<a href="https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiW2h0dHBzOi8vYXBwcy5ib3N0b25nbG9iZS5jb20vdGVjaC1wb3dlci1wbGF5ZXJzL3llYXIvMjAyNC9wZXJzb24vam9obi13ZXJuZXItbGluay12ZW50dXJlcy_SAQA?oc=5" target="_blank">John Werner, Link Ventures | Boston Tech Leaders</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">The Boston Globe</font>

John Werner, Link Ventures | Boston Tech Leaders - The Boston Globe

<a href="https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMiOWh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmJvc3Rvbmdsb2JlLmNvbS90ZWNoLXBvd2VyLXBsYXllcnMveWVhci8yMDI0L9IBAA?oc=5" target="_blank">Tech Leaders in Boston and New England</a>&nbsp;&nbsp;<font color="#6f6f6f">The Boston Globe</font>

Tech Leaders in Boston and New England - The Boston Globe

all souls nursery school & Bill Dave

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Harvard University

Harvard Business School

Boston Center for Community and Justice

Hamilton College

Trinity School, NYC

Managing Director, Link Ventures & CNO/SVP Cogo Labs

Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States

Link Ventures

Managing Director and Partner

EverQuote Pro

Advisory Board Member 

Cogo Labs

Chief Network Officer, SVP of Corporate Development

MIT Connection Science

Fellow

Imagination in Action, formerly known as Blockchain in Action 

Founder and CEO

The vision for AR in Action is a series of summits convening top minds of the augmented reality ecosystem for  sharing insights with presentations and networking.  The program is designed to help explore the challenges and opportunities that face inventors, innovators, integrators, investors, and other executives working to bring the benefits of AR to the world.  The event educates, encourages, and inspires technologists to bring augmented reality into reality.  Goals of AR in Action include - 1. Providing unprecedented opportunities for learning from and networking with greatest minds in AR and adjacent fields of technology. 2. Seeing, touching and hearing about AR research and current state of the art in production settings today. 3. Creating new and lasting connections between the greatest minds in the field tackling the current and future obstacles facing AR’s widespread adoption. 4. Capturing hours of high quality video content about AR to publish on the Internet for viewing by audiences worldwide.

AR in Action

At Meta John Werner is designing a future where augmented reality becomes a healthy, vital extension of who we are and creates deeper understanding, freer expression, and optimal productivity. Werner combines innovative thinking and collaborative, creative solutions to deliver human and environmental impact. Werner was most recently at the MIT Media Lab as Head of Innovation and New Ventures at the Camera Culture Group and Founding Managing Director of Emerging Worlds SIG. At MIT, Werner supported developments on new imaging platforms, including hardware and software technologies, to augment human vision. 

Meta Co.

Vice President, Strategic Partnerships

General Partners, David Blundin CEO and Chairman of Cogo Labs and Mark Casady, CEO and Chairman of LPL Financial, and Ian Sheridan, Managing Director, founded Vestigo Ventures in January 2016 to build a series of early stage financial technology funds. The General Partners have committed $5 Million of capital.Our competitive advantageOur competitive advantage is our network and industry experience combined with the digital assets of Cogo Labs, yielding unique insights. Vestigo only invests in companies where our strategic insights and network are applicable. We are based in the city of innovation, Cambridge, MA, on the fringe of the MIT Campus and have established working relationships with the academic, startup, and financial services communities.Our management company is a highly experienced team of entrepreneurial, financial services, asset management, and behavioral finance professionals. This team has the instincts for business strategies, value, global perspective on economies and the insights into human behavior required for financial services technologies to deliver maximum returns.Vestigo Ventures Fund IThe first in the planned series, Vestigo Ventures Fund I, is an early stage financial services technology fund. Vestigo is raising approximately $50 million for Fund I. Over the life of the fund, we will invest in 15 to 20 companies from seed stage to breakthrough solutions generating revenue looking to scale. The portfolio will be managed to fund the winners with follow-on investments.

