Tim Jackson, founder of QXL.com, speaks on business strategy and technology, and in particular how the Internet will impact on consumer and corporate behaviour and on our working lives. As a partner at Lean Investments LP, he makes investments in early-stage Internet and mobile businesses and sits on the boards of a number of private companies.
He is a Kauffman Fellown at the Centre for Venture Education since june 2015. Tim is also a mentor and investor at Entrepreneur First since january 2014.

He was a regular contributor to the Financial times and the Red Herring, America's leading technology magazine, writing regular columns about web business strategies. He was formerly with The Independent newspaper and The Economist magazine, in jobs including business correspondent, technology editor, editorial writer, and correspondent and bureau chief in Tokyo and Brussels. He is also the author of several books, including a history of Intel and a book about Richard Branson and the Virgin Group.

In 1997, Tim Jackson founded one of Europe's leading electronic commerce businesses.  QXL.com, an online auction service, went public in 1999 both on the London Stock Exchange and the NASDAQ.  The company's market capitalisation soared to around $3 billion, and was briefly worth more than British Airways before consummating a billion-dollar merger with its largest German rival. The merged business, now known as QXL Ricardo, has since lost 99% of its value.

Between 1999 and 2001, Tim Jackson served as managing director of Carlyle Internet Partners Europe, a $700m fund backed by the Washington-based Carlyle Group that invests in European technology businesses.  He remains a senior advisor to Carlyle.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos 2001, Tim was selected as one of the 100 "Global Leaders of Tomorrow".  He was identified by Business Week magazine as one of the 50 "Most influential people in Europe".  He was also designated as one of the "21 leaders for the 21st Century" in a photographic exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London.  In a survey by Business 2.0 magazine amongst new economy business people, he was judged the second most important person they would like to have in their contact book.

In 2009 he started the DVD lending company LendAround. The company, which came out of a not-for-profit initiative, built a highly innovative peer-to-peer system potentially allowing millions of people to share movies on DVD and Blu-ray, taking advantage of the fact that services like Netflix tied up hundreds of millions of dollars in libraries of discs while their customers actually already had two or three times as much inventory gathering dust on their shelves at home.

While the DVD project didn't turn into a commercial business, thanks to the difficulties of operating in the highly restrictive ecosystem of the US Postal Service at a time when demand for streaming was exploding, the project remains open to exploring potential ways in which people can share things they have to the benefit of others and the environment.

He is in demand throughout Europe and North America and has recently spoken for, amongst others, McKinsey & Company, Compaq, Credit Suisse First Boston, Gartmore, Accenture (formerly Andersen Consulting), Jupiter Investment Managers, UBS Warburg and Cisco Systems.