Jack Thorne, an important figure in the modern history of Pittsburgh tech entrepreneurship passed away this week. Jack's decades of work helped to create much of what we now view as Pittsburgh's entrepreneurial infrastructure. For anyone who didn't know Jack, below is an email from Frank Demmler, a friend and former colleage of Jack's at the Enterprise Corporation and CMU.
"For those of you who don't Jack, or know of him, much of what we are doing today in terms of technology entrepreneurship can be traced back to him.
Briefly, he graduated from one of the first business school classes from CMU. He went out West to work at Hughes Aircraft and was one of the first employees of Litton Industries. From there he founded his own electronics firm that he sold in the early 1970s.
Dick Cyert, then the Dean of the CMU business school, and soon thereafter to be CMU's president, recruited Jack to start a small business program at CMU in 1972. For 10 years he was a lonely voice in the wilderness, working directly with the few entrepreneurs who were in the region at that time (Steve Heliman - Medrad; Jerry McGinnis - Respironics; Glen Chatfield - Duquesne Systems; etc.). In the early 1980s, the RK Mellon Foundation asked Jack to design a program that could clone himself and with a $1 million grant, The Enterprise Corporation of Pittsburgh was founded in August 1983 (and I joined it in January 1984).
Those activities combined with the creation of the Ben Franklin Partnership and the founding of the Pittsburgh High Technology Council formed the foundation for what the new Pittsburgh of today has become. I am not overstating it when I say that without Jack, these efforts would not have survived to today."
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