Vestigo Ventures

Advisory Board Member

As Founding Managing Director of Emerging Worlds SIG, John Werner helped conceive, start and lead The Emerging Worlds SIG effort at MIT Media Lab, which is a unique, bottom-up innovation platform designed for addressing big challenges worldwide. Emerging worlds – cities, states, or regions – present great opportunities to test and deploy ideas. He convenes people with diverse interests, skills and backgrounds – young engineers, business people and designers – to collaborate openly with government officials, business leaders and academics, as well as with Media Lab researchers looking for creative solutions to pressing local challenges that can be solved with new technology, including machine learning, Internet of Things, Big Data and mobile devices. John understands the culture of deployment. John has secured corporate and NSF funds. John has tracked the status of all partnerships and programs and explore engaging other regions such as the Mexico, Middle East, Brazil & Africa.  The Emerging Worlds effort that has earned a worldwide reputation for developing disruptive technologies. 

MIT Media Lab

Founding Managing Director of Emerging Worlds SIG

Imaging Cafe is a monthly event bringing together researchers, engineers, and students to foster deeper conversation with entrepreneurs, mentors and investors.  This gathering is for people excited about mobile camera phones, cameras in developing countries, image-search, medical imaging, online photo sharing, home automation, computational photography, 3D printing and more. 

Imaging Cafe 

Co-Leader

My work at the MIT Media Lab taps into my passion for technology, innovation, photography and the future.  As Project Innovator for Professor Ramesh Raskar, Director of the Camera Culture Group.  The group is creating new imaging platforms (from capturing trillion frames per second imagining to creating glasses-free 3D Displays), developing hardware and software technologies for augmenting (super human) human vision.  I'll be bringing young people from around the world together to use rapid prototyping to solve some of real-world problems, working on large scale online learning, and building a community to disseminate technology for human vision and visual computing.  I'll be disseminating technology to prevent blindness, enabling the visually challenged, and bringing eye care to developing countries.  I'll be fostering entrepreneurship to take ideas into the real world for impact, connecting industry with the untapped knowledge of the geniuses of the Media Lab.  And I will continue to lead Ideas in Action through TEDxBeaconStreet and its Adventures--as well as support and advise Citizen Schools.

Project Innovator of The Camera Culture Group

Produced over 500 Speakers to date that have had over 100 million views.  Over 30 talks reposted on <a href="http://TED.com">TED.com</a>.  Ideas in Action vision is to bring together a diverse audience that spans generations, attract speakers with revolutionary ideas, build a global network of lifelong learners, and help great ideas achieve escape velocity through year-round interactive Adventures.  Every Shared Experience can Spark Momentum

Ideas in Action/TEDxBeaconStreet

Founder, Curator & CEO

Brookline Youth Lacrosse

Coach

Werner Family

Dad, Husband, Son, Brother

Executive In Residence

John is the Head of Innovation & New Ventures at the Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab.  He is an innovator, mobilizer, and human super connector.  He constantly builds community and is a ‘moonshot’ thinker innovating as he goes while incorporating the latest technologies.  He believes wholeheartedly in 21st century collaborative creativity in innovating with direct human or environmental impact.  There he supports developments on new imaging platforms, and developing hardware and software technologies to augment human vision.  He is also developing a large-scale online learning platform, bringing young people together from around the world, currently India and the Middle East, to solve some of the planet’s most important problems.  He does this through rapid prototyping and helping to foster an environment of entrepreneurship to take ideas into the real world for impact.  He has been a co-instructor of MIT's Computational Photography and Imaging, Fabrication and Ventures, and an advisor for MIT's Engineering the Medical Tricorder. Works closely with the Principal Investor of the Media Lab’s Camera Culture group to define the vision for the group and actualize it, including working to advance the group’s worldwide collaborations and initiatives connected to health and innovation.  Ensure that the group is meeting milestones, has the required resources, and is collaborating with the correct partners.

Head of Innovation & New Ventures, Camera Culture Group

We are a team of executives in Boston who are committed to fostering a culture of innovation and sharing revolutionary ideas with citizens around the world.  For TEDxBoston 2010 we sought out luminaries who hail from the local area, are driven to make the world a better place, and have developed viable business models for implementing their game-changing ideas at scale.  We're honored to support the TED mission by promoting "Ideas Worth Spreading".

