I'm John. I live in Hanover, New Hampshire with my wife Maggie and our son Bo. Our daughters, Tibby and Izzy, turn up when school lets them. We’ve also lived in downtown Boston for a bunch of years and loved it, but we're small-town people at the end of the day. Starry skies, no traffic, quiet.

I co-founded Boloco in 1997. The business plan started as a class project at Tuck, and we opened the first shop at Berklee College of Music in Boston on February 24 — Steve Jobs' birthday, which I didn't plan but clearly like to mention. I loved the food we served, namely burritos, bowls, salads, smoothies and shakes, but what I cared most about was the people making them and how working at Boloco impacted their lives and futures. Our mantra, "even a burrito aspires," sounded ridiculous to some but kept us reaching for more meaning in all that we did. By 2016 our average wage finally cleared MIT's livable-wage line in every market we operated, and we'd become one of the few restaurant certified B Corps in the US.

What I'm also truly passionate about is technology for the restaurant business, and specifically technology that supports the hourly workers we all tend to overlook. I've been at this since around 2000, when I noticed how slowly the industry adopted anything that might help. I've since invested in dozens of small startup tech businesses and their founders, and most of my days since 2015 or so go to working alongside them and supporting however I can.

My dream company was Worthee, built to bring hourly and low-wage workers into the Information Age the rest of us already take for granted. We had 6,000 members and real momentum in 2019, raised $1.2M pre-seed round, and then couldn't raise the round after that as Covid hit. We didn’t get all of the pieces right. I still think the idea was right, possibly execution and strategy off, some timing too.

Since then I've worked inside the industry instead of around it. I spent time at Toast, the restaurant technology company, and these days I'm at MarginEdge Labs, building software for small restaurant operators — the ones who get overlooked because they don't have a finance team or an IT department. It's the same problem I've been circling for 25+ years, approached from a new angle. And yes, I still have a single, super-busy Boloco location in Downtown Boston as of summer ‘26.

I did get lucky a couple of times and won the 2012 Regional Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year and in 2017 was named one of the top 24 “Movers and Shakers” executives in the restaurant industry by Fast Casual for my “brutal honesty” and transparency. I like to speak at conferences and universities on social justice as not just the right thing to do but necessary business strategy, inclusive capitalism (shareholder first is fine, as long as anyone can be a shareholder), the highlights and pitfalls of raising institutional capital and technology in restaurants and small business. I was also honored to be asked to present my views on the business case for higher wages at TEDxNortheasternU in 2014.

A few things that don't fit anywhere else: I don't like following rules. I once drove Lyft and Uber to understand gig work from the inside, and wrote a lot about it, as did the Boston Globe. I learned to fly drones reasonably well in the early days, volunteering to take money shots for Dartmouth graduation when it wasn’t even clear it was legal to do so among other cool projects. I write constantly and have published almost none of it.

I love kitesurfing, attempting to wing foil, sailing, anything on the water or in the wind works for me.

I'm from Cincinnati, which means I'll defend Skyline Chili and Graeter's Black Raspberry Chip against all comers. Dartmouth '91, Tuck '97.

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