Private Capital Project - Harvard Business School

Private equity has become an integral part of the financial landscape, gaining increasing relevance over time. Today, the global private equity sector has surpassed $4.5 trillion. Harvard Business School's broader missions are well-aligned with the interests of private capital. These shared interests, such as the application of cutting-edge technologies to solve broad societal problems, overlap with swaths of faculty and practitioners. Private capital techniques have the potential to be a crucial part of the solutions to some of the most pressing challenges facing the world. With a focus on altruism, private equity has the potential to be a primary driver of sustained positive change.

The inception of the strategic use of private capital is inextricably tied to Harvard Business School. The first modern PE fund, American Research and Development, was designed and led by Professor Georges Doriot in the years after World War II at HBS. Concerned about potential post-war stagnation, Doriot recognized the crucial role new financial institutions could play beyond the confines of traditional banks and public markets. Today, HBS alumni have an immense impact on the private capital landscape. An analysis of 4,386 VC biographies in Capital IQ reports that 13% have attended HBS, while the next most common was 6% with Stanford Graduate School of Business. Notably, HBS was also the first major business school to offer classes in “Entrepreneurial Finance” and “Venture Capital and Private Equity.” Today, both are widely emulated, primarily using HBS cases, at other institutions.

Our Goals

To facilitate deeper interaction between academia and practitioners to understand the big challenges in the industry and their potential solutions
To foster influential research at HBS and other schools by assembling and curating data on the industry
To ensure that our MBA graduates and Executive Education participants are exposed to cutting-edge ideas that will shape their career paths in the Venture Capital and Private Equity Industries