TEDxBoston.org

Executive Curator

Loeb Fellow

Managed eleven Boston programs that enrolled over 1,000 middle school students and Alumni Services; programs employed over 100 full and part-time staff.  Coordinated 250 volunteer led apprenticeships annually.  Led key program that evaluation report allowed for scaling of organization.  Responsible for raising $18M over five years from renewable and new sources.  Contributed to planning and design of $1M expansion of Citizen Schools head quarters in 2005.Citizen Schools cited a national quality leader by the following:- The American Business Collaborative- Boston Society of Architects’ Award- The Council of Chief State School Officers- Fast Company Social Capitalist Award (4x)- Freedom House Award- Mass Inc. Commonwealth Medal- Princeton Review Best Entry-level Job (3x)- Skoll Social Entrepreneurship Award- The National Institute for Out of School Time- The Southeast Development Laboratory- U.S. Department of Education- Media: Boston Globe, Education Week, Financial Times, NPR, TIME , Wall Street Journal- Independent evaluation results affirm that Citizen Schools is advancing the academic performance and lifting the educational trajectories of low-income students.

Citizen Schools

Boston Executive Director

Designed and led 8th Grade Academy, the capstone program at Citizen Schools, serving over 500 at-risk 8th graders in the Boston Public Schools by preparing them for high school, college, and beyond.  Recruited 380 lawyers as writing coaches, published Guide to Boston High Schools, forged partnerships with ten colleges and managed key corporate partnerships, secured $.5M Federal grant, all in support of 8th Grade Academy.  Helped transform Citizen Schools’ program model by scaling this program initiative.

Founder and Executive Director, 8th Grade Academy

Helped transform Citizen Schools from a concept paper in 1995 into a thriving national educational organization; one of two founding staff members still with the organization.  Member of senior management team that has helped support/led all aspects of Citizen Schools’ strategic growth, including sustainability, impact and scale, and developing a vision and plan for the short and long term future of the organization.   Founding Director of Citizen Schools’ first school partnership, creator of 8th Grade Academy and the Writing Coach program, first Executive Director for all Citizen Schools sites, and overseer of the Expanded Learning Time pilot.  Have helped organization recruit 20,000 volunteers and hire 2,500 staff.  Have helped thousands of young people create paths towards high school graduation, college, and career success.Citizen Schools is a leading national education initiative that mobilizes adult volunteers to help improve student achievement in underserved communities by teaching skill-building apprenticeships, redefining how learning happens across the country.  Citizen Schools currently serves 5,000 students and engages 3,500 volunteers in seventeen cities in seven states nationwide, with a $28M operation budget (2012).  Independent evaluation results affirm that Citizen Schools is advancing the academic performance and lifting the educational trajectories of low-income students.

Founding Team Member, Member of Leadership Team

Member of Founding Team at Citizen Schools, Currently member of office of the CEO & Senior Management Team (Operating Team).  Super-connector for the organization.  Mobilize and connect human capital and secure resources.  Engage leaders from all sectors in creating opportunities for kids.  Source talent and national/regional board members and recruit six figure prospects.  Identify and pilot opportunities for innovation.  Present on Citizen Schools in a variety of high leverage venues, including: Intel Visionary Conference;  Google’s TechTalk; BIF (Business Innovation Conference); BoldFacers; TED University; TED Long Beach; TEDGlobal.  Advocate through traditional and new media and public policy.  Lead social media efforts, including successful mobilization effort to win <a href="http://Change.org">Change.org</a> contest and Ashoka Innovation Award.

Chief Mobilizing Officer & Managing Director

Led Citizen Schools growth from a local concept to a national network.  Led program development sessions that grew into our model.  Managed program, campuses, new initiatives, technology, and marketing.  Directed twenty semesters of after-school programming.  Established a powerful Citizen Schools brand.  Coordinated student and volunteer recruitment.  Worked closely with student’s families.  Led programming and design efforts for interior fit-out of new 20,000 SF Community Tech Center in Dorchester.  Coordinated Harvard Business School case study on Citizen Schools.

Member of Start-up Team

Boston Public Schools, Boston, MA (1992 – 1996)Teacher, Harvard-Kent Elementary, 1st grade, learning disabled classTeacher, Paul A. Dever Elementary, 5th grade, learning adaptive behavior clusterTeacher, William McKinley Technical, 4th and 8th grade, emotionally and behaviorally disturbed classAfter-School Teacher, Compass, 1st & 2nd graders, academic enrichment program & Facilitator, Columbia Point Coalition

Boston Public Schools

Teacher

Wediko Children Services, Hillsboro, N.H. (Summers, 1990 – 1993)Co-Director of School (1993)Designed and implemented school component of residential treatment center for 170 children at nation's oldest residential program for emotionally and behaviorally disturbed children.  Trained and advised 24. Mathematics and Language Arts Teacher (1991,1992)Residential Leader (1990)