Chris Jerde
Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Founder
I do not have a deep belief in the power of data. I have twenty years of watching good data produce bad decisions.
Numbers reach the C-suite stripped of the conditions that produced them. By the time a capital decision gets made, nobody in the room remembers that the occupancy sensor cannot see a person sitting still.
I spent thirteen years at Gensler as Strategy Director in the consulting practice, building the quantitative methods used on global portfolios for Fortune 50 clients. In 2018, my client at one of those firms asked me to keep doing that work independently: same service, less overhead. I founded Jerde Analytics to do it, and I have worked with Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Capital Group since.
The background is unusual for this field, and it is why the work holds up in a room with finance: applied economics and finance (M.S., UC Santa Cruz), real estate development (M.R.E.D., USC), international relations (B.A., Brown), and thirteen years inside one of the world’s largest architecture firms watching how buildings actually get designed, valued, and cut. I can read a sensor feed, a capital plan, and a design standard. The failures I find usually live in the space between them.
I have contributed to the Gensler Research Institute for over a decade.
Speaking
WorkTech San Francisco, 2024. Benchmarking is hazardous to your workplace portfolio.
WorkTech Los Angeles, 2025. The Three-Way Pull: How to Reconcile Data, People and Leadership in Decision-Making.