Peoria, IL (February 14, 2013) Jeff Hoffman, founder and CEO of Priceline.com, will be the inaugural speaker in the Turner School of Entrepreneurship and Innovation’s Distinguished Entrepreneur Speaker Series on February 25 at 7:00 p.m. at Bradley University. The lecture will be given in the Peplow Pavilion in the Hayden-Clark Alumni Center. Admission is free and open to the public.

Hoffman is a serial entrepreneur having launched, grown, and sold companies in e-commerce, entertainment, and the Internet. His most well known endeavor is as a founder and CEO of the Priceline.com family of companies. After Priceline, Jeff also founded and served as Chairman and CEO of Black Sky Entertainment, an independent production company in the film and music industries.

He has founded and grown a series of successful startup companies in his career, guiding his companies to both acquisitions and public offerings. For his efforts, he received a Lifetime Achievement Award in Entrepreneurship from the National CEO Council in 2010, and was inducted into the Hall of Fame for Entrepreneurs by the Collegiate Entrepreneurs Organization that same year.

Hoffman’s first startup was a software company in the travel industry named CTI, a company that quickly became the industry leader in technology for the travel and tourism industry, and was later acquired by American Express. He also was a founder and CEO of early e-commerce pioneer Virtual Shopping, Inc., which developed patented, proprietary software and hardware for online retailing on the Internet, and was later acquired by Europe’s Wallenberg Group. He has been featured on Fox News, CNN, CNBC, and other networks, and featured in Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, Inc. Magazine, and more.