive education program on entrepreneurship, closed dozens of strategic partnerships, mergers, and private equity placements, got married and had two kids, spent four seasons as a backup center/guard in the NFL, re-capitalized a failed dot com, graduated from Amherst College, and pancaked NFL All-Pro Linebacker Ray Lewis. (In Ray's defense it was in practice when he probably wasn't going 100%, but I'm still counting it.)

NEXT: David Brody, Managing Partner