Christopher Gergen is the CEO and co-founder of Forward Cities – a national learning collaborative of over two dozen cities focused on building more inclusive entrepreneurial economies that also helped launch InnovateNC – a similar multi-city learning collaborative in North Carolina.

He is also a founding partner of Raleigh Founded, the largest entrepreneurial co-working community in North Carolina. Additionally, Christopher is a fellow and faculty member with Duke University’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship initiative, co-author of the nationally acclaimed book Life Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, an alum of Leadership North Carolina (class 24) and a 2013 Henry Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute. Other entrepreneurial endeavors for Christopher include co-founding SMARTHINKING, a venture-backed on-line tutoring company that grew to over 1,000 universities before being acquired by Pearson in 2011, launching the Entrepreneurs Corps that placed 400 AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteers into 96 non-profits for a year of capacity building support, and starting Café Nunoa – a bar, restaurant, live music venue in Santiago, Chile that Christopher started when he was 24. He lives with his wife and two children in Durham, NC.