Overview

Gender

male

John Boynton is an entrepreneur and investor who has co-founded several companies and invested in a number of others. Over the past twenty five years, he co-founded several companies including Yandex, CompTek, and InfiNet Wireless in Russia. He is an investor and/or board member in several other high growth companies, and devotes a great deal of time to non-profit work in his community and beyond. He has been self-employed all but seven years of his career -- those years were spent at Forrester Research and Mercer Management Consulting.

His career was shaped by a trip to the Soviet Union during his junior year in high school. He was studying Russian language at the time, and that 1983 trip inspired him to direct his entrepreneurial energy toward Russia after graduating from Harvard in 1988. He and his partner started their first company in Moscow in 1990 and have been at it ever since.

Many of his investment and non-profit activities are driven by a belief in the power of community. Although social media makes it possible for us to be constantly in touch, there is a deep need for connection that technology cannot satisfy. He expects to see accelerated adoption of business models that create opportunities for rich, authentic, human interaction in people's daily lives.