Theodore Waitt: Finding Purpose in All Things Electric

Theodore "Ted" Waitt is the co-founder and former CEO and chairman of Gateway, Inc., helping revolutionize how people used technology by pioneering the use of direct marketing in selling personal computers. Dubbed a maverick by various business publications, Waitt has moved on to start different enterprises after Gateway, Inc., including the Waitt Foundation, Waitt Institute for Violence Prevention, the Waitt Institute, and the wholly-owned private investment company with wide-ranging interests, Avalon Capital Group, Inc.

Through the foundation, Waitt was able to become one of the 50 most generous philanthropists in America, a distinction credited from a list released by Business Week. He was also the chairman for the Family Violence Prevention Fund's Founding Fathers campaign and currently serves as a member of the Council of Advisors and the Board of Trustees of the National Geographic Society while also the vice-chairman for the Salk Institute for Biological Studies Board of Trustees.

Ted Waitt was born in Sioux City in Iowa in 1963, the son of a fourth-generation cattleman. He went to the Universities of Iowa and Colorado and worked for nine months in the PC industry back in Des Moines, Iowa. In 1985, Waitt and Mike Hammond co-founded Gateway while on the Waitt family farm. With $10,000 from a loan Waitt's grandfather secured, the two grew Gateway from the ground up, turning an idea born in a barn into a Fortune 500 company.

As the years passed, Waitt collected a number of accolades, including: the Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award given by the US Small Business Association; two Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year awards; a Ten Outstanding Young Americans award from the US Junior Chamber of Commerce, and a Marketing Computers Marketer of the Year. He also as an Honorary Doctorate in Science from the University of South Dakota and was appointed by Congress to participate in the Advisory Commission on Electronic Commerce.