Scion of a prominent American business family, ventures backed by Jay Robert (J.B.) Pritzker have been in the news recently, including the “1871” entrepreneurial hub, located at the Chicago Merchandise Mart, and the newly-launched FireStarter Fund for Illinois-based technology start-ups.
Born in 1965, Pritzker is a Chicago entrepreneur and venture capitalist, as well as a philanthropist of note, whose efforts in early childhood education have teamed up his family foundation with such household names Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet.
He is unarguably a member of the “who’s who” and “names to watch” list for Chicago business news. As of September 2011, J.B. Pritzker was #159 on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans, one of 11 members of the Pritzker family on that exclusive roll call. The Chicago Sun-Times has named him to its “Top 100” list for the city’s technology economy. In 2008, the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce awarded J.B. Pritzker its “Entrepreneur Champion Award.” And under the new Chicago mayoral administration, Pritzker joined Rahm Emanuel’s 50 member “World Business Chicago” council.
Jay’s grandfather A.N. Pritzker (1896-1986) was the son of Ukrainian Jewish immigrants, and amassed a fortune with his brother Jack in Chicago real estate. Along with his sons Jay, Robert, and Donald, father of J.B. who died in 1972 of a heart attack, the Pritzker family consolidated its business empire by building industrial conglomerate the Marmon Group and hotel chain Hyatt.
J.B.’s older sister Penny Pritzker is also a member of the Forbes 400, is national finance chair of the Obama presidential campaign, co-founded The Parking Spot company in 1998, and heads with husband Bryan Traubert the Pritzker Traubert Family Foundation. In 2008 she withdrew her name from consideration as U.S. Secretary of Commerce due to her involvement in a failed Chicago bank that promoted sub-prime financial instruments. In an interesting family twist, J.B. Pritzker was national co-chairman for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign,
Pritzker and his brother Tony run the Pritzker Group, a private investment firm that specializes in mid-size, late-stage companies. Most recently, the Chicago Tribune on January 31, 2012 reported the sale of Entertainment Cruises to the Pritzker Group from New York investment firm ICV Partners.
In a September 2010 Chicago Magazine interview, reporter Jeff Bailey compared the Pritzker Group’s approach to the Marmon Group, run by Jay and Tony’s uncle Robert, a comparison that Pritzker found flattering. On founding New World Ventures in 1996, his venture capital firm, J.B. said that same interview: “None of our family businesses were focused on technology. It was ’93 when I came out of law school, and the Internet was taking hold. So I started New World Ventures.”
The descendent of a Ukrainian Jewish family and member of a wealthy American Jewish clan, J.B. Pritzker worked to pave the way for the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, opened in 2009 in Skokie, Illinois, and serves as its chairman.
As Pritzker Family Foundation president, Mr. Pritzker started the Children’s Initiative, designed to serve children living in poverty. Under the direction of Nobel-laureate James Heckman, he also supported the founding of the Pritzker Consortium on Early Childhood Development at the University of Chicago. The Pritzker Family Foundation, along with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Buffet Early Childhood Fund, is an original sponsor of the First Five Years Fund, focused on quality care and education for children from birth to age five.
J.B. Pritzker lives in Chicago with his wife and two children. He is a graduate of Duke University and received his J.D. from the Northwestern University School of Law.
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