Discerning opportunities that others have overlooked

Terry Jones ’68 has a keen eye for opportunity. Jones is a founder and general partner of Syncom, a group of telecommunications and media venture capital funds with capital in excess of $225 million.  Syncom’s specialty, Jones says, is targeting underserved niches in the market. Several years ago, for example, Syncom helped bring cable television to minority neighborhoods of major cities, including Chicago, Newark, and the Latino areas of Los Angeles. Another of Jones’s success stories is a company called Radio One, which started as a single radio station in Washington, D.C., and with Jones’s backing has grown to 65 stations, becoming the seventh-largest radio company in the country.

Radio One is an example of how Jones has discerned opportunities that others have overlooked. What was different about Radio One? The entrepreneur who started it was an African-American woman. Jones says, “A lot of the entrepreneurs that we finance are black or Latino. They really are tremendous managers and talents, but they haven’t been able to get money from traditional venture companies.” While women and minority entrepreneurs are not as rare as they used to be, notes Jones, they continue to have a tougher time accessing capital.

Jones feels good about giving deserving entrepreneurs a chance—and about building companies that bring positive economic changes to their communities—but he emphasizes that good intentions achieve little without business savvy. Capitalism, he notes, can be enabling and uplifting or evil and exploitive. “It’s just a question of how it’s practiced and applied,” says Jones. “Syncom is a venture capital company.  We’re trying to achieve the highest returns on our money as we can, but that doesn’t mean I have to be ruthless. I want to use the capitalistic system to create wealth for entrepreneurs, investors, and the community.”

Jones takes a hands-on approach to ensuring the growth and success of the companies in which he invests. Often serving as a board member, Jones uses his more than 20 years of experience to help entrepreneurs develop sound business strategies. “This kind of engagement is rewarding and challenging,”  he says.

An engineer turned entrepreneur 

Terry Jones has made a career out of banking on entrepreneurs and markets that other people don’t expect to turn profits. But then again, others might not have expected an engineering major like Jones to become a venture capitalist. But Jones says his engineering training at Trinity developed his skills in math, analytical thinking, and the scientific approach to reaching conclusions—assets for any businessperson. Moreover, studying engineering in a liberal arts environment enabled him to explore broad topics, issues, and problems that math and science couldn’t solve. “People around me were talking about history and philosophy and religion, and I had to deal with them on their level,” he says. “The advantage of the liberal arts education is it promotes creative thinking as well as technical thinking."

While the engineering department is proud to call Jones one of its own and even awarded him a Century of Engineering Achievement Citation during its 100th anniversary celebration, Jones may be remembered at Trinity more for his extracurricular activities. At the time, Trinity was still a men’s college and was—like many other institutions of its kind—on the verge of a sea change. Jones, one of only three African American students in his class, became the founder of Trinity’s first black student organization. In the spring of 1968, Jones and his cohorts gained campus fame for their takeover of Williams Memorial. The sit-in was staged to show support for the creation of scholarships for disadvantaged students from the inner city. Jones recognizes that he came to Trinity at an important time in the life of the College. Trinity “opened itself up” to him, he says. “It was ready to receive what I had.” And vice versa. “A lot of what I am interested in right now in life is the result of that kind of openness and that kind of giving that I experienced at Trinity,” he says.

During his senior year, the Westinghouse corporation made Jones an offer he couldn’t refuse: a good engineering job and the flexibility and financial support to attend graduate school. Jones enrolled at George Washington University and earned his master’s in computer science and biomedical engineering. Advancing his career in industry or embarking on his Ph.D. would have made sense, but in 1972 Jones was ready to try something different, something more creative and adventuresome. After earning his M.B.A. at Harvard, he promptly left for East Africa, figuring that if he failed as an entrepreneur there he could always just get a job. Jones became a co-founder and vice president of Kiambere Savings and Loan in Nairobi. After four years, he returned to the United States and joined the newly established Syncom, where he’s been ever since.

Jones, who is president of Syndicated Communications, Inc., the oldest of the Syncom funds, makes time to share with others what he’s learned about starting and running businesses. He is involved in the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, which targets junior high and high school students. Through that organization and other connections, he occasionally makes presentations in schools and colleges in the D.C. area. He is also a member of the board of directors of the Southern African Enterprise Development Fund, an international venture investment fund that uses its capital to create businesses in 11 southern African countries. Ever the advocate for entrepreneurship, Jones says, “It’s a way of sharing the experience and expertise of American venture capital practitioners with entrepreneurs in emerging markets around the globe.”

- Leslie Virostek