Cofounder of Sherwood Partners, the firm the venture capital world has turned to since 1992 when a company reaches its hardest moment. Board member of the Smithsonian's Lemelson Center. The national voice on what happens when innovation fails, through every downturn of the last 25 years.
"I really see myself as the Mayo Clinic."
NPR, April 2020
A native of Illinois, Marty started his first business in the fifth grade with a newspaper route, then moved on to delivering phone books and mowing lawns. At Columbia College Chicago he studied marketing and played drums in rock bands, touring with a band called the Reveles until he discovered he enjoyed booking the gigs more than playing them.
He moved to Los Angeles to manage artists, including Lou Rawls, Bill Withers and the Miracles. After Smokey Robinson left the group, Marty helped rebuild the Miracles and landed them a multimillion dollar recording contract. He is credited as the group's manager on their album Love Crazy.
Marty then built a reputation fixing consumer companies. He helped turn around Famous Amos Cookies as chief operating officer, served as chief operating officer of a major shoe company where he restructured a 280 store retail chain, and as chief operating officer of a garment company grew sales 800 percent in under 18 months. It was in the garment business that he learned the Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors, the out of court alternative to bankruptcy he would later bring to Silicon Valley.
In 1992 Marty and Michael Maidy cofounded Sherwood Partners. The firm grew to offices in Santa Clara, Los Angeles and New York, serving technology, life sciences, fintech, cleantech, consumer products, retail and manufacturing companies, and working closely with venture capital, private equity, lenders and law firms.
His first Silicon Valley assignment came in 1999 from Silicon Valley Bank. Within three years he had wound down more than 70 dot coms holding nearly $3 billion in assets, including Kozmo.com and AllAdvantage, according to the Washington Post. NPR later reported he closed nearly 200 technology companies in that era. A page one profile in the San Jose Mercury News in June 2001 made him a Silicon Valley name, and Fortune Small Business credited him with popularizing the ABC in the Valley.
When credit froze in 2008, Bloomberg Businessweek turned to Marty to explain how venture firms wind down their portfolios. In 2017 he told TechCrunch Sherwood had closed three or four unicorns. When the pandemic hit in 2020, he told NPR the firm had gone from two to four wind downs a week to two to five a day. Through it all, he built Sherwood into a leader in monetizing intellectual property, and in 2012 he became a managing member of agencyIP, which sells and licenses patents, trademarks and copyrights.
On June 30, 2026, EisnerAmper announced that Sherwood Partners and its 30 professionals would join the firm, one of the largest accounting and advisory firms in the United States with fiscal 2024 net revenue of $1.02 billion. EisnerAmper's announcement described Sherwood as the gold standard for Assignments for the Benefit of Creditors. Marty continues to lead Sherwood as Partner in Charge.
Marty serves on the board of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian. He has presented and moderated for the Smithsonian, the American Bankruptcy Institute, IBF, INSEAD and INSOL. He has been published or quoted in The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Fortune, Institutional Investor and Venture Capital Journal, and has appeared on CNN, CNNfn, NPR and Canada's RobTV.