Jim Fournier

Summary

Jim is a serial entrepreneur and angel with three decades experience in tech, four decades in sustainability and twenty years in climate. He is professionally focused on data governance and invests personally in the transformation of technology driven by solar and storage. His own technology, JLINC, governs data exchange under human-readable agreements. This provides a solution to use-cases from personal data in AI and commerce, to medical records, to supply chain, with immutable audit proof, but without the overhead of a blockchain. A broad patent issued on December 24, 2024. Jim has always focused on systemic solutions to global issues. He studied physical sciences and architecture as an undergrad and left MIT to pursue his first company. Industrial design led to tech as a partner with Silicon Graphics in the early 90’s. In May 2000, he convened the Planetwork conference in San Francisco. That seminal event inspired a network of 50 IT and media professionals who met for 2-years to write the Augmented Social Network whitepaper – before Facebook. He also funded a key patent resulting in founder’s shares in the Linkedin IPO. In 2005 he foresaw the need to remove CO2, invested in a biochar startup and then founded BEC with the emeritus expert in gasification at NREL. He represented biochar at the UNIPCC for 3-years and was a finalist for the Branson Prize when he sold BEC in 2011. Soon after the Arctic ice collapsed, he met the senior scientist at NCAR who had proposed Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) for global cooling, raised money for research and co-authored the 2014 summary in PhilTrans. Planetwork had also launched the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW). After the IPO, Jim hired Victor Grey to build a distributed publishing app. In 2015 the two formed Portable Data Corp (PDC) to file the patent on JLINC. They had a working solution for GDPR in 2018, but EU regulators didn’t act. PDC has built a well documented containerized reference implementation of JLINC, with spinoffs DataPal and Tru, and is licensing JLINC for personal data in AI and commerce, health, publishing and supply chain. In early 2024, Jim invested in a tiny sister company with a totally new AI technology. Nooroot offers traceable processing, trained on much smaller data sets, at 50x less energy. He formed Noolinc Studio to launch a fund to invest in spinoffs built on the tech stack. As an LP, Jim has a chemistry/materials science-based thesis that was anticipated by an evolutionary narrative he first described in the 90’s at: metanature.org