Our Team
John Dana Chisholm has four decades of experience as entrepreneur, CEO, and investor. He founded and for five years served as Chairman/CEO of Decisive Technology (now part of Google), publisher of the first desktop and client-server software for online surveys. Later, he founded and for eleven years served as Chairman/CEO of CustomerSat (now part of FocusVision), a leading provider of enterprise feedback management systems. Earlier he served in engineering, marketing, and management positions at GE, HP, Grid Systems, and Xerox. Today he heads John Chisholm Ventures, a San Francisco-based entrepreneurship advisory and investment firm.
He has served as trustee of the Santa Fe Institute since 2010, on the MIT Corporation (board of trustees) from 2015-2021, and as president and chair of the worldwide MIT Alumni Association from 2015-2016. He is advisory board member for the Harvard Kennedy School Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, for the Atlas Network, and for the Gruter Institute for Law and Human Behavior. Previously, he served as chair of the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society; as advisory board member for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) and the Institute for New Economic Thinking; as mentor and judge for the Hult Prize for entrepreneurship, the European Innovation Academy, and the Thiel Fellowship; and as member of MIT visiting committees for the Institute for Data, Systems, and Society and for departments of mathematics, social sciences, linguistics and philosophy. He gave the 2019 Siwei Distinguished Lecture at the University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and has twice served on the Recommendations Committee of the World Internet Summit in Wuzhen, China. He is author or co-author of two US patents and has contributed to Forbes. He is the author of Unleash Your Inner Company: 10 Steps to Discover, Launch, and Scale Your Ideal Business and of Integral: A Mathematical Odyssey.
John holds bachelor's and master’s degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT and an MBA from Harvard Business School. He writes and speaks frequently on entrepreneurship, innovation, the future of education, holistic approaches to diversity and inclusion, and on what forms of regulation foster vs. stifle entrepreneurship, innovation, and economic growth. An avid mountain climber, he has summited Mounts Kilimanjaro, Rainier, Shasta, Whitney, St. Helens, and made the roundtrip trek to Everest Base Camp.
Dickey Singh has over two decades of technology leadership and entrepreneurship in mobile and SaaS/Cloud, with proven success in engineering, design, product, and operations. He is the CEO and founder of Cast.app, the provider of enterprise reports that you can read, listen, and watch. Previously he was the CEO and Founder of analytics and data exploration company Pyze. He also has served as CTO, or senior vice president of engineering and products, for ViVotech, Replay, MarketTools, CustomerSat, Spear, and Infor. He delivered a mobile wallet and mobile backend-as-a-service for Mobile Payments at ViVotech. He led the software, operations, and product management teams designing, developing, and releasing CustomerSat™10, an industry-leapfrogging SaaS Enterprise suite whose market success contributed to CustomerSat’s acquisition by MarketTools, now Confirmit.
His nine patent applications encompass virtualization, fraud management, and mobile access of hardware from HTML5/CSS3 pages, and audio-visual reports that can be played like video and interacted with like dashboards.
Earlier, Dickey was director of software development at @Road – a SaaS and fastest-growing company in North America 5 years in a row – now Trimble [NASDAQ: TRMB] where he developed solutions for the mobile resource management industry. He also held management or R&D positions with ERP software supplier Baan Research (now Infor), Nortel Networks, SPSS Inc. [NYSE: IBM], and Tata Consultancy Services. He graduated magna cum laude with BS/BE in Computer Engineering from MIT, University of Pune. He also has a certification in Artificial Intelligence from MIT, CSAIL/Sloan. His interests include computing, sports cars, and photography.