Mac McQuown is an environmentalist and entrepreneur who has started more than a dozen companies in the financial services, technology, and California fine wine industries.

His financial career began on Wall Street in 1961, where he worked for Smith Barney & Co. until Wells Fargo Bank recruited him to San Francisco to serve as the director of the company’s internal “think tank” in 1964. In the following decade, he worked with colleagues to pioneer the use of data to analyze the stock market and create the first equity index funds. He also cofounded Wells Fargo Investment Advisors, which is now part of BlackRock, a financial planning and investment management firm.

Since leaving Wells Fargo in 1974, McQuown has consulted for numerous multi-national corporations and founded and built several companies in the finance and banking sector. Building on his quantitative work at Wells Fargo, he cofounded and became director of Dimensional Fund Advisors in 1981 to create “second generation” equity funds. In 1989, he cofounded and served as chairman of KMV, which provided corporate credit analytics to global financial companies before being sold to Moody’s in 2002. McQuown launched Diversified Credit Investments in 2004, a San-Francisco-based investment firm.

In 1995, McQuown and his wife, Leslie, cofounded Stone Edge Farm Estate Vineyards and Winery, which grows and produces Bordeaux-style red table wines, olive oil, and heirloom vegetables, and operates a private restaurant in Sonoma, California. A dedicated environmentalist with a desire to combat climate change, McQuown is leading his farm toward energy self-sufficiency. He also serves on the advisory council of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California at San Diego.

He graduated from Northwestern University with a BS in mechanical engineering in 1957, served as an officer in the U.S. Navy for two years, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1961.