Carter Williams

Carter Williams has dedicated his entire career to driving innovation across industries, first as a young engineer at McDonnell Douglas, and subsequently at Boeing, where he managed R&D initiatives within Boeing Phantom Works and was instrumental in founding Boeing Ventures. Over his extensive career, Carter has directly managed investments exceeding $600 million in early-stage ventures and corporate research, generating billions of dollars in new product revenues. At Boeing, he led strategic technology planning efforts, overseeing both internal and external technology and manufacturing research, laying critical foundations for innovative ventures.

Following Boeing, Carter transitioned into entrepreneurship, becoming President of Gridlogix, transforming a modest 4-person startup into a successful enterprise acquired by Johnson Controls in 2008, where it became integral to the Johnson Controls Panoptix system. Leveraging his entrepreneurial experience, he then served as Senior Managing Director at Progress Partners, an energy and technology-focused investment banking firm, and held leadership roles as Managing Partner at Open Innovation Ventures and Director at Clayton Capital Partners.

Today, Carter serves as Managing Director of iSelect Fund, where he focuses on transformative investments in agriculture, food innovation, and healthcare. He is an influential advocate for the "Food is Health" initiative, promoting systemic innovation aimed at reducing the $1.9 trillion annual healthcare costs resulting from poor nutrition. Carter emphasizes opportunities deeply rooted in latent customer demand, validated market needs, and strategic solutions aligned with evolving consumer and health priorities.

Carter is also the past President and Founder of the MIT Corporate Venturing Consortium and co-founder of the MIT Entrepreneurship Society. He holds an M.B.A. from the MIT Sloan School and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Passionate about the dynamics of innovation and systemic market shifts, Carter regularly shares insights on his Substack, Creative Destruction, highlighting the role of disruptive change in driving economic progress and industry evolution.