Jeff Horn, co-founder and CEO of Masked Rider Capital (MRC), has 26 years’ experience in the finance, banking, and technology sectors. He’s helped to lead MRC in bringing the rapidly growing coffee brand, 7 Brew, to Lubbock, in raising roughly $80 million in outside capital, and in managing a $500 million asset portfolio.
Yet, he says his greatest accomplishment is still ahead – graduating from Texas Tech.
In May, Horn will receive his Online Bachelor of Business Administration in General Business (OBBA) from the Jerry S. Rawls College of Business. A long-time goal rooted in childhood trips to Texas Tech games with his grandfather, earning his undergraduate degree will be one of the most meaningful achievements of his career. One, he admits, has been more challenging than he thought, but comes with an invaluable return.
“I’m the CEO of a large business, but I found myself having anxiety about going back to school 26 years into my career, not because I wouldn’t understand the content or feel like the odd duck, but because going back online was so different from how I remembered college,” Horn said. “It took me two or three classes to get comfortable, but the flexibility to do schoolwork around full-time work was ideal, and what surprised me the most was how collaborative the online environment is.”
An honors graduate of Monterey High School and avid baseball and football player, Horn walked on to the Texas Tech baseball team, after spending a year playing both sports at Abilene Christian University. When an arm injury ended his time on the diamond, he went to work at his grandparents’ cotton gin manufacturing company to put himself through school. He accumulated 90 hours toward his business degree by 1999, and then life threw him a curveball.
That January, he met Kari, a chemistry major at Lubbock Christian University (LCU) with one year left before continuing her graduate education with the goal of attaining a pharmacy doctorate. The following May they were married. This, he says, is where he wants to be transparent – not to make things awkward, but to know the truth of how his online journey happened.
“We knew we were the ones for each other, but January to May is very quick and then we had our first child that November,” he explained. “Kari finished her undergraduate degree, and we made a promise to Kari’s parents that she would finish her pharmacy degree.”
To provide for his growing family while Kari continued school at LCU, Horn left Texas Tech and accepted a job working for a bank technology company. In the next four years, the couple moved to Austin, had another child, and Horn’s career began to take off as he covered half of the U.S. selling check imaging software. In Kari’s last year of pharmacy school, Horn moved with their oldest son, Tucker, and their then youngest son, Raider, back to Lubbock to be close to his mother-in-law while Kari concentrated on her rotations. In 2004, Kari earned her pharmacy degree from the University of Texas.
“At that point in my career, I was doing well but I yearned to do something more entrepreneurial,” Horn recalled. “At 35 years old, I bought my first business, Benchmark Business Solutions (Benchmark), from former Lubbock Mayor Dan Pope for $5,000,000.”
Under Horn’s leadership, Benchmark grew into one of the largest independent Xerox dealers in the country within a decade. Between 2013 and 2017, his team ranked No. 1 in the nation four out of five years. During that time, he led six acquisitions, expanded operations, and drove 500% growth before selling the company in 2017 with revenues then exceeding $30 million.
“The question of whether I wanted to go back to school or not always lingered,” he added, “and in the midst of working, raising kids, and buying and growing a business, at the time it just seemed really hard to do all of that and go back to school.”
As he transitioned out of Benchmark, he and long-time friend, and MRC partner, Dusty Womble, began discussing what they could do with their casual real estate investment firm. They knew that businesses in Lubbock, and the surrounding area, that wanted to grow but needed more capital to do so, had to go to Dallas, Houston, Austin, and even New York, to find a private equity firm.
Seeing that gap in the market, Horn and his partner made a decision.
“That’s when we said, let’s be Lubbock’s first,” he said. “The city’s big enough, it’s growing, we know a lot of people in the area, so why don’t we do that?”
So, in 2020 that’s exactly what they did with the launch of MRC. Since then, what began with a single commercial property has grown into a diversified portfolio spanning private equity, specialty finance, real estate, and growth capital. Their hybrid family office and private equity firm has grown to a team of 15 professionals that partners with entrepreneurs, developers, and established businesses to provide flexible equity and finance solutions for companies that want to scale, grow, or transition their business.
One of the first businesses MRC invested in was 7 Brew. After an immersive coffee making experience at its headquarters in Arkansas, where they fell in love with the high energy, quality products, and culture, they bought territories in west and central Texas, Oklahoma, and in the panhandle and west gulf of Florida. Their first store opened in January 2023 on University and 15th St. in Lubbock. By September 2025, the company had grown to 50 stores, with MRC holding a 60% ownership stake.
