Scott Hart remembers a peculiar problem with hiring at the young StepStone. Candidates wanted to join. The people interviewing them sometimes felt obliged to point out the drawbacks. Money was scarce. Clients were few. The firm was still taking shape. In an industry accustomed to selling confidence, this was an unusually candid recruitment pitch.
Hart joined in 2007 as a senior associate. Fifteen years later, he became sole chief executive. Between those two appointments came a London office, a partnership, a co-investment business, shared leadership with Monte Brem, and a public listing. The progression makes a tidy résumé. Living through it involved accepting a much less tidy proposition: an established career could be exchanged for a company whose future remained unwritten.
The recruiting memory supplies a useful way into his story. It captures the distance between choosing an organization and inheriting one, between the promise made to an early employee and the responsibilities that employee eventually takes on. Hart has occupied both sides of that bargain.
“We have no money, we have very few clients, and we’re just getting started.”
Scott Hart, recalling StepStone’s early recruiting conversations, 2022
A finance degree, then the work beneath the deal
Before StepStone, there was Notre Dame. Hart studied there from 1999 to 2003, earning a BBA in finance and business economics, summa cum laude. His early professional path took him to Morgan Stanley and then TPG Capital. These were places where a young investor could learn how a transaction is assembled, examined, financed, and eventually unwound.
At Morgan Stanley, where he worked from 2003 to 2005, he was an analyst in the consumer and retail investment banking group. At TPG, from 2005 to 2007, his work covered investment evaluation, execution, and monitoring. His sector experience included consumer businesses, retail, and energy.
Those assignments give his later career a practical foundation. Buying a company involves a thesis about what it can become. Financing it involves a thesis about what it can withstand. Monitoring it requires returning to both arguments after the transaction has lost its novelty. A spreadsheet is wonderfully agreeable until the business starts supplying its own answers.
The July 2007 announcement of Hart’s arrival at StepStone placed him among five new investment-team hires. All would work in research and due diligence. It also recorded a connection beyond finance: he was then on the leadership board of the Joy of Sports Foundation, which used sports to teach life skills to children facing disadvantage.
His initial StepStone title matters. He arrived to do investment work inside an emerging organization. The chief executive role would come through successive responsibilities, rather than appearing on his first business card.
- 2007Joins StepStone as senior associate
- 2011Helps open the London office
- 2013Becomes a partner
- 2019Named co-chief executive
- 2022Becomes sole chief executive
London was a job, not a pin on a map
In 2011, Hart helped open StepStone’s London office. He lived in London for a period while helping launch the European business. It is the sort of career detail that can disappear into the phrase “global expansion,” which makes the whole exercise sound as easy as ordering another set of letterheads.
Opening an overseas operation puts a different set of questions in front of an investor. Who needs the service? Which relationships need attention? How does a firm become useful in a market where it is still establishing itself? Hart’s London assignment added organization building to a career already grounded in evaluating companies.
The geographical move also fits the work he would continue doing with major international clients. A private-markets portfolio belongs to a particular investor, with particular obligations. Institutions do not acquire the same needs simply because they invest in the same asset class. Serving them requires a sense of the whole portfolio and an understanding of the people responsible for it.
Hart’s career kept that client work alongside investing. When he became co-CEO in 2019, the announcement emphasized relationships with some of StepStone’s earliest and largest clients. The appointment joined together activities that can look separate from a distance: finding investments, keeping clients’ confidence, and building the organization that supports both.
The investor beside the investor
Hart became a partner in 2013 and served as co-head of private equity co-investments from 2013 to 2019. He later led private equity from 2017 to 2025. Co-investment is an especially revealing part of that history because it brings the allocator closer to an individual transaction.
In a fund investment, an investor commits capital to a manager’s portfolio. In a co-investment, capital goes alongside a manager into a specific investment. A secondary transaction provides another route, through buying an existing investment interest. The three approaches answer different questions about exposure, timing, and access.
