Andrew J. Lewis
Founder, The Coherence Portfolio
Scholarship and Early Career
Raised in Minnesota, Andrew J. Lewis studied American Studies, History, and Music at St. Olaf College, where he served as president of the St. Olaf Choir. He earned his PhD in American Studies from Yale University, studying early America and the relationships among natural history, wilderness, and religious experience across time.
Lewis spent a decade teaching in Washington, DC, publishing scholarly work before being denied tenure. His subsequent career combined entrepreneurship, technology, and business leadership.
Lapa Rios: Conservation and Hospitality Innovation
As a co-founder of Lapa Rios Lodge in Costa Rica, Lewis helped establish a pioneering model of conservation-based hospitality. The enterprise demonstrated that environmental stewardship and commercial success could reinforce one another. Lewis later served as principal negotiator of its profitable sale, helping secure the preservation of 950 acres of rainforest while fulfilling the commitments made by the founding family to the natural world, the local community and the people of Costa Rica.
Technology and Executive Leadership
At CIBT, a global travel services company, Lewis became an executive leading knowledge management, product development, marketing, and customer experience. He intended to continue building businesses in travel and hospitality, but the progression of limb-girdle muscular dystrophy (LGMD) required another adaptation.
Founding The Coherence Portfolio
In 2025, Lewis founded The Coherence Portfolio, bringing together his experience as a historian, entrepreneur, technology executive, and disabled person.
The company develops products and ventures across accessible travel, recreation, mobility, community memory, and the built environment. Its premise is straightforward: disabled people are not simply consumers of innovation. They can identify unmet needs, design solutions, build businesses, and create economic value.
Lewis approaches this work with urgency. American institutions produce an extraordinary amount of discussion about accessibility, inclusion, and innovation. Far less becomes tangible progress in the lives of disabled people. TCP exists to close that gap through products, experiments, partnerships, and businesses that deliver results.
A Continuing Public Investment
Lewis’s first seed investor was the United States National Endowment for the Humanities, which supported his early scholarly work on the 19th century Grange Movement in Minnesota. He regards that investment as an enduring public obligation.
His body was never going to be of much use to the United States. His mind, however, remains very much available.
The Coherence Portfolio is how he intends to repay his first investor.
Active Fellows
The Coherence Portfolio’s Fellows Program provides paid, hands-on experience in entrepreneurship, product development, and business operations. Fellows work on real projects while participating in a practical entrepreneurship curriculum designed to develop professional skills, independent judgment, and entrepreneurial confidence.
TCP pays emerging entrepreneurs to learn by doing, while holding itself accountable as a (not exactly) employer.
Gage Bolten
Senior at the Landon School, preparing for university studies.
Nomi Bortnick
Second-year student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill studying social work and music.
Peter Kumar
Second-year student at Northwestern University studying artificial intelligence, journalism, and innovation.
Asher Lewis
Third-year student studying Decision Analytics, music, and golf at Wake Forest University.
Phoebe Lewis
Second-year student at Bowdoin College studying the environment, wilderness, and religious experience.
Olivia Zaft
Second-year student at Georgetown University interested in communications, social impact, and international affairs.