John Burke once had about 48 hours to work out what to do with a berry. The assignment, shared with three other Santa Clara students, was to devise a business plan for Dole Foods: harvesting, processing, marketing and distributing açai in juice blends. It was a Thursday night in Los Angeles. The presentation was due Saturday morning. Years later, Burke would build a software holding company whose preferred unit of time is the decade. His career has given the deadline a considerable extension.
The students took second place and $3,000 at the International Business University Competition. Burke, Patrick Flanagan, Scott Kirk and Rob Harding had turned a supply-chain problem into a plan under the guidance of management professor John Toppel. Before there were software acquisitions, there was a practical question about getting something from its origin to the person who would pay for it. A berry is a modest place to start a business biography. It does, however, discourage grandiosity.
A guard from Lake Forest
Burke comes from Lake Forest, Illinois. At Lake Forest High School, he was a three-year varsity basketball starter and twice the team's MVP. His junior and senior teams put together a 42-17 record and won consecutive regional championships. In his senior year, the team won its first conference title since 1988. He went on to play guard at Santa Clara, wearing number 22.
College changed the scale of his playing time. Across the 2004-05 and 2005-06 seasons, he appeared in 18 games without a start. The record includes four points and four rebounds against Cal State Stanislaus in November 2005. It also includes membership of the West Coast Conference Commissioner's Honor Roll. The résumé had room for both a basketball and a textbook.
He graduated magna cum laude from Santa Clara's Leavey School of Business in 2008, with a degree in commerce and accounting. The combination is pleasingly concrete: team sport, business competition, accounting. None supplies a magical explanation for the founder he would become. Together, they place his early ambitions somewhere more useful than a legend invented after the fact.
The trip from a spreadsheet to Sydney
Burke began his professional career at EY, working in audit and transaction advisory. In 2011, he joined TCV's business-to-business software team. His own explanation for getting into investing includes timing and persistence: the firm needed someone promptly and gave him an opening. There is something refreshing about a career turning on a vacancy. Destiny rarely mentions the recruitment process.
His next move took him into the business itself. Between his first period at TCV and his return in 2018, Burke worked at SiteMinder in Sydney, initially in analytics and then as chief financial officer. The hotel software company was expanding internationally. Investing had offered a view of companies from the outside; the finance role put him inside an operating organisation with customers, colleagues and decisions that had to survive contact with the working day.
His later board biography records five years at SiteMinder across various roles. He also served as a non-executive director, leaving the board on October 21, 2021. Those distinctions matter. CFO, investor and director are different jobs, with different distances from the daily work. Burke's route through them gives his later interest in company building a practical context.
When SiteMinder listed on the Australian Securities Exchange in November 2021, Burke celebrated the founders, the leadership team and the people who had worked alongside him. He gave the finance team a particular mention. Public offerings make good photographs; the work behind them has rather more spreadsheets. His congratulations distributed the credit across the people who had carried it.
A company with a longer calendar
In 2021, Burke founded Merit Holdings. Based in the Greater Chicago area, he leads a company that buys, manages and builds software businesses serving specialist markets. Merit's stated ambition is to give those businesses a permanent home. The idea carries a plain implication for Burke's job: finding a company is the beginning of the relationship, with years of operating work still ahead.
Merit describes a structure in which portfolio companies retain operational independence while sharing capital, expertise, resources and community. Its capital comes from a small group of entrepreneurs and investors aligned with its approach. That arrangement asks Burke and his colleagues to do two things at once: understand each business closely enough to help, and leave room for its own management to run it.
For an owner considering a sale, the calendar can be as consequential as the price. A specialist software business may have accumulated relationships over many years. Employees know the product's odd corners. Customers know whom to call. The buyer inherits those expectations along with the assets. Merit's proposition is that continued ownership can make space for that accumulated knowledge.
Deserving the name
The name Merit draws on Charlie Munger's idea that a person should deserve what they want. Burke's company translates that into an expectation of being worthy of the people it works with: sellers, employees, customers and partners. Its published values favour curiosity, humility, authenticity and relationships. It also puts people and families first.
A holding company can print its values in minutes. Living with the consequences takes longer. In Merit's case, the name is an unusually direct reminder of the test: ownership gives the buyer authority, while deserving trust requires repeated conduct. There is no elegant shortcut between the two. A good name can at least make the standard harder to forget.
That is where Burke's career becomes interesting as a sequence rather than a list. He has inspected companies as an accountant, invested in them, worked inside one and founded an organisation intended to keep them. Each position asks a different question of the same business. Merit brings those questions together around the duration of the relationship.
Friends become colleagues, slowly
Burke's appointment of Sureel Sheth as Merit's president and partner in 2025 offers a more personal view of how he builds. They first met when their earlier firms, TCV and JMI, partnered with legal software company Clio. Over the ensuing years, Sheth became a friend and trusted adviser. The working relationship arrived after the personal one had had time to develop.
Explaining the appointment, Burke emphasised Sheth's empathy, humility, curiosity and ease with other people. Sheth, in turn, described being drawn to Merit's mission and the opportunity to work with his friend. His responsibilities include new software partnerships and the organisation's development across people, talent and learning. Hiring a president made the long-term ambition a shared management assignment.
Burke also welcomed Ashley Murphy as growth operator partner in 2025, following her six years at Toast. Her remit covers customer understanding, go-to-market execution and repeatable growth systems, alongside AI work across the portfolio. These are specific operating responsibilities. They make the promise of shared expertise easier to picture: someone has to help a company understand its buyers and turn that understanding into daily practice.
Two products, one practical problem
Merit's acquisition of Inteum in 2025 brought it into intellectual property management and technology transfer. On February 5, 2026, Merit announced its acquisition of FirstIgnite, whose software supports university partnerships, business development, market intelligence and IP analytics. The two businesses had already worked together through product integrations and customer initiatives.
The announced aim was to deepen that cooperation across the technology transfer process, linking the management of intellectual property with opportunity discovery and engagement with potential partners. The announcement included customary closing conditions. Burke's emphasis was on the value the teams had already demonstrated together and on giving them room to invest over time.
“Inteum and FirstIgnite have already proven the value of working together in service of their customers.”
John Burke, February 2026
His subsequent welcome for Angus Norton as Inteum's CEO returned to familiar qualities: humility, product judgement and willingness to learn, including about AI. He also thanked Robert Sloman for the foundation built at Inteum and for helping bring Norton aboard. The handover connected a new leader to the existing business, rather than treating the appointment as a fresh origin story.
What staying asks of a founder
Burke's biography moves through different kinds of teams: a high-school starting five, a college roster, four students with a presentation deadline, a software company's finance organisation, an investment partnership. At Merit, he is assembling another one. The recurring detail is collaboration, visible in the colleagues he names and the responsibilities he gives them.
The early açai assignment ended with a presentation and a prize. A holding company has a more awkward finish line. If the promise is continued ownership, the work carries on through product decisions, management changes and the next customer's request. Burke has chosen a business in which patience creates additional obligations. Staying gives him more time to build, and more time in which to be judged.