STEVE REID
Editor & Publisher
sreid@lbknews.com
We have all witnessed how information technology has evolved in our lifetimes, surpassing perhaps any past achievement in human history. It is incomprehensible that today, people can find 50 dates in 10 minutes or read any newspaper across the globe instantly. When someone wants to buy or sell a car, they no longer call a classified ad department; the listing is blasted across multiple platforms.
But it wasn’t always like this. When former Washington Post Company President Alan Spoon started his career in the heyday of print journalism, newspapers blanketed every corner, information was devoured over morning coffee, and the world moved at what now looks like a snail chasing a turtle.
Today, the intersection of education, news delivery, political discourse, dating, and financial investment all come together in our hands as we stare at our screens. Is the wave of technology that moved us away from daily newspapers 30 years ago the crest, the trough, or simply the beginning of a new tsunami?
For Spoon, who sat in front of a rapt audience of mostly-former business executives in the tennis center of the Longboat Key Club this past week, the narrative of his life came into clear focus. It is a story of continuous adaptation. Alan Spoon is a man who didn’t just witness the digital revolution; he architected major pillars of it—from the fraught, transitionary boardroom of the Washington Post Company to the high-stakes world of venture capital, and ultimately to the highest governance levels of the Smithsonian Institution and MIT.
The Sailboat and Early Currents
Long before the words “venture capitalist” were ever uttered, a young Alan Spoon looked at an MIT course catalog. On the cover was a picture of a racing sailboat. That single image attracted him to the school, where he earned degrees in science and management and eventually became captain of the MIT sailing team.
The sailboat cutting deftly through the sunlit waves is an apt metaphor for Spoon. He is a man who navigates swift currents and winds he cannot control, but always with a sail, a rudder, a clear direction, and a relentless strategy.
“I’ve had a career that is long and meandering, but you can pull a thread through it,” said Spoon.
Lean at 74, Spoon possesses an intense gaze that occasionally surveils the room before fixing its attention sharply on his listeners. His early trajectory was anything but conventional. “I never went to law school to be a lawyer,” remarked Spoon, who earned his J.D. with honors from Harvard Law in 1976 and once sat beside Mitt Romney in a constitutional law class. Instead, he took his analytical gifts to The Boston Consulting Group (BCG). Utilizing early computing tools for data-driven strategy, he rose to become a remarkably young partner by age 29.
The First Command: The Washington Post and the Oracle
Spoon’s trajectory shifted globally in 1982 when he was recruited to join The Washington Post Company as vice president for new business development. Upon his arrival, he recalled how legendary publisher Katharine “Kay” Graham had a large round table in her dining room—a deliberate choice to foster collaborative discussion rather than the implied optics of a long rectangular table with a throne at the end.
Spoon was seated, and next to him was Warren Buffett.
“I could tell he was from another galaxy,” Spoon quickly realized, noting Buffett’s unparalleled judgment and clarity. He would later call Buffett the most important business influence in his life.
Spoon rose rapidly. As President of Newsweek from 1989 to 1991, he led the magazine to its strongest financial year on record. Eventually, as President and COO of the entire Post corporation, he oversaw newspapers, broadcasting, and education services like Kaplan. At the time, print media was a cash cow.
“Newspapers were making a ton of money,” Spoon noted, recalling an era of massive print optics—Gulf War, Princess Di, Monica Lewinsky, etc.
But Spoon, ever looking at the horizon, had a “eureka” moment. Drawing on his early tech exposure at MIT and his bold corporate investments in early cellular telephone networks, he realized the days of analog print media were rapidly nearing their end. He was agonizingly aware of the tectonic shift before most of his peers.
Spoon recalled of the early 1990s that as AOL was coming on, he would go to the movies and see films like Sleepless in Seattle where email was going back and forth. He remembered that while everybody else was laughing, he was suffering.
Cannibalizing the Core: The Pain of Transition
Traditional media executives and many journalists at the time viewed the emerging internet as a cannibalizing threat. Spoon’s instincts were the exact opposite.
