John got his MBA at UChicago while working at Wall Street powerhouse Wasserstein Perella & Co. His vision—merging high finance with largescale real estate development—led to his second entrepreneurial venture, focused on opportunistic investments in the dramatically overbuilt hotel sector. After the acquisition and turnaround of the Sheraton North Shore for a nice profit, the next major local deal was the Wyndham Chicago (above, today the Hyatt Mag Mile), which Oxford converted and profitably sold to Wyndham. Other favorite deals: the Hotel Lexington and Metropolitan Hotel in NYC, and the 1,000-room National Conference Center in Northern Virginia in ’00—then the arbitrage shrunk as distressed opportunities were harder to come by. (Giving John and his wife some time to study architecture and history at Oxford University.)