Ted Fujimoto

Ted is an entrepreneur at heart and founded his first company at age 18 that began by designing and implementing logistics, customer relationship management and financial systems. He works with leadership teams in the media, entertainment, healthcare, education, insurance and real estate sectors representing a mix of some of the top worldwide recognized brands and emerging companies. Over the past three decades, Ted has worked with teams at LVMH, Remy Martin, Air Touch Communications (now part of Verizon), General Motors, IBM, Sony, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Walton Family Foundation, among others. His work includes supporting the deployment of over $1.6 billion in investment capital, providing strategy that supported over $500 million in philanthropy awarded, providing process and strategy underlying the transformation and redesign of 700 public schools representing 350,000 students, designing and developing finance and logistics systems for the deployment of mobile phone networks in 58 countries, launching and managing insurance captives that outperformed their peers and facilitating the development of a job creation plan that produced 100,000 new jobs in 10 years for an island.

One of Ted’s transformative experiences that shaped his work occurred when he sold his first company and became an equity partner in a consulting firm that had a 35+ year track record of redesigning the customer retail network experience for 11 automotive and hospitality brands worldwide. The magic in the firm’s methodology was how organizations can systematically create, replicate and sustain a completely different culture by changing the mindset of team members and the motivational drivers from extrinsic to intrinsic.

Ted believes in the power of high-quality education for kids to prepare themselves to be proactive citizens who can be entrepreneurial, create jobs and make their communities and the world a great place to live and thrive in. When he founded his first company, it was a struggle to find team members with the right skills so he co-designed and co-founded the Napa New Technology High School, which opened in 1996. The school conducted all learning through project-based learning, modeled after the project management protocols used by his company combined with a focus on creating a culture and team agreement of trust, respect and responsibility. Ted helped to design and create the replication systems and strategy for several of the highest performing public-school designs in the country that created hundreds of schools, including New Tech Network – known in their communities as “New Techs” as well as Big Picture Learning among others. He is the recipient of the 2002 Center for Digital Government “In the Arena” Award for Education Leadership in transforming vision to reality.

Ted oversaw the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Carnegie Foundation grants for a Sacramento region education and workforce development intermediary organization working to redesign schools. He describes this experience as one of the most challenging in his career with the obstacle of implementing and sustaining innovative proven practices within systems not fully aligned to support them. Ted later advised and helped design programs for over a dozen state charter school associations to provide better support to improve charter school quality.

He serves on the board of the California Credit Union, a credit union with over $4.6 billion in assets.