John DC Miles

John is a music lover at heart (and has attended over 400 concerts), threw 80s parties in NYC in the early 2000s, and at 18 years old, held up a sign and sang a song with Sting. He also does an impression of Franck Eggelhoffer, from the film, “Father of the Bride.”

As an associative thinker, John has parlayed his ability to think of 10 ideas at once into connecting disparate things, whether people, words, or businesses. You say Portland? He will likely link Fred Armisen, Nike, and Johnny Marr (of The Smiths) together. He is a “double Dukie,” which, in Blue Devil parlance, means he attended Duke for both undergrad and MBA. He was an English major, prefers writing custom poems over gifting traditional cards and spoke to his fellow MBA classmates at graduation about how the personal activities and interests dwelling at the bottom of your resume can actually make you a more engaging professional.

He founded and runs a company that creates stories that position businesses and individuals for growth. After college, John spent 8 years at Goldman Sachs, helping to start and grow the insurance asset management business. After Fuqua, he advised early-stage companies, developing product and investment stories and sourcing business development partnerships for them, and in 2013, he was the Co-Founder of a cross-sector venture development company, Art & Science Collaborative. Based in Los Angeles at the time, he eventually helped lead the build-out of the world’s first commercial dance brand at Millennium Dance Media. He also trained for 8 months to try to qualify for the 2012 IRONMAN World Championships, but…wait for it…he didn’t qualify. Sigh.

He partners with his clients from a point of empathy, having spent much time as a pre-med student in hospitals and as a volunteer with a local ambulance. The embed we see reporting from the front lines with military teams is the analogous model John follows when guiding - with you, side-by-side through the entire journey, helping you craft, and make sense of, your own value and stories.

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