ABOUT EVERETT

Everett Harper is an author, speaker and a Practitioner Fellow at CASBS (Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford) for 2025-2026.

He is a rare combination of a Black entrepreneur with a Silicon Valley pedigree and a National Champion with a proven record for solving complex problems. 

Everett has been a "first and only" his whole career — first in his family to college, first national champion at Duke, first class of Practitioner Fellows at Stanford's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and among the only 1% of C-suite in the Silicon Valley that are Black. Being first and only has given Everett unique pattern recognition to pioneer practices with purpose and results.

During his 15-year tenure as Founder and CEO of Truss, a software infrastructure company that built IRS DirectFile and fixed healthcare.gov, Everett the foresight to build a company that’s been remote-first since 2011 and salary-transparent since 2017. Before Truss, Everett was at Linden Lab, maker of Second Life, a pioneering virtual world; Bain and Company; and Self-Help, a community development finance institution. 

His first book, Move to the Edge, Declare It Center (Wiley, 2022), in response to COVID, George Floyd, and wildfires – was the groundwork for what is today called polycrisis. His current work at CASBS focuses on how AI can be infrastructure for community wisdom and Connected Resilience.

Everett’s distinctive voice and unique history makes him a sought-after speaker on leadership, connected resilience, remote work, high performance workplaces, and social entrepreneurship. He has been featured at conferences such as TedX, Dent the Future, Tugboat, TechStars and Velocity, podcasts like the Commonwealth Club and AfroTech, and writing for Forbes, Thrive Global, and TechCrunch. 

Though both his parents had pioneering careers as software programmers for IBM, Everett is the first in his family to attend college, as an A.B. Duke Scholar at Duke University. While majoring in biomedical and electrical engineering at Duke, he also won a NCAA National Championship in soccer. He was inducted into the North Carolina Soccer Hall of Fame in 2019. Everett graduated with an MBA and a M.Ed in Learning, Design and Technology from Stanford University. He is a Board Member of CARE, working to fight poverty worldwide.

Everett grew up a small town kid in New York’s Hudson Valley. He currently lives in Oakland, CA, making limoncello when life hands him lemons.