Jai Shekhawat

Jai Shekhawat is the Founder and former CEO of Fieldglass, a cloud platform for the management of contingent labor and services. Under his leadership, Fieldglass grew globally with users in more than 100 countries in 30 languages and emerged as the largest firm in the world in the fast growing vendor management software category. He was Ernst & Young’s 2012 Midwest “Entrepreneur of the Year” as well as the 2012 recipient of the Peter Yessne Staffing Innovator Award, recognized for pioneering the Vendor Management Software (VMS) space. Fieldglass was also recognized as the Illinois Venture Capital Association’s 2014 Private Equity Portfolio Company of the Year and has received many other awards. The company was acquired by SAP in 2014.

Jai is a former strategy consultant with McKinsey & Company where he served clients in areas of corporate strategy, technology and cross-border alliances. He is also a former senior executive at Syntel, a software services firm in Michigan and the co-founder of Quinnox, an application outsourcing firm in Chicago, Illinois.

Jai is a Trustee of the Field Museum of Chicago, serves on the Board of 1871 (Chicago’s entrepreneurial hub for digital startups), on Governor Rauner’s Illinois Council for Innovation and is a member of the Commercial Club and the Commonwealth Club of Chicago. He is an adviser to Starvest Partners, a New York based venture capital firm and serves as an Advisory Board Chairman for Madison Dearborn Partners, a private equity firm based in Chicago. He currently serves on the Boards of Signal, Semantify, Fleet Complete, Highground, Utopia, HealthEngine, FourKites and OfficeLuv along with being an investor and adviser to many high growth firms. He is a founding member of the Firestarter Fund, which mentors and invests in Chicago startups. He has previously served on the Mayor’s Council of Technology Advisers, the Technology Membership Committee of the Economic Club of Chicago, the Board of Tie-Midwest and the Board of MetroSquash. He is a frequent speaker on entrepreneurship and strategy at the Kellogg and Booth Business Schools as well as at various industry events.

Jai holds an MBA with specializations in finance and strategy from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, and a bachelor’s degree in management science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India.