John Dunning

President

John is an entrepreneur, investor and operational executive. He loves finding an awesome new idea and creating and implementing a plan to bring it to life. He also gets excited when he sits down with a group of people who are knocking it out of the park, and simply need the next stage of leadership to focus and become really effective at execution. Dunning’s experience ranges from having served as a key team member in several San Francisco-based software start-ups, a venture capitalist, founding CEO of two Boulder, Co-based technology start-ups to now serving as mentor/advisor and consultant to a number of software businesses and their leadership teams including several
Techstars companies. John has  learned from things that work and from things that haven’t, while developing somewhat of a secret sauce for operational and executional success because of both success and failure.  He most recently ran San Juan Vacation Ventures, LLC (SJVV), operating the largest vacation rental management agency in the San Juan Islands, northwest of Seattle. Prior to SJVV, John was the founding CEO of Confident Financial Solutions (CFS) developing specialty finance products for the automotive repair market. CFS is now the largest auto repair finance business in the country. Prior to CFS, Dunning was founding CEO of Clarimedix, a medical device company that developed a proprietary medical device patch for the treatment of Alzheimer’s and other vascular disorders. John also co-founded and ran the company from inception through to human studies in partnership with Johnson and Johnson. Before Clarimedix, Dunning worked with Wasatch Venture Fund (now Epic Ventures); managing the full life cycle of investments; sourcing, leading diligence, finance syndication and oversight of the companies. Prior to joining Wasatch, John worked as a Business Development Manager at two
software/financial products companies. John possesses a B.A, from the University of Oregon, where he studied Economics, International Studies and Spanish, and an M.B.A. from the Thunderbird School of Global Management.