Having taken technology and CPG companies through hyper-growth, investments, global expansion, mergers, acquisitions and IPO including scaling and selling Beats by Dr. Dre to Apple for $3B, Rafferty Jackson knows that companies built on a fundamental purpose, the company why, are more likely to scale and succeed, creating better jobs and better products. Helping startups and later stage companies identify, capture, and drive the company why into the enterprise is now her why.Armed with her personal belief that space and autonomy startups will help solve humanity’s hardest problems, she helps founders, leaders, and investors of the next industrial revolution tell these complex tech stories to broader non-technical audiences through universal storytelling techniques. She created the First Principles Pitch, a method for teaching the fundamentals of storytelling premised on the company why to ensure audiences always understand the company story and can retell it. Awarded the Highly Commended acknowledgement for the 2023 Outstanding Woman in Tech from the Women in Tech Employers Award UK, Rafferty is the Non-Executive Director at Opteran Technologies, a University of Sheffield spinout building the software platform for autonomous machines based on biomimicry mapping, and an Investment Committee member for the Seraphim Space Venture Fund II. She is an advisor to Xona Space Systems, bringing position, navigation, and timing to support intelligent machines through a low earth orbit satellite constellation, and to Eartheye Space, delivering satellite tasking as a service with business insights to solve users' business problems. Annually, she directs the industry-leading Startup Space Competition at the Satellite Show in Washington DC and presents and/or mentors hundreds of early stage space startups at accelerators, incubators, venture studios, and numerous US military startup events. Rafferty first joined technology startups in 1997 working with Microsoft’s WebTV Networks, a web access set-top box for the television, and then joined Macromedia supporting the launch of revolutionary software products like Dreamweaver and Flash. Next, she took Ubiquity Software, maker of the SIP-application server, public on the London Stock Exchange in 2005, and then sold it to Avaya. She then joined the executive team responsible for the brands The North Face, Vans, JanSport, Reef, and Eagle Creek and made a name for herself on the executive leadership team at Beats by Dr. Dre.Photo: Conor McCabe 2019
Listed skills include Strategy, Intellectual Property, Start Ups, Mergers And Acquisitions, and 20 others.