Jonathan Sexton now serving as KEC’s Chief Operating Officer
By Tom Ballard, Chief Alliance Officer, PYA
The Knoxville Entrepreneur Center’s (KEC) Jonathan Sexton has a new title; he’s now the organization’s Chief Operating Officer (COO).
“Jonathan has really been working as the COO for the last couple of years,” Jim Biggs, KEC’s Executive Director, says of the gregarious Knoxville native who joined the organization in early 2014.
“They brought me in to be me,” Sexton told us at the time as related in this teknovation.biz article. Since then, those of us involved in the Knoxville-Oak Ridge entrepreneurial ecosystem have seen the results of the yin and yang nature of KEC’s leadership team.
Prior to the title change, Sexton was KEC’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR), a title that befitted the foot that he continued to maintain in the world of founders and co-founders. He’s been involved in the launch of firms such as Artist Growth LLC, Bandposters, and Audiohand, and the strong growth of Made in Network in Nashville.
He’s also a singer and songwriter, having led a band appropriately named Jonathan Sexton and the Big Love Choir and now performing solo and with Teen Spirit, a ‘90s cover band he formed last year.
“Jonathan’s been the principal person behind most of the programming we’ve done,” Biggs said, adding that the COO title “helps us recognize and people in the community visibly see how much he is doing. The EIR title did not capture the breadth of what Jonathan had been doing for a long time.”
Biggs explains that Sexton’s role of focusing on operational needs and aligning resources with KEC’s priorities frees him to concentrate on areas like fundraising and strategic partnerships.
We posted this two-part series (Part 1 and Part 2) on Sexton in late 2013.
