Jeffrey Rayport

Jeffrey F. Rayport is a faculty member in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in the MBA and Executive Education programs.

Prior to HBS, Rayport was as an operating partner at Castanea Partners, a private equity firm specializing in retail and consumer brands. He was founder and CEO of Marketspace LLC, a digital advisory firm, and co-founder of Monitor Executive Development, a custom education business. He was a Senior Partner at Monitor Deloitte. Rayport was also a co-founder of several corporate universities, including at Omnicom Group, Bertelsmann AG, and Amgen.

Earlier in his career, Rayport was a faculty member at HBS for nearly a decade. While at HBS, he developed the first MBA-level e-commerce course in the US, enrolling nearly a thousand MBAs. In creating the course, Rayport authored over a hundred case studies, articles, and notes. Business plans written by students in his course gave rise to many start-ups, including Yahoo!

Prior to his leave from HBS, Rayport coined the concept/term “viral marketing.” He was also voted Outstanding Professor for three years in a row by the HBS Students Association.

Rayport has published a series of leading MBA-level textbooks on strategy in the networked economy with McGraw-Hill and also a bestseller with Harvard Business Press on reinventing service businesses. He has been a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Bloomberg BusinessWeek, and his writing has appeared in CIO, Financial Times, Fast Company, Forbes.com, CBS MarketWatch, McKinsey Quarterly, Strategy & Business, and MIT Technology Review.

He has served as a director of public and private corporations, including AGENCY.com (ACOM), Andrews McMeel Universal; Be Free (BFRE); CBS MarketWatch (MKTW), Conversant (CNVR); GSI Commerce (GSIC), iCrossing, International Data Group; Hanley Wood; MediaMath; Linkwell Health; Monster Worldwide (MWW); Receptiv; and Shoprunner. He is a trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, and a trustee of WGBH in Boston, MA; chair of the board of From the Top (the #1 U.S. classical music radio and TV program, distributed through NPR and PBS) in Boston; and an Overseer of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston.

Rayport earned an A.B. at Harvard College; an M.Phil. in International Relations at the University of Cambridge (U.K.); and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Business History at Harvard University.