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Stephen Culp is a founder of Smart Furniture, Delegator, Causeway, Chattanooga STAND, a founding partner of the Chattanooga Renaissance Fund, and a believer in an entrepreneurial approach to everything.
As a former officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve, Peace Corps Volunteer, and, randomly, an attorney, Stephen has served as an advisor or director for Causeway, the local Trust for Public Land, CreateHere, Chattanooga 3D, RiverCity Company, the Chamber of Commerce, the Company Lab, InnovateHere, the American Lung Association, the Theatre Centre, and Chattanooga STAND. In 2010 he represented the Chattanooga region as a Marshall Fellow in Europe.
An NCAA Division I fencer in college, Stephen graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill with Highest Distinction, ranked 8th in a class of 4,000. While studying abroad in 1989 and ‘90, he produced an on-site photo & audio journal of the political revolutions breaking out across Eastern Europe. Traveling in Romania, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East and West Berlin (vs. sitting in class), he spent Christmas 1989 hammering pieces off the Berlin Wall, pieces he keeps to this day.
In 1992, after a short research project for the United Nations, Stephen joined the United States Peace Corps. While learning Hungarian and teaching high school for two years in a small town in Hungary, his school named him Teacher of the Year.
Returning to the U.S. in 1994, Stephen earned a law degree at Stanford, and completed a graduate fellowship at the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, studying international terrorism. He worked briefly for the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Washington, DC, and again as an Intelligence Research Specialist for the FBI Olympic Squad in Atlanta 1996, where he ran a leg of the Olympic torch relay.
Starting in 1998 in a Stanford professor's garage, Stephen set out to change an industry by inventing the first patented Smart Furniture®, pioneering the web-based “Design on Demand®” model, and bringing custom design to a whole new market-- everyone. Applying the Peace Corps mission to help others to help themselves, his goal was (and is) to put design directly in the hands of consumers. Today, Smart Furniture is an industry leader in innovation, personalized design, customer service, and marketplace ethics.
In 2001, Stephen moved Smart Furniture to the renaissance city of Chattanooga, Tennessee, and remains actively engaged as Chairman. As one of the older members of a young team, he remains chief purveyor of stories that begin with “Hey whippersnapper-- in my day, we had to...” to keep all the talented whippersnappers in line.
In addition to his role at Smart Furniture, Stephen is a co-founder and CEO of Delegator.com, founded to help growing businesses (like Smart Furniture) focus on their mission and delegate the rest. With a focus on the local community, in 2008 he co-founded Chattanooga STAND, one of the largest community visioning efforts in history, and in 2010, he started Causeway, an organization designed to support civic entrepreneurism. In 2011, to help foster local for-profit entrepreneurial growth, he helped launch the Chattanooga Renaissance Fund.
Stephen was born in Birmingham, Alabama, youngest of five boys, and is now, finally, married. His interests include international affairs, athletics, and asking too many questions. He has climbed the Grand Teton in Wyoming and Mt. Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, holds a black belt, is (was) an avid surfer, and appeared on the November 2004 cover of Inc. Magazine. He also used to speak several languages, but now they’re all mixed up in his head. Finally, Stephen can tell you what happens when you (1) roll a forklift perpendicular over a drainage ditch, (2) drive 30,000lbs of inventory across the country in a truck rated for 10,000lbs, and (3) drive away from a gas station with the pump still in the tank, twice.
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