Entrepreneur. Educator. Operator.
Jeff Meade
One-Liner
"Jeff Meade is an entrepreneur, educator, and operator who created Venture-Based Learning, a model that turns every college student into a founder before graduation."
Available For
Advisory & Board Roles
Board and advisory engagements with education companies and organizations shaping the future of learning and workforce readiness.
Speaking
Keynotes and conference sessions on entrepreneurship education, Venture-Based Learning, and rethinking how institutions prepare students for the real world.
Training
Workshops and faculty development experiences that help educators embed entrepreneurial thinking into existing curricula.
Partnerships
Institutional and corporate collaborations that connect organizations to the Venture-Based Learning model.
Full Bio
Most education systems were designed to produce employees. Jeff Meade decided to build something different.
He spent two decades as an entrepreneur before he ever set foot in a classroom. He co-founded a youth research company that attracted acquisition offers. He grew an experiential marketing agency to over $20 million in revenue. As Marketing Director at Villa, named Retailer of the Year by Complex during his tenure, he led the launch of Rookie by Villa, a retail brand extension that opened 30 locations in 12 months and contributed 11% of total sales. He also founded Creative Friction, a management consulting firm advising marketing agency founders on the business decisions that keep them up at night.
Then he walked into a classroom and asked a question nobody was asking: what if students didn't study entrepreneurship? What if they just did it?
That question became Venture-Based Learning.
As Founding Director of Entrepreneurship at Paul Quinn College in Dallas, Jeff turned that belief into a graduation requirement. Every student, regardless of major, develops, launches, and operates a real venture before earning their degree. Not a case study. Not a simulation. A real business with real customers, real challenges, and real stakes. Students graduate with entrepreneurial experience most people don't get until years into their careers.
The program he built around that requirement includes a curriculum that embeds entrepreneurship across every major, a Student Seed Fund that provides milestone-based capital to student ventures, and Quinnite Conversations, a multimedia platform where students lead podcasts and faculty write case studies spotlighting founders with unique lived experiences.
His work has been featured in Harvard Business Review, Fast Company, and Entrepreneur Magazine. He speaks regularly on why entrepreneurship education needs to be more hands-on, more accessible, and more connected to the communities students come from.
Jeff holds an MBA from the Olin School of Business at Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a Consortium for Graduate Study in Management fellow, and a B.S. in Business Administration from Babson College.
He serves on the board of Project Unity, a Dallas-based movement built on the belief that what unites us is greater than what divides us, bringing people together through its "Together We" series of dialogue, community events, and education across North Texas, and advises the Innovation Accelerator at United Way of Metropolitan Dallas.
Everything he built before Paul Quinn was preparation. He just didn't know it yet.