Jim has served on the Board of Directors of Blackstone (BX) since 2016 where he has been instrumental in helping to initiate Blackstone’s Life Sciences Funds and Blackstone’s Technology Growth Funds. He has previously served as an investor and/or lead Director at Circle, Dell, Etsy, Facebook, Legendary Entertainment, Marvel Entertainment, Spotify, Wal-Mart, and 21st Century Fox as well as many others.
Jim was a co-founder and investment committee member along with George Roberts and Henry Kravis of Accel-KKR (since 2001). In 2001, Jim and Accel hired Jim’s HBS Sectionmate and long-time friend Kevin Comolli to start Accel Europe in London, one of the first silicon valley venture firms in Europe.
Jim is a Fellow Emeritus of Harvard Corporation, Harvard’s Senior Governing Board where he also Co-Chaired Harvard’s Finance Committee. He is a member of Harvard Business School’s Board of Dean’s Advisors, a founding member of Harvard University’s Global Advisory Council since inception in 2013; a founding member of the Dean’s Advisory Board at Stanford’s School of Engineering; Chairman of the Stanford Engineering Venture Fund as well as a Founding Member of the Advisory Board of the Stanford Institute for Human-Assisted Artificial Intelligence (HAI) which was launched in March 2019.
Jim is the past Chairman (Tim Cook is the current Chairman) and Jim remains a Board Member of the Tsinghua University Advisory Board for the School of Economics and Management. He also is a member of the University of Texas President’s Innovation Board and a founding member of the UT President’s Commercialization Advisory Board. In addition, Jim is a long-time active volunteer as a Trustee of The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, SF MOMA, the American Film Institute (AFI) in Los Angeles, and Stanford’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society (PACS ). Jim is a long-time member of CFR and a member of several World Economic Forum committees. He also has a long-standing interest in conservation and environmental sustainability and is a longtime member of the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), The Nature Conservancy, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and Trout Unlimited. Jim is also an advisor and supporter of Celtics United for Social Justice, an organization committed to addressing Racial Injustice and Social Inequities in the Greater Boston area
Since 2016, Jim’s investment interests have centered on collaborating and deepening ties with many of the world’s excellent Universities in the Unites States including Stanford, Harvard, MIT, UCSF, University of Texas Austin, and several others that have deep expertise in technologies that sit at the intersection of Al and the life sciences and quantum sciences.
Jim is a graduate of Stanford and Harvard Business School where he graduated as a Baker Scholar. Jim is passionate about golf, flyfishing, art, philanthropy, the Boston Celtics (where he is been a minority owner since 2001), and entrepreneurship in the classroom (he taught in 2022 in Florence Italy at the Stanford-in-Florence Breyer Center for Renaissance Studies).
