Mark Johnson

Bio

Mark Johnson is CTO of Stand Together, a community of nonprofits tackling society’s biggest problems, from economic opportunity to education to criminal justice reform. Prior to the nonprofit world, he was CEO of GrainBridge, an AgTech joint venture between ADM and Cargill. After releasing a product to farmers, he sold the company to Bushel in October 2021.

Prior to GrainBridge, he cofounded Descartes Labs with a group of scientists from Los Alamos National Laboratory with the vision of building a digital twin of the Earth to better understand our natural resources. He served as the CEO, leading the company to over 100 employees, $60m in funding, and $20m in revenue. Previously, Mark was CEO of Zite, a wildly popular AI news reader that got smarter as you used it, and sold Zite to CNN in 2011, ran the company for 3 years there, and sold the company again to Flipboard in March 2014.

Before Zite, he was a product manager, trained at SAP and then jumped into 3 successful search startups: SideStep (acquired by Kayak for $180M in December 2007), Kosmix (acquired by Walmart in April 2011), and Powerset (acquired by Microsoft in July 2008). Through the Microsoft acquisition of Powerset, he ran product management for the Powerset office of Bing.