Session Speaker

Jeff Sandefer

Jeff Sandefer is an entrepreneur, a teacher and an educational innovator.

As an entrepreneur, he started his first company at age 16; recently he sold Sandefer Capital Partners, an energy investment firm with several billion dollars in assets.

As a teacher, his students at the University of Texas five times voted him the school’s Most Outstanding Teacher and he was named by BusinessWeek as one of the top Entrepreneurship professors in America.

As an education innovator, ten years ago Jeff and a group of successful entrepreneur-teachers started the Acton School of Business – named after the Victorian scholar of freedom, Lord Acton, who most famously said, “Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  The school is dedicated to serving America’s next generation of principled entrepreneurs.  Acton is famous for its 100-hour work weeks, and the Princeton Review – the gold standard for business school rankings – has consistently ranked Acton’s teachers, students and program as one of the top MBA programs in the country.

More recently, Jeff and his wife started Acton Academy, a low cost elementary school that has been drawing national attention as one of the leaders in blended and project based learning.

Jeff has been a longtime board member of National Review magazine, the Texas Public Policy Foundation, the Philanthropy Roundtable and the Harvard Business School. He belongs to the Mont Pelerin Society and is one of the youngest people ever elected to the Texas Business Hall of Fame.  He and his wife, Laura, have three children, Taite, Charlie and Sam.

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