UW alumnus donates $3.5 million to entrepreneurship

UW–Madison business students will receive first-hand experience in being entrepreneurs thanks to a gift of nearly $3.5 million from a business school alumnus.

James Weinert has given a gift of stock worth nearly $3.5 million to enhance entrepreneurial studies at the School of Business. Weinert, chair of Tri Pro Inc., earned his MBA from the university in 1969.

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The focus of entrepreneurial education at the School of Business will be the newly named Weinert Center for Entrepreneurship. Among its offerings is the Weinert Applied Ventures and Entrepreneurship (WAVE) program, one of only a handful of programs in the country to give entrepreneurship students the opportunity to invest real money in companies they evaluate.

Robert Pricer, Graham Wisconsin Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship and director of the Weinert Center, says the gift will be used to enhance the teaching of entrepreneurship for undergraduate and graduate students.

“The Weinert gift makes an enormous difference for our entrepreneurial program. It enables us to bring in new ideas and new people so we can keep up the momentum,” Pricer says.

Weinert says the center has already designed a new course to teach undergraduates and graduate students how to start a business.

Weinert, a former cross country and track star, received his undergraduate degree in English in 1967. He currently serves as an executive in residence at the school, is chair of the WAVE board of directors and is a member of the business school Dean’s Advisory Board.

Weinert says he gave the business school gift “because I saw the positive impact an earlier gift had on students, and as an acknowledgment for the school’s fine work in developing a top entrepreneurship program.”

After a successful career in marketing and business development, Weinert joined in 1983 with UW-Milwaukee MBA Steve Simon to engineer the turnaround of American Sharecom, Inc. (ASI), a privately held loss-ridden company with $3 million in annual revenues. UW–Madison alum William King joined them, forming a management team that transformed ASI into a highly profitable powerhouse with annual revenues exceeding $120 million. In 1995, ASI merged with Frontier Corporation, which was subsequently bought out by Global Crossing.

“The increasing importance of business start-ups in this growing economy makes it imperative that we have a high-powered program for entrepreneurship,” Dean Andrew J. Policano says. “The latest Weinert gift puts us in a position to assemble one of the finest entrepreneurship programs in the country.”

In total, Weinert has given more than $6 million on behalf of the School of Business. Weinert’s gift of 25,000 shares of Frontier common stock in 1996 enabled the business school to create the nation’s first applied program in entrepreneurship. That gift — valued at the time at over $700,000 — was earmarked for students in the WAVE program to invest in ventures they identified as promising. WAVE students have since invested in enterprises as diverse as a software development venture, a computer recycling service, a food service operation, and a concierge service.

One of its first investments was in UCLID Software LLC, Madison. Company CEO Curt Szymanski is among the students and alums who credit UW’s entrepreneurship program with helping them develop skills in the area of entrepreneurship. Szymanski says: “The WAVE program’s investment, along with all the assistance and training offered along the way, made it possible for me to develop UCLID into a viable business. That help meant everything to me.”