Jeff Sandefer lives a dual life as an entrepreneur and a teacher. As an entrepreneur, he founded several successful companies—his first at age 16; his latest, Sandefer Capital Partners, an investment firm with several billion dollars in assets. Business may be his day job, but Sandefer’s passion is teaching. While he was at the University of Texas, his students five times voted him the school’s Outstanding Teacher, and Businessweek named him one of the top entrepreneurship professors in America.

Fifteen years ago, Sandefer and a group of successful businessmen started the Acton School of Business, whose one-hundred-hour-a-week program led the Princeton Review to repeatedly name Acton’s students as the “most competitive” MBAs in the nation. In 2012 the Economist honored Sandefer as one of the top fifteen business school professors in the world. In 2010 Sandefer and his wife, Laura, started Acton Academy, a cutting-edge K–12 school that blends a one-room schoolhouse, the Socratic method, and twenty-first-century technology. Acton Academy has expanded to more than two hundred schools worldwide, with 18,000 applications from parent-entrepreneurs who want to launch a new school.

Sandefer is a graduate of the Harvard Business School, where he served for over twenty years on the school’s governing committees. He was a longtime director of National Review magazine and the Philanthropy Roundtable, and is one of the youngest members ever elected to the Texas Business Hall of Fame.

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