John is the Chairman, CEO and co-founder of Grace Matthews, Inc., a Milwaukee-based boutique investment bank specializing in the chemical and material science value chains. Over his 30+ year career, John has been the lead investment banker on hundreds of chemical mergers, acquisitions, financings and other corporate finance engagements around the world. Grace Matthews will celebrate its 25th anniversary in 2024.

Prior to his career in investment banking, John was a research engineer in Digital Equipment Corporation's Advanced Semiconductor Development group in suburban Boston. John was part of the R&D effort at Digital that developed the Alpha chip technology, which at the time was the fastest commercially available microprocessor ever engineered. John received his B.S. in Materials Science and Engineering and his M.B.A. from the Johnson Graduate School of Management, both at Cornell University.

John has served as a director for a number of private businesses and non-profit organizations. Currently, he is a director of Purity Zinc Metals (Nashville), Technical Products, Inc. (Cleveland), the Bradley Impact Fund (Milwaukee), and Acts Housing (Milwaukee). John also is active at Arizona State University’s W.P. Carey School of Business, as a guest lecturer in their Investment Banking Industry Scholars program. He served as an advisor to the Czech Ore Research Institute (Prague, Czechoslovakia) on technology transfer strategies during their transition from communism to free markets in the early 1990’s. His direct experience working in early post-Communist Eastern Europe was eye opening, and instilled his genuine commitment to capitalism and freedom as a moral issue. John was a member of the Koch Seminar Network (now Stand Together) for several years to support these goals.

John and his wife, Gwyneth, have been happily married for 36 years, and have one daughter, Grace, and three golden retrievers (Max, Winston, and Izzy). The Beagle family splits time between Milwaukee and Scottsdale.