Peter Jones: The Only Dragon Who Never Left
Peter Jones
Peter Jones was born on 18 March 1966 in Maidenhead, Berkshire, and is the only investor to have appeared in every series of Dragons' Den since it began on BBC Two in January 2005.
His path into the Den ran through mobile phones, not television. At 32 he founded Phones International Group in 1998, and within five years the wireless communications company was turning over more than 400 million dollars a year.
Building an empire in mobiles
Phones International Group grew fast through the early 2000s, distributing handsets and airtime deals across the UK and building the kind of scale that made Jones one of the country's wealthiest young entrepreneurs by his mid thirties.
In 2011 he sold Wireless Logic, a division of the group, for £38 million, one of the few concrete transaction figures attached to his business career that has been reported in detail rather than estimated.
Twenty years at the table
Jones joined the Den for its first series in 2005 alongside four other original panellists and has outlasted every one of them, becoming the anchor figure new dragons are introduced against whenever the lineup changes.
He was appointed CBE in the 2009 New Year Honours for services to business, entrepreneurship and young people, recognition tied largely to his enterprise education work rather than the television show itself.
Beyond the Den
In 2008 Jones founded the National Enterprise Academy through his own foundation, an initiative later renamed the Peter Jones Enterprise Academy that now runs programmes in colleges and schools across the UK.
He has also carried the Dragons' Den format abroad, appearing as an investor on the American version, Shark Tank, which puts him in the unusual position of judging pitches on both sides of the same format.