Jeff Cherry is a seasoned CEO, entrepreneur, corporate executive, startup advisor, venture and wall street investor, speaker, and writer with a track record of strategic execution and innovation. Over the last 35 years, he has built award-winning companies in engineering, design, strategic consulting, and investment management. He has been a trusted advisor to Fortune 500 executives, government agencies, and startups, with a focus on helping teams understand customers and build dynamic, high-performing organizational cultures.
Jeff has a unique combination of C-Suite experience
CURRENT BOARD APPOINTMENTS
FOR PROFIT Hungry Harvest, LLC Capital Funding Group Bank
PHILANTHROPIC James Beard Foundation
Upsurge Baltimore Park Heights Renaissance The Loyola Baltimore Sellinger School of Business Sinai Hospital of Baltimore Johns Hopkins Technology Ventures The Univ. System of Maryland Momentum Fund Living Classrooms The Laudato Si Challenge Foundation The Sixteen Thirty Fund
He brings corporate governance and strategic guidance experience through his work on corporate boards as a long-time management consultant and investment manager. He currently sits on the board of McKean Defense Group, a $100MM engineering services company, where he advises the company on organizational culture and technology trends and serves on the Compensation Committee. He also sits on the board of Hungry Harvest, LLC, a food delivery startup where he recently assisted with the closing of their $13.7MM Series A financing. He advises the company on fundraising, strategic execution, and M&A strategies. Jeff founded his first venture in 1985 as a 25-year-old graduate student at the Catholic University of America, where he earned a Bachelors and Masters degree in Architecture. That first company was named one of the fastest-growing companies in America by Inc. Magazine in 1997 and was the foundation for the launching of 5 other ventures.
He is regarded as a leading authority on the ideas of organizational culture and design, stakeholder management, and innovation. He has written articles on organizational culture and stakeholder management for Conscious Company Magazine and the Huffington Post and has been profiled on Forbes.com as well as in the Baltimore Sun. He has been honored as one of the top 10 people in technology in Baltimore by the Baltimore Business Journal. In 2018 he was awarded the inaugural Laudato Si Challenge Impact award at the Vatican for entrepreneurs who are leading the charge to change the relationship between business and society. More recently, the tech journal Technical.ly named Jeff their 2020 Baltimore Impact Leader of the Year. The Conscious Venture Lab accelerator, which he founded in 2013 was named one of the 10 greatest social impact programs in the world in 2019.
In 2022, Jeff formed the Novella Center for Entrepreneurship to help create and administer training programs to teach entrepreneurs,early-stage founders, and CEOs the tenets of Stakeholder Theory and Conscious Capitalism®, showing them how managing a business for all of its stakeholders creates both societal and financial value.
