Personal experience triggers Yarbrough’s generosity

Jon Yarbrough knows luck exists in the world, both good and bad. Creating a video gaming empire, he has been very successful through other people playing the odds. However, he also knows the flip side to good luck. Someone very close to him – his sister, Karen – has struggled with schizophrenia most of her adult life.

Yarbrough is now using his success to help Vanderbilt’s Department of Psychiatry continue its work and research in fighting schizophrenia and other mental illnesses.

His sister has been treated by Vanderbilt’s Stephan Heckers, M.D., chair of the Department of Psychiatry.

“I am very passionate about psychiatry, and schizophrenia in particular, because of my sister,” Yarbrough said. “She is doing wonderfully since being seen by Dr. Heckers.”

Yarbrough understands all too well the long road of recovery with schizophrenia. He has watched his sister suffer throughout her life before receiving the correct treatment and medication.

“The Vanderbilt Psychiatry Department is the best in my opinion,” Yarbrough said. “Dr. Heckers has done great things with my sister.”

Yarbrough credits his sister for helping him not be discouraged in business or in life. One summer in college at Tennessee Technology University he sold books door to door. Yarbrough explained how the company would teach them that rejection and discouragement were part of the sales world, and they needed something more than themselves to keep them motivated to sell.

“I wrote ‘Do it for Karen’ on a piece of paper and when I would get discouraged I would pull this paper out and read it,” he said. “She never quit and neither did I.”

Yarbrough’s current business, Video Gaming Technologies (VGT), was formed during his tenure at Tennessee Tech. He was spending time in game rooms while attending school and started competing in foosball tournaments.

During an internship at NASA in Langley, Va., Yarbrough bought a foosball table for practice while he was away from college. When he returned to Cookeville, he didn’t have a place to store the table, so he made a deal with a local game room to use the table and to split the revenue with him.
“I was amazed at how fast the quarters racked up,” he said.

Yarbrough, who graduated with a degree in industrial engineering, continued to buy other video games and eventually started VGT, one of the nation’s largest video gaming companies.

Since 1991, VGT has been supplying markets with LCD touch screen machines, stepper-reel live-draw bingo games and a revolutionary narrow-width gaming cabinet that lets facilities place two machines in the space traditionally taken by one game.

“I have been very fortunate in my life and I want to give back,” he said. “I plan on giving a large portion of my wealth to places like Vanderbilt who are working to combat schizophrenia. I want my life to mean something and I am passionate about (the treatment of) schizophrenia.”

Yarbrough lives in Franklin, Tenn., with his wife, Kathy, and 7-year-old daughter, Amy. The couple’s 18-year-old son, Jon Jr., is attending college at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.
- JON COOMER