Jeffrey F. Rayport is a faculty member in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School, where he teaches in MBA, Executive Education, and HBS Online programs. He was previously an operating partner at Castanea Partners, a private equity firm focused on retail and consumer brands. Prior to that, he was founder and CEO of Marketspace LLC, a digital advisory firm, and co-founder of Monitor Executive Development, a custom education business. Rayport was also a senior partner at Monitor Group (now Monitor Deloitte). He cofounded 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 and 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 graduate-level textbooks on strategy in the networked economy and a bestselling trade book 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 several public and private corporations and is a trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA, and of WGBH in Boston, MA; chairman 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 holds an AB from Harvard College, an MPhil in International Relations from the University of Cambridge, and an AM and PhD.in Business History from Harvard University.