John joins us from Dublin, Ireland, where he owned an event management and catering company that worked to grow the market for small food producers and help them to build better businesses. 

From there, he moved to Chicago to get his MBA at Kellogg and worked with an agriculture focused VC, Frontier Growth Advisors, in Delhi, where he conducted extensive research on the Indian agricultural technology market. At Frontier, he was the principal on a proposed investment in real time content delivery technology for use in the mobile agricultural extension space. Harnessing these skills, he brought them back to Kellogg to lead a team through a yearlong design project, which sought to use high-end adaptive learning technology as a means to personalize agricultural information delivery services currently being used by farmers in India. 

Most recently, he was Acumen Global Fellow working with Avani Bio Energy, a company that creates pine needle gasification power projects for remote communities in the Himalayas. He’s an avid Scrabble player and loves to snowboard (an unlikely habit for an Irishman). 

John holds a BA in Political Science, University College Dublin, an MA in Development Studies from the University of Manchester, and an MBA from Northwestern University.