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James R. Porter named COBA Entrepreneur-In-Residence
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PorterJames R. (Jim) Porter has served in a comprehensive range of technology industry, community, and professional activities with a healthy mix of career advancement experience and "Give back" activities. He has been a principal participant in more than 30 mergers and can account for more the 25 CEOs who have worked for him over the last 20 year. He has managed in the public company sector for most of his career and had raised more than $500 million in the marketplace. Porter is the past chairman of the CCI/Triad and for 12 years was the CEO and president of Triad Systems (where the market value moved from $54 million to $366 million during his tenure).

He has an industrial engineering degree from Texas A&M University, was a captain in the Air Force, a faculty member at Texas A&M (where he was awarded two grants for study and research), did graduate studies at Harvard University, and was a systems engineering manager at IBM.

He has served in executive roles at two successful start-up companies which built, sold and serviced end-user software for the life insurance industry. His professional career has always been heavily weighted toward mission-critical software for large numbers of customers.

Industry support activities have included several terms on the board and executive committee of the Information Technology Association of America, plus leadership roles in quality management and financial practices initiatives for the software industry. Porter served 10 years on the AICPA Accounting Standards Executive Committee for the software industry.

He was served on numerous public and private company boards and currently serves on one public company board (SVB Financial), one privately held company board (Cardone Industries), plus two private university governing boards (Abilene Christian University and Pepperdine University, where he chairs the Investments Committee which oversees a $700 million portfolio). He also has served on the boards of two large medical centers and several foundations.

Porter is a principal of Porter Capital Partners and an active investor in several technology companies and a regional investment bank. He resides with Lela, his wife of 51 years, in The Woodlands, Texas.