Jed Taylor

2013 Distinguished Alumni Service Award

Jed Taylor is the assistant director of the Technology Entrepreneur Center and an Entrepreneur-in-Residence (EIR) at EnterpriseWorks. Taylor spends his time helping students become innovative entrepreneurs and helping faculty members launch their new ventures.

Taylor earned his master’s in computer science at the University of Illinois in 2003. He was also a member of the Siebel Scholar class of 2003. He received his MBA from the University of Illinois in 2005 and went on to work at Honeywell Aerospace as a project manager, where he was in the leadership development program. Taylor received the “high potential” classification, given to the top 2% of new employees.

In 2007, Taylor joined the startup CleanMake (later called Pattern Insight) at the request of the startup’s founder and his former faculty advisor, Professor Yuanyuan Zhou. Taylor moved back to Champaign to run sales and operations. He oversaw sales growth from $40K in the first quarter of 2007 to over $5M during the U.S. economic recession. He was the first employee of Pattern Insight and helped grow the company from a professor/student startup to a successful exit to VMware in 2012.

Since 2010, Taylor has served as an EIR at EnterpriseWorks, the University of Illinois’ top-ranked high-tech incubator in the Research Park. As an EIR, he consults with 20 to 30 faculty startups a year, helping them launch their ventures. He provides mentoring, shares lessons learned, and connects them with alumni, investors, and other successful entrepreneurs.

After leaving Pattern Insight in 2011, Jed has run the day-to-day operations of the Technology Entrepreneur Center (TEC) in the College of Engineering. The mission of the TEC is to create the next generation of great entrepreneurs from the College of Engineering at Illinois. In addition, he strives to help build a strong tech community in Champaign, serving on the Board of Directors and advisory boards of several tech startups in the Champaign area.