Jeff Barrett

Jeff provides the essential structural backbone of our ventures, managing complex legal architectures and maintaining the rigorous discipline of our kill switch validation.

Jeff has spent his career on the structures that decide whether a good company survives its own growth. As an M&A attorney at Michael Best & Friedrich, he closed more than 30 transactions ranging from $2 million to $360 million. He has sat on the acquirer's and the investor's side of those deals, so he tends to see what a founder is agreeing to before the founder does. He is also co-founder and General Counsel of Biked, a bike company that started in a garage and has grown into a successful firm serving serious riders across the US. He has structured the company's investor and strategic partner deals from the beginning, and he knows what it costs a founder to learn that work on the fly. At Egnatia, that experience shows up on day zero rather than at the term sheet.

He has built cross-border ventures in practice rather than in theory. As head of global innovation at a large international nonprofit, he runs a worldwide contractor program along with the legal, tax, and HR architecture behind it. As Chief Strategy Officer of LinkAcross, he leads strategy and compliance across Albania and North Macedonia. He holds a law degree from the University of Wisconsin Law School, has lived in Tirana since 2016, and works in Albanian. Building locally for global scale comes down to concrete mechanics: entity design, equity, intellectual property, hiring, banking, and the tax treatment of all of it. Jeff has solved most of them at least once already.

One of the things Egnatia offers founders is a shorter to-do list. Jeff takes the legal and governance work off it so they can spend their hours on the product and the customer. He also brings the harder discipline the studio is built on: an honest read on whether a structure, a market, or an idea has earned more capital, and the willingness to say so when it has not.