John Richards
2325 Venture Points
FundersClub Panel Member, Guest Contributor
John E. Richards is an entrepreneur, venture investor, mentor, and educator. His endeavors involve founding, operating, managing, selling, and investing in enterprises. Though he is a generalist, he mentors entrepreneurs frequently in software, Internet, mobile, blockchain, and consumer products. Most recently, in 2022 he founded Startup Ignition Ventures, a pre-seed venture fund, a natural extension of his well-known Startup Ignition entrepreneur bootcamp. He served as Google Fiber’s Head of Operations when Google entered the Utah market. He spent over a decade teaching entrepreneurship at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah where he helped the Rollins Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology to global prominence and top rankings. He has been listed as one of the Top 25 entrepreneurial educators in the United States. He was managing partner of UtahAngels, a venture investing group. He co-founded BoomStartup, a leading tech seed accelerator. He has invested in hundreds of ventures and mentored thousands. Early in his career, he was president of a yellow pages publishing company and later created the first-ever online yellow pages that led to an initial public offering and a multi-billion-dollar valuation as part of InfoSpace, Inc. John is a frequent speaker at conferences and other events. He and his family reside in Utah.