John Connell

 Founder & CEO

John Connell is the Founder and CEO of Focal AI, which goes beyond note-taking and meeting prep for Canadian and U.S. advisors. Focal AI automates the entire client lifecycle for financial planners, offers performance coaching powered by Shaping Wealth, the leaders in behavioral finance, and data entry automations with CRM tools along with planning tools like Conquest.

John began his career at Microsoft, where he managed a $1B P&L within Office 365 and contributed strategically to the company’s acquisition of LinkedIn. After relocating to San Francisco, he joined a video conferencing startup that was later acquired by Dialpad. He went on to invest in enterprise SaaS and AI/ML at a $5B AUM venture capital fund before becoming the first business hire at an AI-driven compliance startup, helping scale the company as business hire #1 from pre-revenue to $36M in funding within three years.

He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin with studies in Finance and Management Information Systems, and had touchpoints early career across wealth management at Merrill Lynch and equity trading at Jefferies in New York.

Today, Focal AI is trusted by executives and advisors at firms including IPC, Assante, Ritholtz Wealth Management, and Charles Schwab as the industry’s most secure AI note-taking platform for financial planners, helping individual advisors save up to 15 hours per week and teams expand client capacity by 30%.