John B. "Jay" Rogers, Jr., Co-Founder & CEO, Local Motors

John “Jay” Rogers is President, CEO, and Co-Founder of Local Motors, a next-generation US-based car company that is changing the way cars are designed, built, and owned.

A car guy through-and-through, Jay grew up a student of the industry. His grandfather owned the legendary Indian Motorcycle Company and was the first Cummins Engine Distributor in the United States. It was Jay’s family and personal passions that inspired the most ambitious plan behind Local Motors: To create an open source community that works together to design and develop exciting, efficient vehicles and builds them locally in a sustainable manner with customer participation.

Rogers is a graduate of Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School (Baker Scholar). He was elected as a Young Global Leader by The World Economic Forum in 2014. His career has taken him from a startup in China to Ewing & Partners where he became a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA), to McKinsey & Co, and the US Marine Corps where he served for six years as an Infantry Company Commander.

Local Motors is home to more than 60,000 car design concepts, 25,000 community members, over 80 full time employees across three locations in the United States, four production vehicle models, and 100’s of smaller vehicle innovations sold in its shop.

Jay’s story, and the Local Motors story of American innovation and co-creation, has been shared on numerous national and international television and radio programs, on the pages of the world’s most well respected technology and automotive publications, and via dozens of speaking engagements around the world.