Johnny Monsarrat

An award-winning public speaker with decades of experience as a successful businessman, Johnny Monsarrat often speaks on the trials and rewards of entrepreneurship. For Johnny, the entrepreneur’s journey is, at heart, a simple (but not at all easy) process: the key to success lies in setting the right priorities and ignoring the unimportant details.

Needless to say, this is easier said than done, and has been the subject of countless self-help books for entrepreneurs. But Johnny is perhaps the ideal person to explain these concepts. After graduating from MIT with a BA at the tender age of 20 and studying computer science at Brown University, he went on to found Turbine Games, whose pioneering games defined the massive multiplayer online (MMO) gaming genre, worth nearly $20 billion today.

Johnny also later founded Hard Data Factory, for which he invented two web-scraping technologies which provide valuable business intelligence for clients. In addition, Hard Data Factory is trying to build the world’s largest calendar of art events, encompassing theater shows, festivals, and the like.

Equally important, Johnny Monsarrat has considerable experience consulting on business practices for a range of organizations, from startups to nonprofits. Towards that end, Johnny uses data to streamline their marketing, and builds alliances and partnerships with other, similar organizations (be it a coalition towards a social cause or distributing products for a massive tech company).

Johnny has also had experience as a philosopher. In 2009, he built Soulburners, a crowdsourced art project where people would handwrite and submit meaningful, deep questions. By the end of the exhibit, Soulburners received 12,000 questions (all of which Johnny answered by hand), setting a Guinness World Record in the process.

During the course of answering Soulburners’ challenging questions, Johnny Monsarrat came to a realization. Though he had never believed in theology or spirituality, shunning things like psychic readings, astrology, and even organized religion, Johnny understood that analysis and critical thinking lay at the heart of all problem solving--from relationships to business disputes. After all, what was an advice column or self-help book, except for rational, analytical thinking?