The Most Accomplished, Best-Connected Entrepreneur You've Never Heard Of

From the moment he queues up a movie, boots his computer, and hits the treadmill at 4 a.m.—unfathomably refreshed after three hours' sleep—Tullman is a blur. By 8 a.m., having consumed several newspapers, watched half a film (he sees about 120 a year for professional reasons), and cleared his first 100 e-mails, he arrives at Tribeca Flashpoint Academy, the showplace digital-media-arts college he built one summer in Chicago while all the normal people were at the beach. On a typical day, he might brainstorm with Fortune 500 executives in his ADD-décor office; sit in on a commercial being shot by students on a sound stage at Chicago's Merchandise Mart; lead tours for celebrities such as Bill Clinton, Quentin Tarantino, or the documentarian Ken Burns; counsel a graduate on his or her first start-up; hunker down with managers from one of the half a dozen companies he invests in; tinker with the incubator he is building to house 15 of his own product ideas; and teach a class at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. Notice how I said and? Not or. Phew.

I rise from my chair to follow Tullman out of his office, and by the time I reach the door, he is already down at the end of a long hallway, greeting Rahm Emanuel, mayor of Chicago and an old chum, here to tour Tribeca Flashpoint Academy and discuss projects of mutual interest. "I have 22 minutes," says Emanuel, who briefly lodged in Tullman's West Loop loft after leaving his White House job to run for Richard Daley's old seat. The two charge around the school for 15 minutes, then settle in to Tullman's office to talk about job training and how youthful they appear in various photos.

At 66, Tullman is a tie-and-socks-optional kind of guy on whom a ponytail would not look amiss. Tribeca Flashpoint Academy is the latest in a long string of companies he has launched, led, or salvaged. And like the autumnal work of a prolific writer, it draws on many of his favorite themes—technology, pop culture, education, professionalism—while refreshing a tired genre.

That genre—or rather, that industry (clarity trumps metaphor, as the storytelling-obsessed Tullman would tell you)—is vocational education. "It's a shame that the United States is the only country in the world where it's considered downscale and horrible to go to any kind of vocational school," says Tullman, pecking at his computer, which is wired to a large screen that barrages visitors to his office with wow-inducing videos and applications created by Flashpoint students and faculty. "Everyplace else, there are apprenticeships, vocational training, all kinds of paths to be successful. We need that here."

Tullman believes training young people to fill tomorrow's jobs is this country's best shot at reducing unemployment and staying globally competitive. Tomorrow's jobs, of course, is code for technology, a subject, Tullman argues, traditional four-year colleges teach poorly because faculty aren't in the field keeping current and students don't work across departments in interdisciplinary teams, as happens in the real world. "Part One was that every other school was teaching in these silos with tenured faculty who weren't learning new technologies," says Tullman, explaining what attracted him to the idea for Flashpoint, which was brought to him in 2007 by Ric Landry, the company's co-founder. "Part Two was you had a group of kids that were only interested in digital and were not going to go to a four-year liberal-arts school and end up with their futures in hock."

Flashpoint offers a two-year associate's degree. Starting Day One, students from all five departments (film and broadcast; recording arts; animation and visual effects; games and interactive media; design and visual communication) collaborate on class assignments and on custom projects for the likes of Microsoft, Disney, and Neiman Marcus. Tullman spends much of his time wrangling those projects, which gild students' portfolios and introduce them to potential employers. "We are totally responsive to what the industry needs," says Tullman, who on the day I visit meets with the CEO of a small business developing a localized entertainment service for inner-city McDonald's franchises, representatives from a Fortune 100 consumer-products company plotting their mobile strategy, and executives from the Chicago arts and entertainment complex Navy Pier, who are soliciting ideas for a $150 million renovation. (See above: Phew.)

Tullman envisions thousands of disaffected, keyboard-addicted kids emerging from their bedrooms and flocking to Flashpoint, where they learn to be both creative technicians and—equally important, he insists—responsible employees. In that sense, the school has the aura of a social enterprise. It is, however, an accredited, for-profit institution that will start making money this year. In 2011, Flashpoint had revenue of $12 million with 600 students; by 2014, Tullman anticipates, enrollment will hit 1,000. There is talk of distance learning as well as campuses in New York City and other domestic and international locations. Tuition is $25,000 a year, with more than half of students receiving financial aid.

Flashpoint's biggest investor is Tribeca Enterprises, co-founded by Robert De Niro, Jane Rosenthal, and Craig Hatkoff in the wake of 9/11 as a way to answer atrocity with art. Owner and operator of the Tribeca Film Festival and other ventures, the organization has invested $16 million, according to Tullman, for a 50 percent stake in Flashpoint. "Flashpoint is a front seat on the world stage of what's the Next Big Thing," says Hatkoff. "If it's exciting and state of the art, they're either using it or they created it."

Flashpoint fits neatly within Tribeca's mission: to encourage innovation in the creation and delivery of narrative. But Hatkoff and his partners were also struck by the intensity and track record of Tullman, who may be the most accomplished entrepreneur you've never heard of. "What Howard has built over the course of his career is just extraordinary," says Hatkoff. "I had never seen a resumé like his before. I had to read it in two sittings."

Tullman's mind moves even faster than he does. "You're having a conversation with him, and suddenly you feel like you've missed a sentence, and your brain races after him," says Barbara Pollack, a frequent business collaborator and friend since childhood. "With Howard, you're always catching up."

Pollack—a member of the Flashpoint start-up team who is now a marketing and design consultant—is part of a devoted coterie that follows Tullman from company to company, responding whenever he blows the new-venture whistle. It is by necessity a hardy bunch; reporting to this guy is no Sunday in a hammock. Tullman works 80 to 100 hours a week, and while he doesn't expect employees to do the same, no one drops in his estimation by being the last person out the door. He is infamous for pounding out e-mails late into the night and for publicizing mistakes. "It's a harsh theory," Tullman concedes. "But if you share that mistake with the whole company, then everybody learns from it. And that person develops an incrementally thicker skin." He also announces his own errors, though those are "rarer than hen's teeth," he says.