John Connors

John Connors is a managing partner at Ignition. John joined Ignition in 2005 after a distinguished career as a software-industry executive.

John spent sixteen years at Microsoft in several high-level, strategic roles. From January 2000 to April 2005 he was senior vice president of finance and administration, as well as the company’s chief financial officer. He also served as vice president of the Worldwide Enterprise Group and vice president and chief information officer (CIO). Before becoming CIO, John held a number of positions within and outside finance, including corporate controller; general manager of worldwide financial operations; director of business operations at Microsoft’s European headquarters in Paris; and director of business operations for the Worldwide Sales and Support Strategy Group.

John is a member of the board of directors of Nike (NKE), Splunk (SPLK), MAKA, Motif Investing, Chef, Tempered Networks, Icertis, KenSci, and LiveStories. He was also a board member of XenSource, acquired by Citrix in 2007; Heroku, acquired by Salesforce in 2010; Parse, acquired by Facebook in 2013; Tier 3, acquired by CenturyLink in 2013; Scout Analytics, acquired by ServiceSource in 2014; Xamarin, acquired by Microsoft in 2016; Azuqua, acquired by Okta in 2019; and FiREapps, acquired by Kyriba in 2019. John also led Ignition’s investment in Splunk (IPO 2012). John was named to the 2013 Forbes Midas List, a ranking of the world’s top venture capital investors, and to Business Insider’s 2013 list of top enterprise technology VCs.

John received his BA in accounting from the University of Montana. He also received the Distinguished Alumni Award from the University of Montana.