They also require different kinds of judgment. Confidence in a manager is one consideration; confidence in a particular company and its price is another. An existing interest comes with its own history. Combining these approaches in a portfolio calls for more than enthusiasm about an asset class.
That distinction helps explain why Hart’s co-investment experience belongs near the center of his story. It sits at the intersection of manager relationships and transaction analysis. The investor has to understand the person across the table and the asset being offered. A reassuring handshake cannot complete the arithmetic.
A handover with an overlap
In August 2019, Hart became co-CEO alongside StepStone founding partner Monte Brem. Brem described him as one of the first employees the firm had hired. The arrangement gave Hart a formal role in overseeing management and strategic direction while retaining the founder’s involvement.
Two consequential events followed during their shared tenure. StepStone went public in September 2020. In September 2021, it acquired Greenspring Associates, adding to its venture and growth capabilities. These were changes to the organization Hart would soon lead alone, with new public shareholders and a broader investment business.
The listing also supplied an unusual ceremonial moment. On September 16, 2020, Brem and Hart rang Nasdaq’s closing bell in a virtual celebration with the company’s team joining remotely from across the country. The company entered the public market; the bell-ringing party had to travel through a screen.
Hart became sole CEO on January 1, 2022. Brem became executive chairman. Their period of joint leadership had lasted more than two years, giving the transition an overlap rather than a single abrupt change. The arrangement reflected a stated ambition to build an organization that could last for generations.
For Hart, the handover made a familiar organization newly his responsibility. The work he had helped develop became part of a larger task: keeping investment activity, client relationships, and the firm’s direction connected as its ownership and capabilities changed.
Numbers need names on the columns
By June 30, 2026, StepStone reported $245.4 billion in assets under management and $667.9 billion under advisement. Together, those amounted to roughly $913 billion of total capital responsibility. The labels are essential. Advice and management describe different relationships with capital; combining them without explanation produces an impressive number and an unhelpful picture.
The distinction suits a business built around portfolios. Its scale is distributed across different mandates, assets, and responsibilities. Hart’s leadership has to accommodate that variety. There is no single investment decision that can stand in for the whole operation.
A June 2026 launch with PitchBook offers a more concrete glimpse of the machinery. SPI Deal Benchmarking made StepStone’s deal performance and operating metrics available within existing research workflows. Users could examine investments across dimensions including strategy, geography, industry, size, and time period, with outputs aggregated and anonymized.
The useful question beneath those filters is how performance was generated. Did an investment benefit from its market, its financing, or changes within the business? A result becomes more informative when the circumstances behind it can be compared. For a career that began in analysis and due diligence, this is a recognizable extension of the original work.
The early employee, still building
Hart’s public professional ties still include Notre Dame’s Wall Street Leadership Committee and YPO San Diego. His StepStone location is La Jolla. The geography of his career includes Wall Street and London, while his present base remains in the San Diego area.
His responsibilities also extend into the firm’s culture. He was listed on StepStone’s diversity, equity, and inclusion committee in its 2022 report. In his message for the 2023 responsible investment report, he described colleagues’ varied perspectives and expertise as part of serving clients, and emphasized rewarding careers and a culture of belonging.
On October 1, 2026, StepStone announced Yoshitaka Todoroki as vice chairman focused on Japan and the broader Asian region. Todoroki had spent a decade at Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund. Hart welcomed the perspective of an asset owner who understood how private investments fit inside a broader portfolio.
That emphasis carries the story back to a recurring question in Hart’s work: what does the investor actually need? It connects research, client relationships, an overseas office, and recruiting someone whose experience comes from the other side of the mandate.
The early StepStone candidates had been asked to consider a firm still being made. Hart took that proposition himself. His subsequent career has given it a succession of concrete forms: an office to open, investments to examine, a founder to work beside, and an organization to lead. The unfinished part has kept changing.