In 2021, Forbes magazine included 60-year-old Jim Breyer in the list of the 400 richest Americans with a fortune of $2.9 billion. This money was not an inheritance from rich parents or a random win. Jim Beyer earned his entire fortune by being able to see the potential in startups and people.
Jim Breyer’s thorny path to big money began in New Haven, Connecticut, where about 150,000 people lived in the year of his birth. His parents, Hungarian emigrants who had fled the Revolution, highly valued a good education.
As soon as his father got a scholarship, he went to Yale University. Both parents worked hard and rose to senior positions in technology companies.
Jim Breyer followed in his father’s footsteps
Who was an engineer, and immediately after school c level executive list he applied to Stanford University, where he graduated with honors. While still a student, he began looking for an internship. Sending out resumes to IT companies led him to Hewlett Packard, where he earned his first income and gained his first impressions of the rapidly growing high-tech market.
A seminal moment in Breyer’s life occurred in 1982, when use tags and categories he first saw Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, on the cover of Time magazine. The young entrepreneur’s story was so inspiring that Breyer plucked up the courage to write a letter to Apple asking for a job. And he got it.
After working at Apple, he worked at McKinsey for another 2 years, and then went back to school. This time to Harvard, where he successfully received an MBA degree and even made it into the top 5% of his graduating class.
Experience in finance and understanding
The IT market attracted Breyer to try his hand at the mobile lead investment business. However, after studying at Harvard, he faced a number of rejections. Large venture companies did not take a young specialist into the team. Breyer was rejected by both Kleiner and Sequoia Capital.
Luck smiled on him, and in 1987 he got a place on the Accel Partners team. The investment company invested in start-ups that did not yet have a name, and their prospects were unclear. Accel itself was also a start-up. It was founded just 4 years earlier by Arthur Patterson and Jim Schwartz.
