Jess Hunt is an entrepreneurial executive, operator and board member of growth companies. With nearly 20 years’ experience, she has an established track record of driving revenue and profit growth while leading innovative companies with $40 million to $400 million annual revenue. Jess is sought-after as an expert in business model development and strategy, B2B sales and marketing, product and service development, cost-restructuring, talent acquisition, organizational design, and building executive teams, with a focus on marketplace business models and SaaS companies.
President & COO – Andela
Jess is the former President and COO of Andela, a company that builds globally distributed engineering teams for top U.S. technology companies. During her tenure, she executed a company-wide turnaround, pivoting the company’s 1300+ employee operating model from a brick-and-mortar vocational training business to a fully distributed engineering talent marketplace.
Under Jess’s leadership, Andela rebuilt the executive, engineering and commercial teams, refocused the client profile upmarket, launched the enterprise business, took the company all-remote across seven countries, and reorganized large real estate investments to raise margin and flexibility. Jess developed Andela's proprietary technology roadmap to build a marketplace platform, along with tools to enable customers to manage global distributed engineering teams. With the turn-around, the company moved upmarket, improved net revenue retention to over 100%, and reduced burn by a factor of four, putting Andela on a path to continue to double ARR every year. As a result, in 2021 Softbank led a Series E valuing the company at $1.5 billion.
Today, Andela builds high performance, diverse distributed engineering teams for software and enterprise companies across three continents, and in so doing, is building the infrastructure for the future of distributed work. In 2020, the company made Forbes’ list of Next Billion-Dollar Startups.
Executive Vice President
and GM – Axiom
Prior to joining Andela, Jess served as Executive Vice President and GM at Axiom Global from 2014 to 2018, the largest platform for high caliber, on-demand corporate legal talent with a network of thousands of legal experts across industries. She led Axiom's North America business, global marketing, and strategy, improving performance through upgrading leadership, centralizing operations from ten North American offices to one P&L and three GTM industry verticals. She doubled the 2014 - 2017 CAGR over the previous three years, and reversed opex growth trends to improve operating margins by double digits by reorganizing a 150-person revenue organization across all sales functions. Jess oversaw the expansion of the client base into some of the world’s largest pharmaceuticals and technology companies, and the integration of an acquisition of Canadian competitor Cognition. Her work positioned Axiom for its 2019 investment agreement with global private equity firm Permira.
Senior Vice President and Enterprise GM – Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG)
Jess began her career in business at Internet startup Gerson Lehrman Group (GLG), where she launched and led GLG Enterprise, serving as its SVP of Sales and GM. Enterprise achieved an eight-figure revenue run rate in its first three years, crossing nine figures in year seven with over 160 enterprise clients, including nine of the top ten global pharmaceutical companies. Jess implemented sales specialization at GLG, building the first SDR, Customer Success and Account Management functions. She also expanded Enterprise’s global reach, establishing business in Japan, the UK and Germany.
Jess served as SVP and GM of HighTable, GLG’s digital tool providing active and influential professionals, academics and entrepreneurs a place to collaborate around new business ideas. GLG received a $200 million PE investment from SFW Capital Partners in 2015.
Board Positions
In 2021, Jess joined the Board of Directors at Encompass Technologies, a cloud-based ERP system for beverage manufacturers, distributors, and retailers. Encompass is mapping the entire supply chain data for the beverage industry with the industry’s first all-in-one cloud-based Route Accounting Software (RAS), Warehouse Management Software (WMS), and Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) solution.
Jess also served on the Board of Bodhala, an AI-powered-SaaS platform that empowers in-house legal teams to better analyze, interpret and optimize outside counsel spending. Upon her appointment to the board, Bodhala CEO and Co-Founder Raj Goyle said, “Jess has built world-class sales and operating organizations from the ground up and is an expert at building high performance teams that scale businesses to new heights. Her background in leading go-to-market strategies for platform businesses, including those within the legal industry like Axiom, will help lead our growth." After hitting 400% YOY growth, Bodhala was acquired by Onit in September 2021.
Jess regularly advises and takes an equity stake in early-stage companies, especially those that focus on Enterprise software, marketplace and AI, including leading voice and video survey platform Phonic.AI.
Non-Profit Boards and Advocacy
Jess served on the Board of Directors of the National Alliance for Mental Illness (NAMI) in New York for nine years, also serving as its Vice President. An active supporter of mental health care policy and justice, she advocated for mental health parity long before the Affordable Care Act. She is a vocal supporter of NAMI’s #IWillListen Campaign, which focuses on de-stigmatization of mental illness. Jess also served as a Trustee on the board of Graham Windham, NYC's oldest private child welfare agency.
Jess is vigilant about gender equality and minimizing gender biases in the workplace. She is focused on fixing the “leaky funnel” problem of women not advancing to senior roles at companies despite 50/50 male and female school enrollment. As a working mother herself, Jess is also passionate about caregiving parents feeling welcome and respected in their place of work.
Jess is a sought-after commentator and has appeared on several podcasts, offering her insight on topics including productivity and success in the workplace, CFOs and revenue models and technology’s influence on the future of law.
Education and Personal Life
Jess holds a Ph.D. from Yale University in Physical Anthropology with a focus on human and primate paleontology. She earned both her B.A. in Biological Anthropology and Certificate in Primatology from Duke University. Her doctoral dissertation, Morphological Integration of the Catarrhine Cranium: An Ontogenetic and Phylogenetic Perspective, examines cranial evolution and development in early human ancestors using mathematical modeling. As a graduate student, Jess authored a course on evolutionary biology and philosophy of science, which she taught to Yale undergraduates.
Originally from Iowa, Jess lives in Boulder, Colorado with her husband, Paul Hurley, and two daughters.