Daniel Isenberg
Daniel Isenberg has been a thought and practice leader in entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship ecosystems since the 1980s and has taught, practiced, and invested in entrepreneurship since then.
Dan was a professor at the Harvard Business School for 11 years where he pioneered education in international entrepreneurship. Since 2010 an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School, from 1987-2005 Dan was an entrepreneur, entrepreneurship teacher and venture capitalist in Israel and since has made investments in over four dozen technology startups in ten countries, as well as six VC funds in Israel, the US, China and the Middle East. Dan authored Worthless Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value (Harvard Business Review Press 2013) and over 35 digital and print articles on entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship ecosystems in the Harvard Business Review and over 40 teaching cases. He has been featured in the Economist, Forbes, Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, etc. Dan and the Scale Up team have founded and directed Manizales-Mas, Scale Up Milwaukee, Scale Up Rio, Scale Up Atlantic Canada, Scale Up Trinidad and Tobago, and ScaleratorNEO. Dan has conducted World Economic Forum events at Davos, Africa, Europe, Latin America and China, guest lectured at the Harvard Kennedy School where he was also an associate of the Growth Lab (2016-2017), and he guest lectures at MIT DesignX. In 2012 Mikhail Gorbachev awarded Dan the Pio Manzu Award for “Innovations in Economic Development.”
Dan holds the Ph.D. degree in social psychology from Harvard University. Dan is co-organizer of the MBL Project on Histones and Chromatin and is an MBL Society Fellow. Dan enjoys salsa dancing (On2), collecting wine, creating art, and fishing. Nevertheless, he is most excited about spending time with his four kids and his two grandchildren, helping his over two dozen active devil investments grow, and by being surprised by what entrepreneurs around the world can accomplish.