WELCOME TO THE CONTORER FOUNDATION
For a Prosperous and Sustainable Future
WHO WE ARE AND WHAT WE DO
As Futurists in both their careers and their philanthropic activities, Lori and Aaron Contorer never stop imagining what "could be" in life. Based on insights from technology, sociology, psychology and economics, they not only consider possible and probable futures, but work to influence the manifestation of a preferable future.
​
Challenging assumptions and looking for opportunity, the Contorer Foundation invests in visionary, innovative and effective organizations working to improve the quality of life for humanity, and the state of our world through sustainable growth.
AARON CONTORER
President
Aaron is co-founder and managing partner of Greatscale Ventures, and founder and chairman of FP Complete.
Greatscale is an investment group that combines investment capital, disciplined success methods, and a network of seasoned technology executives and experts to help founders build and scale their tech companies. We invest in market-driven, early-stage companies using proven technologies to augment human effectiveness -- helping large numbers of people to reach their goals of being healthy, wealthy, and wise. As one of two managing partners, Aaron’s responsibilities range from overall strategy through company selection, organizing the cloud of executive and technical services, investor relations, and mentoring leaders.
FP Complete provides advanced engineering services for companies that use powerful cloud computing systems, with special strengths in DevOps, Blockchain, and highly reliable Functional Programming. Our global clients in Financial Technology, Life Sciences, and numerous other reliability-focused industries use us to accelerate their time-to-market, scalability, and security. We augment our clients’ own IT teams and open-source technologies with mentoring-based Success Programs, joint engineering projects, and full-scale solutions architecture and hands-on implementation. As chairman Aaron oversees the firm’s long-term strategy, culture and priorities, and major alliances.
Aaron has served as chairman or CxO at 5 tech startups, and as chairman or board member at 6 nonprofit corporations. He is cofounder of Equinox Project, part of the School of Leadership at the University of San Diego, and in 2009 he was named San Diego’s Environmental Leader of the Year for his work bringing together the business, research, and environmental communities. He is a supporter of MCE Social Capital, providing micro-credit to entrepreneurs in Peru and other developing countries.
Formerly Aaron served as technology adviser to CEO Bill Gates at Microsoft, and as general manager of Microsoft’s in-house engineering tools team and of the software engineering tool Visual C++. He was a technology architect and manager on the creation of MSN and parts of Windows, Exchange, and Active Directory.
In the 1980s he cofounded the shareware business model at Contorer Computing, and was one of the original Internet software engineers at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, contributing to what became Microsoft Internet Explorer. He is an inventor on 18 computer technology patents. An early student of artificial intelligence, Aaron holds degrees in computer science and in cognitive psychology.
A native of Chicago and former long-time resident of Seattle, he is a certified scuba diver and sailboat pilot who lives by the beach in La Jolla, California, with his wife, fellow technology executive, investment manager, and leadership consultant Lori Contorer. He can often be spotted in his wetsuit swimming with the abundant local sea life.
LORI CONTORER
Chairman
An accomplished international corporate CEO, board member and change maker, Lori advises technology companies, senior executives, philanthropists, foundations, corporate and non profit boards and legislative leaders globally in areas including
*Defining strategy that turns vision into reality
*Implementing sustainable systemic change
*Establishing clear measurable outcomes and accountability
*Accurately forecasting industry, economic and technological transitions
*Drafting effective legislation
*Inventing and validating mission-critical products, technologies and security
*Diversity and Inclusion
Lori's visionary leadership has been recognized with myriad awards, including:
*Fortune Magazine’s Most Powerful Women Entrepreneurs
*Finalist, EY San Diego Entrepreneur of the Year
*San Diego Business Journal’s Women Who Mean Business Award
*Induction into the BGSU Dallas-Hamilton Entrepreneurial Hall of Fame.
*SNS News Firestarter
As founder, Chairman and CEO of Everyone Counts, Inc, Lori pioneered the use of modern technology in elections, introducing state of the art security and accessibility to voting. The company quickly became the global leader in election system design, with Lori universally regarded as the world's top expert in election security and innovation. Raising $40 million in venture and private equity funding, Lori grew Everyone Counts from a vision to global industry leadership.
Disrupting the $31 billion elections industry by migrating government and private-sector organizations worldwide from antiquated hardware and error-prone manual, paper-based processes to transparent, auditable software as a service (SaaS).