G. Garvin Brown IV was the Chairman of Brown-Forman Corp., the distiller of Jack Daniel’s Tennessee Whiskey, from 2007 to 2021, a company founded by his great, great grandfather George Garvin Brown in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1870. Today, he is a Venture Partner at Ascension, an early-stage VC backing the next generation of tech and impact founders, and a Senior Advisor at Ispahani Advisory, focused on corporate governance for family businesses.

Garvin also recently endowed the Diamond-Brown Chair in Democratic Studies at McGill University, is a Trustee at UK for UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency’s national charity in the United Kingdom, and is the Treasurer of the International Foundation for Electoral Systems in Washington, DC.

He was raised in Montreal, Canada, and is a graduate of McGill University (B.A. Political Science & History), the University of British Columbia (M.A. Political Science) and London Business School (M.B.A).