Honoring John Bradley Jackson’s Impact on Startups
Twice a Titan, Silicon Valley and Wall Street: John Bradley Jackson’s Journey from Student to Entrepreneurship Center Leader
This spring, colleagues, students and the Southern California startup community are giving their best wishes to John Bradley Jackson ’77, who is retiring from leading the Center for Entrepreneurship and being a full-time lecturer at Cal State Fullerton’s College of Business and Economics.
Jackson will still be involved in the region’s entrepreneurial landscape, but will be spending his time in Washington state as a devoted grandfather no doubt preparing his family’s next generation of entrepreneurial talent.
Since becoming director of the Center for Entrepreneurship in 2009, Jackson and his team – including Travis Lindsay, Mayan Jiminez, Philip Stinis, Victor Macias and for many years Charlesetta Medina among many others – have helped hundreds of startups in all sectors get launched by connecting with venture capital and discovering the best practices for success. The center has hundreds of mentors hand picked from the professional world, entrepreneurs, and guest speakers. It is a large community of entrepreneurially minded people that is a tremendous asset for the center, the students and Cal State Fullerton.
Jackson’s life journey is unique in that it has been bookended by the Business Titan experience. In the mid-1970s, he was a student at the then School of Business. It was an era of $100 per semester tuition and connecting face-to-face with classmates in the days before Zoom and smartphones.
“I worked part-time at a retail shoe store which paid for all my bills and then some. I had a full ride scholarship from the state of California which allowed me to attend college. I was also accepted to USC but chose CSUF instead,” recalls Jackson. “Professors used chalkboards, and students took notes by hand. Face-to-face discussions were essential, and visiting professors during office hours was the norm. No calculators were allowed for exams, but slide rules were acceptable.”
Silicon Valley would be the next destination for Jackson, where he would help tech startups get launched from the business side of things. Then, from the mid-1990s to early 2000s, Jackson spent nearly a decade on Wall Street, helping companies such as Pixar (then led by the late Steve Jobs) go public.
“The Street was all about greed with a capital G. I guess I dodged a few bullets and survived,” he says. “Then the Dot-Com boom crashed in the early 2000s. I reinvented myself as a startup founder, the first marketing professor in the new entrepreneurship concentration at CSUF, public speaker and author.”
Having taught students for 23 years, Jackson has noticed discernable changes in the ethos and focus of young businesspeople over nearly a quarter century.
“The students of the early 2000s were capitalists. They wanted fame and fortune and were committed to changing the world through business. Today’s students still want economic impact, but they embrace social enterprise. They aim to make the planet better while making a profit,” he says. “Twenty-plus years later, I enjoy reconnecting with former students who are now in charge. It pleases me to see them mature into good citizens, successful business owners and proud parents.”
In 2014, Jackson led the university’s acquisition of an old Great Depression Works Progress Administration civic building in downtown Placentia to house the new Startup Incubator, which hosted classes, workshops and study space for CSUF students and others across North Orange County seeking to start their own businesses. This new initiative landed Jackson on the front page of the college’s 2015 alumni magazine. During the COVID crisis five years later, the university divested itself of many off-site locales such as the building housing the incubator, but the initiatives developed there continued and grew on-campus at Cal State Fullerton.
This decade, Jackson’s most notable impacts have included founding the SoCal Celebrates Entrepreneurship conference held each spring, which brings together students seeking to perfect their personal pitches, investors, lenders, startups, and veteran entrepreneurs for an opportunity to collaborate and maximize opportunities. Also, Jackson has been nominated six times for the Orange County Business Journal’s Excellence in Entrepreneurship Award. Additionally, he is the founder of Titan Angels, LLC, an early-stage venture fund which has invested in startups founded by fellow Titans and other community members.
To the community, Jackson’s Wall Street side is most evident. But students and friends know him as a cowboy at heart. For 12 years, he lived in rural Norco, which is branded as Horsetown USA. “Horses have always been a part of my life. I love their beauty, strength, and deep connection to humans,” he says. “They symbolize freedom, loyalty, and adventure, forging a timeless bond that’s hard to describe. Also, I have always had a dog by my side and shared my home office with my Amazon parrot.”
Thank you, John Bradley Jackson, for your steadfast commitment to helping generations of entrepreneurs get their start. And best wishes for many years of health and happiness to come!