James Spann

Founder & General Partner

After attending the University of Oklahoma on a Navy ROTC scholarship, serving a 6-year stint as a Marines captain, and enjoying a 30-year corporate career in the life sciences industry, James left the corporate world in late 2019 to devote his full energies to planning, founding and running Boyd Street Ventures. He got the idea after seeing numerous promising OU-affiliated startups fail to launch due to a lack of access to venture capital during his time serving on various University of Oklahoma boards and committees since 2005 and as Vice Chairman of The Advisory Board of OU’s Stevenson School of Biomedical Engineering since 2015. In 2016, he met Jeff Moore, who had witnessed the same problem as Executive Director of OU’s Ronnie K. Irani Center for the Creation of Economic Wealth. They decided that the solution was to open a venture capital firm in OU’s hometown – Norman, Oklahoma – and in 2021, after five years of research and planning, that’s precisely what they did.

James’s previous corporate positions include Chief Commercial Officer for GlideNet Healthcare; Global Practice Leader for Simpler Healthcare, an IMB Watson Health Company; SVP of Operations and Sales for Aramark Healthcare Technologies; VP & General Manager for AmerisourceBergen Technology Group; and Division VP and Division President for Medline Industries. James holds a B.A. degree in Marketing from OU, an M.B.A. from Indiana Wesleyan University, and certificates from the Executive Management Programs at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University and The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.