Jay Abbe

Jay and his wife, Karen, reside on their ranch and vineyards outside of Healdsburg, California, 70 miles north of San Francisco, where they grow grapes and produce a modest amount of wine. Jay is a retired technology business executive, having served as Chief Executive Officer of Optical Coating Laboratory in the late 1990s and President and Chief Operating Officer of JDS Uniphase, a fiber optics company, until his retirement in 2001. Prior to his operating roles, Jay also served for 18 years as a management consultant and senior partner with McKinsey & Company. Currently, he remains active as a director of several public companies, a trustee of his independent secondary school in Pennsylvania, and several local community organizations in Sonoma County. Having grown up outside of Philadelphia in a very East Coast family, where “the West” meant Ohio, Jay connected strongly to Montana during a summer job in 1961 working on the Minuteman missile complex in the central part of the state. He received his undergraduate degree from Cornell University, a graduate degree from Cornell University, and an MBA from Stanford University.