Featured Speaker

Jack Derby

Jack is a professor within the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts where he teaches separate courses in marketing and in sales. Jack has taught at Tufts for 16 years and was the prior director of the Entrepreneurship Center. The Derby Entrepreneurship Center encompasses the study and practice of entrepreneurship through all the Tufts schools and is home to the Entrepreneurship Minor, the largest minor on campus.  In 1990, Jack founded Derby Management, a regional consulting firm specializing in strategic and business planning with deep expertise in the specializations of business planning, sales productivity and marketing optimization. Prior to starting Derby Management, Jack served as CEO of Mayer Electronics and President of CB Sports. He is or has been a board member of 21 companies.

Jack’s 17 years of corporate background consisted of being President of Litton Industries Medical Systems, CEO of Datamedix, and Executive Vice President of Becton Dickinson Medical Systems, a market leader in hospital monitoring. For his work as an entrepreneur, Jack was named to the Boston Business Journal’s Mass High Tech’s All-Star Team, he received MIT Enterprise Forum’s Vince Fulmer Award for his work as chairman, and in 2019, received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Corporate Growth of Boston for his work as long-term chairman of this leading M&A organization. Jack has founded or co-founded nine startups over the years, acting as CEO in eight.

Today, Jack is an active and highly engaged board member with a long investing history as an early-stage investor as General Partner at Kestrel Ventures, Chairman of Common Angels and currently as a General Partner at Converge Ventures.