Alain J. Leroy is a native New Yorker and first-generation American whose parents left Haiti in the 1960’s in pursuit of the American dream. His path was set at a young age once he began programming computers in 4th grade. He went on competing in national high school computer programming competitions and got his first startup experience when he left Rochester Institute of Technology for two years in 1994 to help a British entrepreneur develop an automatic payment processing software application that they commercially sold to a major corporation. After completing his college studies at RIT, Alain joined IBM, as an IT consultant implementing advanced B2B software technologies at Fortune 500 client sites across the United States.

In 2001, Alain moved temporarily to Ann Arbor, Michigan to obtain his MBA at the University of Michigan Stephen M. Ross School of Business. While at Ross studying corporate strategy and marketing under his academic mentors CK Prahalad and Venkat Ramaswamy, whole at Ross, Alain interned at an IBM Innovation Lab and discovered his passion and natural ability to combine science with business to produce solutions that would benefit society.

After graduating from Ross, Alain became a marketing strategist and global brand developer with the emerging business division of IBM Software Group at IBM corporate headquarters in New York. He spent six years at IBM Software Group working with senior executives and industry leaders to bring to market hundreds of advanced B2B software products and industry solutions. During this period, Alain simultaneously co-founded his first social enterprise, a cultural identity lifestyle branding company aimed at unifying the Black and Latino community. Under his leadership, the startup received the Key to the City of Miami Beach in 2006. Then in 2012, while serving as a Business Change Manager in the healthcare industry, Alain co-founded his second social enterprise, becoming an operational investor at a tech startup that developed a remittance transfer software platform launched at the largest retailer in the Dominican Republic.

Seeking to further expand his business development experience overseas, Alain relocated to the U.S. Virgin Islands (USVI) in 2014 to help build and grow economic development companies in the Caribbean region. In September 2017, the islands were struck by two category 5 hurricanes, Irma and Maria.

Alain was selected to join the USVI Governor’s Hurricane Recovery and Resiliency Task Force in 2018 to examine USVI’s response and use lessons learned and best practices to guide their $8 billion rebuilding process. Alain would go on to build a 50-member business transformation consulting practice from the ground up under top-tier consulting firm BDO Global to deliver project and portfolio management services to the USVI Government using 100% locally sourced talent from the Caribbean region.

In 2020, Alain returned to New York with his wife and daughter and became an operational investor in a rising startup membership institution creating solutions that help Black and Brown men in all industries around the globe further pursue and achieve their goals.

Now the CEO and Founder of Fourth Strategies, Alain is building capacity to help more startups. Fourth Strategies is part of a family of social impact companies aimed at helping communities solve tough challenges in the years to come, including growth, innovation, job creation, and productivity. Organizations partner with Fourth Strategies to achieve their mission, which in turn creates more job opportunities and drives innovation and technology development.

In 2022, Fourth Strategies launched Bklab Technologies, a software company with a bold vision of creating more inclusive economies by taking socially-minded businesses to the next level. Bklabs is the first-ever software platform aimed at helping underrepresented developers, businesses, and startups accelerate growth. Bklabs gives entrepreneurs the transformative power of technology to propel their initiatives to new heights. Alain also dedicates his time to equip students with the digital skills they need to find life-changing opportunities. He sits on the Design Thinking Advisory Panel at Pace Lubin School of Business, serves as an adjunct instructor for Columbia University, and volunteers as a mentor for early-stage startups through the BE NYC Mentors Program for Black entrepreneurs. He is a member of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity and the founding chapter of 100 Black Men of America.

Throughout his professional career, Alain has earned certifications in project management, agile / scrum methodologies, six sigma black belt / process improvement, and organizational change management. He has also completed executive education from MIT, Kellog, and Insead in Digital Transformation, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, IoT, and Machine Learning.