Jeffrey Parker, financial info innovator, named Entrepreneur of the Year

By Linda Myers

Alumnus Jeffrey P. Parker will be honored by Cornell as the 2001 Entrepreneur of the Year.

Parker has been credited with fundamentally changing the way information is transmitted in the financial services industry and the corporate world. He will deliver a talk Friday, Oct. 12, at 4 p.m. in the Statler Auditorium that is free and open to the public. The talk is part of a two-day symposium on entrepreneurship, Oct. 11 and 12 on campus, for alumni, students and faculty.

Parker's newest successful initiative is Corporate Communications Broadcast Network (CCBN), which electronically delivers essential corporate information to shareholders. In 1983 Parker founded First Call, which set the standard for the electronic delivery of equity research and earnings estimates to professional investors. Those and other companies launched by Parker continue to thrive.

"My passion is building businesses and providing an exciting and challenging environment for people to work in," Parker said.

Parker's genius has been to spot opportunities long before others do ­ and to act quickly on them ­ sometimes stepping down from top slots in other companies to do so. "His achievements ­ the founding or leadership of more than a dozen companies that deliver information electronically ­ are all the more impressive because most were established well before the boom, and subsequent bust, in Internet-based companies," noted Professor Charles Lee, the academic director of the Parker Center for Investment Research at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management.

In 1980, Parker founded Technical Data Corp., which electronically supplied bond analysis and fixed-income information to professionals in that field. In 1982, he co-founded Business Research Corp., which developed InvesText, one of the world's largest databases of company information. He followed that success with First Call Corp. In 1986, Parker sold all three firms to Thomson International, a Canadian publisher of financial information. However, he stayed on for five more years, becoming chairman and CEO of Thomson Financial Services and president and CEO of First Call Corp.

In 1991 Parker left top management to become a venture capitalist himself, founding Private Equity Investments and serving as general partner of 38 Newbury Managers. The firms fund early stage companies in health care and financial services.

In 1997 he left that venue to found CCBN with partner Rob Adler. When the Securities and Exchange Commission passed a regulation in October 2000 requiring publicly held companies to disseminate non-public information simultaneously to all investors, CCBN moved to capture a large chunk of the new market. It leveraged strategic alliances and partnerships with America Online, Yahoo!, Forbes.com and WSJ.com to expand its information distribution capabilities. Today CCBN provides detailed shareholder information for 2,500 publicly held companies, 40 percent of them on the Fortune 500 list. Clients include Dell Computer, Cisco and Motorola, among others. In addition, CCBN hosts live and archived quarterly conference calls for more than 3,000 corporations each quarter and maintains StreetEvents, an institutional event management database.

Parker graduated from Cornell's industrial engineering program in 1965 and received his master of engineering (industrial) degree in 1966. After earning an MBA at Cornell's Johnson Graduate School of Management in 1970, he spent a decade on Wall Street as a fixed-income salesman, bond trader and money manager.

In 1996, he funded the Parker Center for Investment Research at Cornell's Johnson School, now headed by Lee and director of operations Steve Sharratt. An advanced trading room, powered by several million dollars worth of computer equipment and financial software, the center gives students and faculty access to the same data and analytical tools that Wall Street's largest investment banking and money management firms use.

In 1995, Parker was appointed to the Cornell Board of Trustees. He now is co-chair of the board's Committee on Alumni Affairs and Development and also serves on its Executive Committee as well as on the Johnson School Advisory Council.

Cornell's Entrepreneur of the Year Award recognizes achievements and qualities of a Cornellian who best exemplifies the ideals of entrepreneurship. Past award winners have included Jeff Hawkins, inventor of PalmPilot and other handheld devices; Sanford Weill, CEO of Citigroup; and David Duffield, founder of PeopleSoft Corp.

The award, established by Cornell's Johnson School, is now a part of the universitywide Entrepreneurship and Personal Enterprise Program (EPE). Founded in 1992 as a combined initiative of the Johnson School and the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, EPE is governed by the deans of nine participating Cornell schools and colleges.

For information about Entrepreneur of the Year, contact the EPE office at 255-1576 or visit this web site: http://epe.cornell.edu. For information about CCBN, visit this web site: http://www.ccbn.com.