Jim Jorgensen

Jim Jorgensen (born in 1948 in Racine, Wisconsin is a serial entrepreneur. He has started over 25 enterprises since getting his MBA at Stanford Graduate School of Business at the age of 24. Jorgensen’s industry selection for these new enterprises has been wide, running from retail to manufacturing, from Internet to mail order, and from oil exploration to insurance. Some of the entities remained small, while two of them reached market caps in excess of $1 billion.

Entrepreneurial history

1970s and 1980s

Jorgensen earned his CPA certificate while working at KPMG before and during his time as a graduate student. (Hoffman 2006) His first start in entrepreneurialism was to form the first New Enterprise Club at Stanford with classmate Rene “Ron” Sutton (the club later became the Stanford Entrepreneur Club).

During his second year of graduate school, Jorgensen met Billie Jean King and her husband Larry. (Hoffman 2006) Jorgensen’s sports entrepreneurship started while still attending school. One of his first projects was to help negotiate the Battle of the Sexes (the tennis extravaganza between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs) with sports and entertainment mogul Jerry Perenchio. The event become the most watched tennis event in history. Also at this time he helped in the formation of a new professional sports league, World Team Tennis (Hoffman 2006)

Over the next five years, Jorgensen formed several new ventures with Billie...
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