About Speaker Jim Hornthal…
Entrepreneur, angel investor, and entrepreneurship educator, Jim is the co-founder and Chairman of Triporati/Algorithm Engines, Zignal Labs, LaunchPad Central (now GLIDR.io) and M34 Capital, and he sits on several private company boards. His private investment fund, Hornthal Investment Partners, has made investments in over 50 early stage companies, including Lending Club, Lyft, Change.org, Hightower Advisors, Krave Jerky, KIND Snacks and Hipmunk, and he invests in several venture capital funds, including several managed by CMEA Capital, TPG, and Kleiner Perkins.
As an entrepreneur, Jim is best known as the Founder of Preview Travel, one of the first online travel agencies. Jim took Preview Travel public in 1997, and later initiated its merger in 2000 with a division of Sabre Holdings to create Travelocity.com, where Jim served as Vice Chairman.
Jim has been a Lester Center Fellow for Entrepreneurship at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley since 2002, where he now teaches The Lean Launchpad course to MBA and graduate engineering students. Jim has also taught the course at Princeton and Stanford, and has been part of the National Science Foundation’s iCorps Teaching Team at UCSF and Stanford.
Philanthropically, Jim focuses on mentoring social entrepreneurs who are working to make the world a smaller place by bridging gaps between conflicting regions and nations.
As prior Chairman of the YPO/WPO Peace Action Network (PAN), he gets to work with business leaders who want to play an active role in affecting change and entrepreneurship in their own regions. PAN members share the belief that business leaders have a responsibility to engage and help create jobs, a vital part of improving the prospects for a sustainable peace. PAN has fostered the creation of an India-Pakistan Forum, an Israeli-Arab forum, and the Arab American Action Forum (A3F) that Mr. Hornthal co-founded and currently serves as co-Chair.
Jim serves as a Trustee for The One Voice Movement, a grass roots organization made up of over 600,000 Palestinian and Israeli youth who work to amplify the voice of the mainstream while marginalizing extreme positions on both sides. He is an advisor to Just Vision, an active member of The Council on Foreign Relations and the Skoll World Forum, was a founding participant in the Clinton Global Initiative and a delegate to President Obama’s Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship.
His TED Book is “A Haystack Full of Needles”, and he freely shares his views and perspectives on innovation and entrepreneurship with anyone foolish enough to care on Twitter: @hornthal.