Sean Daniel Murphy is leading the charge for positive disruption in small business support by focusing on access to capital and good job creation for those who need it most. Sean’s personal philosophy is to “bet on people who build people.” Under his leadership, ICA Fund Good Jobs is out to prove that when we bet on good job creators with support and capital, they in turn bet on people in their community, creating a world in which everyone has a good job.
Sean joined the ICA Fund Good Jobs team as a volunteer in 2006, joined the management team in 2009, and established the investment fund as a separate 501(c)3 in 2013. He assumed the role of CEO in 2016, overseeing the recombination of Inner City Advisors (ICA) and Fund Good Jobs into a single legal entity with a unified board and staff team. Under Sean’s leadership, ICA Fund Good Jobs has deployed more than $2M to five businesses, and directly unlocked nearly $15M of additional growth capital for seed portfolio companies. In 2016, these companies employed more than 160 people and increased their annual revenues by 37% year over year. In the same year, Back to the Roots closed a $10M Series A round.
Fund Good Jobs was a recipient of the 2015 Innovation Ecosystem Award while Sean and his work have been featured in Forbes, Huffington Post, Policy Link, NPR, PBS, Shelterforce, The Toronto Star and the East Bay Express.
Sean earned his bachelor’s degree in sociology and minor in education from University of California Los Angeles, and has also completed the entrepreneurship curriculum at Stanford University. Prior to his work with ICA Fund Good Jobs, Sean was a lead consultant for The MattMar Group, a global consulting firm, where he worked on financing transactions and operation planning for start-ups in Canada, Europe, Africa and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Sean served as a member of President Obama’s White House Business Council, a group of business advisors that helped shape small business policy and promoted economic prosperity and job creation in urban areas. In 2014, Sean became an American Express NGEN Fellow and a Cordes Foundation Fellow. Today, Sean serves on the boards of Back to the Roots and The Workers Lab, sits on the ICA Fund Good Jobs Investment Committee.
Sean Daniel Murphy is a member of the Job Quality Fellowship Class of 2017-18. To learn more about the Job Quality Fellows, visit as.pn/jobquality.
The Job Quality Fellowship is part of the Economic Opportunity Fellows Network, a network of leadership and fellowship programs run by the Aspen Institute Economic Opportunities Program. Within this Network, EOP connects national and local leaders from across sectors — nonprofit, government, business, philanthropy, academia, and more — to advance policies and practices with the potential to help low- and moderate-income Americans thrive in today’s economy. Learn more at as.pn/eofn.
Bio updated September 2017.
