Louis Rossetto

Louis Rossetto
Louis Rossetto in May of 2017
Born	(1949-06-06) June 6, 1949 (age 68) Long Island, New York, United States of America
Residence	Berkeley, California, United States of America
Alma mater	Columbia University
Known for	Wired magazine, TCHO, Entrepreneurship
Relatives	Jane Metcalfe (life partner)

Louis Rossetto is an Italian-American writer, editor, and entrepreneur. He is best known as the founder and former editor-in-chief / publisher of Wired magazine. He was also the first investor and the former CEO of TCHO chocolate company. In 2017, p98a berlin is publishing his second novel, Change is Good.

Louis Rossetto was born and grew up on Long Island, New York in an Italian-American family. He went to Columbia University as an undergraduate and later returned for an MBA. Rossetto is life-partners with Jane Metcalfe and they are the parents of Zoe Metcalfe and Orson Rossetto.

In 1971, while a senior in college, he appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Magazine as co-author with Stan Lehr of "Libertarianism, The New Right Credo," one of the first articles about the emerging Libertarian movement. In 1974, he wrote a novel called Take-Over, released by controversial publisher Lyle Stuart. Take-Over posited a counterfactual history: instead of resigning during the Watergate crisis, Richard Nixon launched a coup d’etat. In 1976, Rossetto ghost edited a new journalism book called Ultimate Porno about the making of Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s film Caligula.

In 1985, he joined CBC reporter Richard Evans to report on the Aghanistan war for ABC News. Rossetto’s subsequent articles for the Christian Science Monitor and newsweeklies Elseviers in the Netherlands and Panorama in Italy were among the first to pinpoint the war's turning point, when the mujahideen first put the Russians on the defensive that was ultimately to push them out of Afghanistan.

In 1986, Rossetto joined the staff of Amsterdam-based INK Taalservice, a high-tech translation company serving the new PC industry. INK launched an English-language magazine with Rossetto as editor called Language Technology, which covered the burgeoning the technologies used to process language — from PCs to machine translation to networks. The first issue of Language Technology was designed by leading edge Dutch graphic designer Max Kisman, and was the first issue of any magazine to be created with desktop publishing software, in this case ReadySetGo, which Rossetto had carried back from its introduction at that year's San Francisco MacWorld exhibition. During his time at Language Technology, Rossetto was a consultant to the European Community on language industry issues.