SUNDAY PROFILE - Nature, nurture inspire venture capitalist - With lawmaker parents, Tom Soto had politics in his blood. His job joins that with a love of the environment.
The political business was in his blood, but Tom Soto's heart was drawn to protecting California's natural beauty. So he has made his living melding the two.
Soto, the son of Assemblywoman and former state Sen. Nell Soto (D-Pomona) and the late state Sen. Phil Soto, has spent nearly two decades jumping among political appointments, business ventures and antipollution causes. At times he became a middleman between companies and environmentalists -- a tricky role that Soto says yielded important compromises but also put him at odds with parts of the environmental community.
"He's made a number of important contributions to improving the environment in California," says Mary Nichols, who worked with Soto when she was an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. Nichols, now chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, says Soto "has worked for some clients that had many opponents in the environmental world, and that certainly has made him less popular. . . . I think he's probably stepped on some toes."
Soto acknowledges the tension, but he says his goal was to face contentious issues with a dose of pragmatism.
"If I think it's good for the community, and moving forward with it brings improvements to quality of life and the environment, then I'm going to pursue it," Soto says. "But the key to life is the ability to not only stay disciplined and focused, but also to offer some degree of flexibility, because it's not going to go your way all the time."
Recently, Soto took that philosophy into the world of venture capital, where he hopes to continue his environmental bent by funding clean-technology companies involved in waste cleanup, waste reuse and "green" building materials.
As a managing partner of Los Angeles-based Craton Equity Partners, he helped raise $130 million in pension fund and private equity money and is reviewing clean-tech investments.
"We have all this realization about global warming and climate change, and now we need to commit capital to building companies that will help to mitigate and reverse the trend," Soto says.
Soto, 44, lives comfortably in Santa Monica Canyon. But his beginnings were much more modest.
"My parents were poor Mexicans from East Los Angeles," Soto says. His father was already a state lawmaker when Soto was born -- an event announced on the floor of the Legislature -- but the job was part-time, and Phil Soto had to support six kids, three dogs and a turtle named Charlie.
