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.
Prior to HBS, Rayport was founder and CEO of Marketspace LLC, a digital advisory firm, and co-founder of Monitor Executive Development, a custom education business. He was also a senior partner at Monitor Deloitte, and an operating partner at Castanea Partners, a private equity firm focused on retail and consumer brands.
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 graduate-level textbooks on strategy in the networked economy with McGraw-Hill and also a bestselling trade book with Harvard Business Review Press on reinventing service businesses in the digital age.
He has served as a director of public and private corporations, including AGENCY.com (ACOM), Be Free (BFRE); CBS MarketWatch (MKTW), Conversant (CNVR); GSI Commerce (GSIC), iCrossing, International Data Group; Hanley Wood; Monster Worldwide (MWW); Receptiv; Shoprunner; and ValueClick (VCLK). He is a trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; a trustee of GBH; 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.
