Jai Shekhawat
Chairman, Technology Advisory Board, Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC
Jai is the Chairman, Technology Advisory Board, Madison Dearborn Partners, LLC. He was the Founder and former CEO of SAP Fieldglass, maker of the world’s most widely used Cloud platform for the procurement of contract labor and services. Under his leadership, the Fieldglass platform grew globally with users in 120 countries, multiple languages and currencies and over $50 billion in annual spend. Fieldglass was acquired by SAP for $1 billion in 2014.
He is Ernst &Young’s 2012 Midwest “Entrepreneur of the Year” as well as a recipient of the Peter Yessne Staffing Innovator Award, recognized for pioneering the Vendor Management Software (VMS) space. Formerly, he was a strategy consultant with McKinsey & Co. in Chicago where he served clients in various industries in the areas of corporate strategy, technology and cross-border alliances. He also worked as a senior executive at Syntel, a software services firm in Michigan.
Jai has held various civic and board positions including serving on the Mayor’s Council of Technology Advisors (MCTA) for the City of Chicago, the Membership Committee of the Economic Club of Chicago and the board of TiE Midwest.
He serves on the boards of FourKites, Fleet Complete, BlueCat Networks, HealthEngine and SomruS. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Field Museum of Chicago, the Harris Theater for Music and Dance and 1871, one of the largest technology incubators in the world. He is an Advisor to Madison Dearborn Partners, Starvest Partners and Chicago Ventures. He is a founding member of the Firestarter Fund, which mentors and invests in Chicago start-ups.
Jai holds an MBA with specializations in finance and strategy from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL, and a bachelor’s degree in management science from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science in Pilani, India.
