Founder, The Presidential Precinct; Managing General Partner, Court Square Ventures
Jim Murray is the founder of the Presidential Precinct, managing general partner at Court Square Ventures, and Rector of the Board of Visitors at the University of Virginia. He has been a principal in firms specializing in investment banking and venture capital for telecom and information technology businesses since 1982. Prior to Court Square Ventures, he was a founding partner and chairman of Columbia Capital, which today manages six venture funds aggregating over $3 billion. He is also the managing partner of Greenmont Timber Partners, Greenmont Farms, LLC and President of Murray Enterprises, LLC.
During his career Jim has served as a director of over three dozen technology companies including some seven firms that were IPOs, publicly listed, or merged into public companies. He is the former Chairman of the Advisory Board of the Export-Import Bank of the United States. He also served on the American board of the Smurfit Graduate School of Business Administration, University College, Dublin, Ireland.
Jim is the author of Wireless Nation: The Frenzied Launch of the Cellular Revolution in America, the first definitive account of how the American cell phone industry evolved (selected by Booklist as one of the “top ten” business books of 2001). As an inventor, Jim is the holder of a U.S. patent for a wireless maritime ignition control system.
Jim has been a guest lecturer at Harvard Business School; the Darden Graduate Business School and the McIntyre School of Commerce at the University of Virginia; the Graduate Business School at the College of William and Mary; the Smurfit Graduate Business School in Dublin, and at Piedmont Virginia Community College.
Jim is the former member of the Board of Visitors and former Rector at the College of William and Mary. He is former chairman of the President’s Monroe Commission overseeing the re-development of James Monroe’s “Highland”, and former Chairman of the Charlottesville – Albemarle Community Foundation. From 2001 through 2009, he served as Chairman of the Virginia Governor’s Commission on Higher Education Board Appointments.
Jim received his B.A. from the University of Virginia, a J.D. from the Marshall-Whyte School of Law at the College of William and Mary, and an honorary Doctor of Laws from the College of William and Mary.