Stephen Taylor is a corporate executive, entrepreneur, inventor, and author who has spent more than four decades building things that didn't exist before — inside large companies and outside of them.
He bootstrapped Firefly Magic Firefly Lights with his late wife Kimberley from their living room — a business that grew to ship internationally, appear on HGTV, Animal Planet, National Geographic, and the DIY Network, and be commissioned by Walt Disney Imagineering, the Bellagio, the Columbus Zoo, and the Juilliard School. Their lights were used by Bill Gates during a TED talk. Martha Stewart installed them in her own home. The company was sold a decade after its first order.
Before Firefly Magic, he spent decades inside the corporate world — rising from telephone installer to Director of International Business Development in the semiconductor industry, leading a global division responsible for expanding the company's business across markets worldwide. He also developed the Graphic Systems Television Network during his years at 3M, and held franchise ownership of a Häagen-Dazs store along the way. His corporate career ended the way many do — he lost his Director role to a corporate merger, laid off three weeks before receiving his master's degree. That layoff became the circumstance that led, eventually, to Firefly Magic and everything after it.
He has written and successfully prosecuted two utility patents pro se — a third was filed on his eighty-second birthday.
A circuitous education.
He holds a Master of Arts in International Management from the University of Texas at Dallas School of Management. But the real education, by his own account, happened in the circuitous stretches — as a telephone installer, as a corporate intrapreneur, as a franchise owner, as an inventor who taught himself patent law at the kitchen table, through earning his master's degree at fifty-six.
He traces his Mayflower ancestry through Henry Samson, who arrived in 1620. The family's long American story — which his brother Donald Taylor has documented in a four-volume genealogical series also published by University Extension Press — is the backdrop against which his own memoir sits.
The series and the voice.
Every book in The Circuitous Path: series carries the same premise: the most interesting paths are rarely the direct ones. The memoir that opens the series — Through Entrepreneurship — is the foundational text. The forthcoming A Bootstrapper's AI Advantage brings the same hard-won, first-person perspective to a subject the author is actively living: what it means to bootstrap a business in the age of artificial intelligence.
The voice across the series is consistent — direct, unsentimental, warm. Not business theory from a classroom. Not inspirational pabulum. Wisdom earned in the doing of things, offered plainly to readers who are in the middle of doing their own.
Wife of thirty-six years. Co-founder of Firefly Magic. Educator. Lover of Music. Blackjack dealer at Harrah's who earned her business degree at forty. The quiet standard against which everything else was measured. Every book in this series carries her fingerprints — and the memoir that opens it is our story, not only mine.
The present.
Stephen Taylor writes from a six-acre hilltop in Fallbrook, California, where panoramic valley views provide the working backdrop for everything he does. He continues to invent, continues to write, continues to follow whatever curiosity turns up next. He describes himself as a "racehorse" not born to stand in a barn but to run — a person who thinks across many simultaneous projects — and as an INFJ-A whose perfectionism he now understands as an expression of a deep desire to help others.
The work of the next decade is The Circuitous Path: series, the ongoing stewardship of University Extension Press, and the Kimberley and Stephen Taylor Entrepreneurial Endowment and the Kimberley Taylor Music-Entrepreneur Fellowship at Hillsdale College's Hutchison Center for Commerce and Freedom — a legacy project that will carry the values of this body of work forward long after the books are finished.
The facts.
- Born
- May 1944
- Based
- Fallbrook, California
- Education
- MA, International Management, University of Texas at Dallas
- Ancestry
- Mayflower descendant (Henry Samson, 1620)
- Patents
- Two utility patents and one design patent, all written and filed pro se
- Publisher
- University Extension Press
- Series
- The Circuitous Path:
- Foundation
- The Taylor Entrepreneurial Endowment, Hillsdale College