Cable Pioneer Becomes Pioneer In Online Learning

Feature Article in Amicus Magazine:
Cable Pioneer Becomes Pioneer In Online Learning
By Kenna Bruner

The journey to success for Glenn Jones (’61) began 40 years ago with a $400 loan against his Volkswagen Beetle - which he was living in at the time - and an audacious idea to launch a cable company. From humble beginnings, Jones has gone on to found more than 20 technology-driven companies and a groundbreaking online university.

"Ideas are in the air," said Jones. "What I set out to do, more than just an economic venture, was to evangelize the concept of what could be done using cable and the Internet and education."

Called the "poet of technology," his folksy poetic works are infused with philosophical reflections that hold a mirror on his early entrepreneurial experiences. In addition to his poetry, he has published the books Free Market Fusion, Cyber Schools and Make all America a School.

To some bankers the balance sheet
Is a block of ice that lies,

To the entrepreneur it’s a magic lantern,
Filled with fireflies.

More than anything, Jones has been a restless, creative spirit, tenaciously seeking new challenges and wondering what’s over the next horizon. In 1964, he decided to enter the political fray and ran for U.S. Congress. After losing his bid, he decided to head for the Colorado mountains to try to make some money. Cash strapped, his most valuable possession his Volkswagen, the attorney traveled from town to town – Vail, Breckenridge, Leadville, and Georgetown -- where by day he practiced law in the local cafes, and at night he slept in his car.

In the winter of 1967, he persuaded the owner of a Georgetown cable system that was on the brink of going under to accept $1,000 down on a purchase price of $12,000. The infrastructure of the small cable system was in place, but the business was saddled with 200 non-paying subscribers.

Jones borrowed against his Volkswagen and raised the rest of the down payment by going door-to-door to collect on the delinquent accounts.

Foraging in the financial forest,
Flim-flamming with the stock floggers there,
Trying to make up his mind,
To be a bull or a bear.

"I rented a small TV and knocked on every door to show them that the signal was there," he said. "It wasn’t good, but it was there. They could get Denver channels, Wyoming on a good day."

The first piece of business equipment he purchased was a sleeping bag for his car.

With eight feet of snow on the ground, Jones had trouble getting up the mountain behind Georgetown to check on the cable equipment. He had met a recluse living in an old miner’s shack and struck a deal with him to keep an eye on things in exchange for a bottle of Chivas Regal at Christmas.

Jones wanted to set poles to run cable, but he couldn’t penetrate the frozen ground. He tried burning tires to thaw the ground so he could dig, but two inches was as deep as he could get. Undaunted, he went around town stringing cable where he could -- through lilac bushes, over picket fences, and so on.

Agonizing,
And deploying assets to comply,
With government regulations,
That only multiply.

Realizing that financing for his fledgling cable system would be the key to success, Jones sat down at Georgetown’s Alpine Inn with a cup of coffee, a doughnut and a yellow notepad and began writing a plan.

"I was trying to figure out how to get the system in Georgetown to raise enough capital to be a player in the cable industry," he said. "On my notepad, I figured out it would cost more than $10 billion to build America."

His financial roadmap for connecting the country with his cable system was so innovative and complex that both the law firm and the accounting firm he was working with claimed it couldn’t be done. Convinced that it could be done, he changed law firms and showed the accounting firm how he could accomplish his idea. It became the financial model for the cable industry.

The first company in the cable industry to use public limited partnerships as a financing strategy, Jones Intercable Inc. went on to raise more than $1.3 billion in equity for acquisitions. At its peak, Jones’s company had 22 full reporting entities to the Securities and Exchange Commission and hundreds of thousands of limited partners.

"I couldn’t have done it if I hadn’t been a lawyer," he said. "At any rate, it all worked." From his early days in Georgetown, Jones parlayed the small mountain cable system into one of the top 10 cable companies in the world.

I’m an entrepreneur,
Why do I feel like a gunslinger…

Looking over the next horizon, Jones saw an opportunity to fuse education with communications, first with his cable network and later with digital technology. Always a supporter of higher education, his vision to take education to the people has generated numerous business ventures.

In 1987, he founded Mind Extension University, a cable network that provided college courses and degree programs from 30 universities. During the next few years he created Knowledge TV, a 24-hour cable and satellite TV channel; the Knowledge Store, a virtual store offering learning products; and Jones Knowledge Inc., providing software, technical support, and training to universities for online courses.

In 1993, Jones pioneered total online learning when he founded the world’s first academic institution created solely for the Web - Jones International University. The virtual campus allows students to learn from anywhere in the world, 24 hours a day. It is the first online university to receive regional accreditation, the highest accreditation a U.S. university can obtain.

"Education is the magic loom through which people build their lives and their value systems and their civilizations," he said. "I believe technology democratizes education. It underpins all that I’m doing."

Without change
time would stop.

He has aggregated digital communications into a mass medium making it available to learners everywhere.

Jones is a member of the National Digital Strategy Advisory Board whose members provide input toward the Library of Congress’s preservation initiative to save digital information. It’s possible for information printed on paper to survive for centuries, but information stored digitally may not be accessible from one day to the next. More than 12 million items have been digitized so far.

He is also participating in the World Digital Library’s massive project to make materials from libraries around the world available at no cost on the Internet.

By searching and pondering the ever-changing technological and networking landscape, Jones continues to discover and invent new ways to bring information and education to people.

"For the first time in the history of the world we’ve been able to communicate with billions of people throughout the world," he said. "The most significant distribution device now is the cell phone. When you combine the Internet with the mobile environment, it’s awesome."

Poetry excerpts by Glenn Jones writing as Yankee Jones