jerek lovey

01 / the whole story

i’ve invested my life learning how things become — companies, food, people. myself.

the court

it started on a basketball court. at berkeley i captained a d1 team and studied education — which is to say i invested four years learning what coaching actually is: discipline, repetition, and believing in someone out loud until they believe it too.

the language of finance

after school i learned the language of money — first at merrill lynch, then as finance director of a global buddhist nonprofit. that was where structure first met spirit for me. i watched a balance sheet become an instrument of care, and i never unsaw it.

jerek lovey, portrait
high desert, on the way to somewhere

the food decade

then food, for the better part of a decade. pacific northwest kale chips, made by hand and sold shelf by shelf. a snack brand taken to #1 in its category. take two foods, where we built the world’s first barley milk from spent grain — billions of pounds of perfectly good food headed for waste — in partnership with the world's largest brewer.

the lesson of those years was simple: scale is an architecture problem. and so, it turned out, is a life.

02 / the turn

then everything i’d built asked me to become someone able to hold it.

between 2018 and 2026 i went through a period of deep inner work that reordered how i build, and how i live. some of it was contemplative practice — a thread that runs all the way back to my finance years. some of it was time with wisdom traditions, from south america and elsewhere, that hold transformation as something felt in the body, versus figured out in the mind.

i learned, in my own body, what i now hold for others: that the self which builds a thing is rarely the self that can carry it — and that letting the old one go, gently and  intentionally, is the most practical work a leader ever does.

i came out the other side building slower, truer, and far more myself.

03 / now

today my work is guiding founders through that same turn — in 1:1 guidance and founder intensives, and through atmusphere, the founder advisory i co-founded, when the structure needs the work too.

i do this work as the whole person. it’s better for the work, and it’s better for me.

all of it from bend, oregon — early light on the high desert, juniper and river air on the walk home.

jerek

“an exceptional listener — he confronts what isn’t working, without ego.”

HOLLY FEATHER, TAKE TWO

04 / what i’ve built

the ground this work stands on — two decades of building real things.

TEDx Forbes 2022 Bloomberg vegconomist World MUSE