“I want us to be the ones to cannibalize ourselves,” Spoon reacted.
He knew the financial pillars of the newspaper industry were beginning to crumble. The numbers would soon become staggering: newspaper industry revenue was destined to slide from a record $49.4 billion in 2005 to just $22.3 billion by 2012. The Post’s own print circulation would tumble from a 1993 peak of 832,332 down to 447,000.
Looking at the business outlook, Spoon famously compared the newspaper industry’s trajectory to looking down a staircase at a landing, trying to decide what condition the paper should be in to arrive there in good shape. He mused at the time about what would happen if the staircase was actually a spiral one without any landing.
To survive the spiral, Spoon and CEO Donald Graham changed gears in 1995, pivoting hard to an ad-supported Web model. Spoon noted back then that while the Post was winning the county track meet, the Olympics lay ahead.
He worked aggressively to push the Post’s online platform. Recognizing the necessary cultural separation between old-guard print journalism and the rapidly emerging digital future, he moved the internet operation out to Virginia, architecting the launch of washingtonpost.com.
Spoon knew that classified ads were a massive driver of newspaper profits—sometimes up to 75% of the bottom line. Anticipating the cliff, in partnership with other major newspaper companies, he spearheaded the creation of Cars.com and Apartments.com long before Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace could siphon off the industry’s lifeblood.
Reflecting on those grueling transition years, Spoon previously stated that the Post was early, noting that the board gave him and Don license to build for the Internet. He acknowledged that they lost a lot of money on the way, but was thankful they did because it allowed them to build a platform early.
The Unthinkable Call
Years after Spoon had left to pursue venture capital, Donald Graham reached a breaking point with the spiral staircase. The Post was losing its local advertising monopoly, and Graham quietly began shopping the paper to billionaires.
Before the public knew anything, Graham picked up the phone and called his trusted former president.
Graham asked Spoon if he was sitting down before confessing he was thinking the unthinkable: selling the family’s crown jewel.
When Jeff Bezos ultimately purchased The Washington Post for $250 million, he didn’t just buy a print newspaper. He bought the digital runway Spoon had fought so hard to build.
“By the time I left the Post, it was a central part of the business, and that is what Bezos bought,” Spoon told the Longboat Key audience, noting that today, in an interesting contrast, a massive portion of the New York Times digital subscribers are paying for recipes and games, not just news.
Spoon’s prediction of a fragmented digital future had come entirely true.
Many years ago, Spoon prophesied about the modern media landscape, noting that when the tiles came back together, it wasn’t going to look like a painting with just three colors inside a given frame; rather, it was going to be different for every person.
The Second Command: Venture Capital and Global Scaling
In 2000, Spoon had left his media post to become Managing General Partner at Polaris Partners, entering his second leadership chapter as a venture capitalist. He was highly sought after in the marketplace precisely because of his digital foresight.
At Polaris, together with his VC partners, he began funding the very companies that would disrupt legacy industries across tech, healthcare, and life sciences. Polaris’ track record was very strong—with scores of exits and dozens of IPOs. Among his investments, Spoon backed Phreesia, which revolutionized patient intake before going public. He also invested heavily in LegalZoom, a company that fundamentally altered how everyday people create legal documents, effectively putting immense pressure on traditional law firms.
“LegalZoom was like a PT boat attacking an aircraft carrier,” Spoon said with a smile.
Along the way, Spoon served on outside company boards such as Match Group (changing the way the world dates), Danaher (global diagnostics and drug discovery tools), and Fortive (precision test, measurement and sterilization tools).
Guarding the Past: The Battle for the Smithsonian
Today, Spoon remains as busy as ever, balancing a deep passion for history with a front-row seat to the future. A self-described “museum rat,” his impact on American culture is profound. Having served as Regent and former Vice Chairman of the Smithsonian Institution’s Board of Regents, Spoon co-chaired an inaugural capital campaign that raised a staggering $1.88 billion to preserve the nation’s artifacts.
