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.