Today, each store averages close to $2.5 million in revenue. They partnered with New York-based Franchise Equity Partners, who bought in to a control position to lead the company to more than 200 stores. Today, MRC retains 11% in the company and is very excited with the trajectory of its 7 Brew business.
While business was brewing and deals transacted, with every handshake and relationship formed, Horn kept receiving the same questions. Where did you graduate from? What’s your degree in?
“I’m always honest without going into the awkward, long story of how my life transpired after I left Texas Tech, but those questions have always bothered me,” he said. “So, four years ago, without my wife of 27 years or my three fantastic kids knowing, I quietly began the online program, taking three hours a semester.”
Horn says he remembers a time in his life when the question of going back to school entered his mind and he thought, I don’t need it. When he decided he would go back to school, Horn didn’t know if he could do it – run the company, travel every weekend to see his boys play college football, and work toward his degree. Now with only two classes left, he can’t wait to be finished and to be able to say he is a Texas Tech graduate.
“Yes, it’s been hard in the moment, but I realized I needed a degree,” Horn emphasized. “When my boys found out, they were very excited and impressed, saying, ‘Dad, you’re attending our games, negotiating business deals, and doing this?!’ Completing this degree and seeing their pride will be the most rewarding time of my life.”
Q&A
Q: As a professional whose built a career and life on the value of something, how would you value the Rawls College Online BBA?
Horn: I don’t think it’s hard for anyone to understand you have to be self-motivated and disciplined to complete online work. Sure, there’s flexibility for watching lectures, posting on message boards, and writing papers on your time, but you have to figure out how each course is set up and what it will take to succeed, which doesn’t look the same as sitting in a classroom listening to a lecture and then studying for a test. That, though, is where the value is because that’s the way jobs work. Online classes provide opportunities to learn and work differently. I think it’s very preparatory for the way the business world works – you have to find your place – and that is invaluable.
Q: How do you integrate your online coursework into your full-time work/life schedule?
Horn: I work from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. every day. I do my schoolwork before work, after work, and sometimes on the weekends. The flexibility was very important to me because I knew I’d have to do course work at some really odd times, compared to most. The only instance the timing didn’t work out was when a group wanted to work on our project in the middle of the day.
Q: Has earning your degree online changed the way you think about your own capacity or resilience?
Horn: I’ve worked very hard over my life – as a husband, supporting his wife while she finished school; as a business leader, owning, running, and growing companies (I hope I don't have to ever do anything again that was as hard as building MRC); and as a dad, raising three boys, putting them through school, and never missing one of their games. For Kari and me, our lives have been anything but steady, but it's a true story of resilience, putting in the work, and being rewarded. Oftentimes you're only working for the reward, but now that I’m months away from graduation, looking back, this process has taught me more about myself and what I can handle than anything in my life to date. It’s opened my eyes and helped me to question what else am I shutting off thinking I can’t do that maybe I shouldn't shut off?
Q: What do you think makes the Rawls College Online BBA community unique?
Horn: The level of curriculum and the quality of the teachers administering the classes. I always felt a connection to Texas Tech while taking my online classes. The Rawls College online program does a really good job of not only providing educational opportunities, but they also connect you to the university through a lot of the same tools that on-campus students use.
Q: If you could send a message to your pre-enrollment self, what would you say?
Horn: Think long term. They need to think about when they’re 45 or 50 and what they want to be doing then, what skills they’re going to need then and what they need to do to prepare for that. They need to challenge themselves for the future and know that this period of time is temporary. At MRC, when we're looking at interns, the ones that can think long term are the ones that stand out so far ahead of the rest.
Q: When you think about graduation day, what feelings or emotions are you anticipating?
You know, it's not like I'm going to send out graduation announcements like I'm 22, but this could be a funny: “To continue our backward timeline, join us for drinks after commencement.”
My wife has threatened to include me in our church’s May graduates. I said, Kari, we will be divorced if you do that…just kidding of course.
Really though, embarrassed may not be the right word, but I think a lot of people are amazed like, ‘Wow, he got to where he was without a degree?,’ but then I think some people are disapproving like, ‘I can't believe he doesn't have a degree.’
So, in the end, this is the life-long culmination of making the best of a tough situation, relief from hard work, reward for resiliency, finally checking the box of long-awaited achievement, and validation of our life’s story.