But when speaking of the Smithsonian in that small room at the Tennis Gardens, Spoon’s eyes lit up, and his usual intensity took on a fierce concern. He spoke passionately of his love for unaltered history, free from transient political agendas—and the very real, modern threats to that preservation.
Spoon pointed specifically to today’s fraught dynamics on the Smithsonian’s Board of Regents, whose statutory members include the Chief Justice of the United States. He highlighted the inherent tensions faced by the Regents—whether it’s navigating personnel decisions, deciding whether to display a politically tinged painting, or managing international dust-ups related to the National Zoo’s role in foreign policy, the world’s largest museum complex is increasingly impacted by executive branch directives.
This modern political landscape is exactly why Spoon alluded to the fear many hold of the intentional rewriting of museum captions in an attempt to sanitize or optimize history for a specific interpretive view. He noted that concerned historians have even begun photographing captions before they can be altered. True history, he argued, must include the darkest hours—like Thomas Jefferson owning slaves and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan—alongside the points of light.
“It fails a logical test,” Spoon said of the attempts to sanitize the past. “You can’t talk about progress if you don’t know where you’re coming from.”
Embracing the Billion-Dollar Future
Yet, even as he guards the past, his eyes are locked on tomorrow. As a Life Member of the MIT Corporation, he helped launch edX to bring elite education to the masses and established the MIT Sandbox Innovation Fund for student entrepreneurs. But his focus has increasingly zeroed in on the next great technological frontier.
Spoon is deeply embedded in MIT’s staggering $1 billion commitment to address the global opportunities and challenges presented by the rise of artificial intelligence. It marks the single largest investment in computing and AI by any American academic institution. At the heart of this endeavor is the MIT Stephen A. Schwarzman College of Computing, made possible by a $350 million foundational gift from Schwarzman, the chairman, CEO, and co-founder of Blackstone. Spoon, who serves on the board for the College, pointed out how AI is front and center on the minds of MIT faculty and administration in thinking about future education and basic research.
He is heavily involved in the cutting edge of science that this technology accelerates. He spoke of the rapid evolution of, for example, digital pathology, where diagnoses that once took weeks can now be done instantly and more accurately.
But the room grew entirely still when he spoke of the profound human impact of these investments: the gene-editing breakthroughs of CRISPR.
Billion-Dollar Tech at the Human Scale
Spoon spoke of a little boy named Kieran Joseph Muldoon—Baby KJ. Born in August 2024 with a rare, fatal metabolic disorder called CPS1 deficiency, the infant’s liver was unable to break down toxic ammonia. It was effectively a death sentence. Yet, in under seven months, scientists developed a bespoke, customized CRISPR base-editing therapy. Administered via lipid nanoparticles when KJ was just seven and eight months old, the treatment rewrote his genetic destiny.
By early 2025, Baby KJ was showing promising recovery, tolerating protein, and surviving common childhood illnesses—a historic landmark for “on-demand” personalized medicine. The connection to Spoon’s world is undeniable: the underlying base-editing technology that made this miracle possible was developed by researchers at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Polaris was an originating investor in CRISPR technology. Danaher, where Spoon is a board member, was a crucial part of the Baby KJ team providing timely diagnostics, logistics, and treatments.
“What’s most on my mind is AI,” Spoon told the quiet, attentive Longboat Key room. “Every board I’m involved in is adopting tech. It’s like flooding water. You can’t stop it. AI is amoral, not immoral. I hope the better angels will direct it and use it rather than the bad angels.”
Looking back at the doors that opened in his long, intense career—from anticipating the digital cliff at The Washington Post to funding climate architecture research and life-saving genetics—Spoon offered a final piece of familiar wisdom to the crowd:
“Luck is when preparation and purpose meet opportunity.”
As he spoke, looking a bit younger than his 74 years, his eyes darted excitedly. He looked like a man who doesn’t just wake up at the top of a curve, but one who is perpetually trying to see over the horizon, always looking into the distance, positioning like a sailing captain with an instinct to capture the wind.
