Jacob is from a small dairy farm in Iowa, the son of hippie runaways, who both were the first in their families to go to college. By the age of five years old, he was waking up at 4 AM to milk and feed cows before school and again after school from 3-8 PM. Consequently, the values of a good education, independence, responsibility, work ethic, and the importance of family were repetitively taught from a very young age. Much to his parents’ chagrin, he enrolled at Cornell University to become a large animal veterinarian or a college professor but got sidetracked with finance classes resulting in an unpaid internship with Rabobank, a Dutch multinational bank in New York City. He worked on mergers and acquisitions in South and Latin America, specifically focusing on dairy and agriculture.
A couple of years later, in a moment of brilliance and foresight, he moved to Boston and accepted a job with Arthur Andersen in their M&A technology practice as the tech bubble was bursting and Andersen was being brought down by Enron. Realizing that corporate America wasn’t the best place for an individual with an independent streak, in 2003, he co-founded Capstone Partners. From the onset, he founded, led, and developed the Education and Training practice at Capstone.
Over the next 20 years, he was instrumental in growing the firm from two to over 200 people, successfully helping lead the Company through its sale to Huntington Bank in June 2022. During his tenure at Capstone, he was nominated for over 50 M&A deal of the year awards, winning 20 of them, and being named an Emerging Leader in his early 30s and Investment Banker of the Year in 2021 at age 44. However, the entrepreneurial bug bit again, and in early 2023, he and the rest of the Education and Training practice left Huntington to found Navagant, a boutique sell-side M&A firm dedicated to the Education and Training industry.
In his limited free time, he and JJ love going on nature hikes, traveling the world, becoming “master” home improvement experts, and golfing poorly. He barely tolerates a massive inter-family Boston vs. Pittsburgh sports rivalry and tries to get to Cape Cod to visit his folks as much as possible.