Professor Engel is an internationally recognized expert in innovation, entrepreneurship, and venture capital, lecturing and advising business and government leaders around the world. He is the co-founder with the well-known serial entrepreneur Steve Blank, of The Lean LaunchPad. After a successful business career, he joined the faculty of University of California at Berkeley in 1991 to found the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, of which he is a Senior Fellow and the Founding Executive Director Emeritus. He advises major corporations as well as young emerging companies and private equity investors on corporate strategy and innovation.

Verne Harnish is founder of the world-renowned Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO), with over 12,000 members worldwide, and chaired for fifteen years EO’s premiere CEO program, the “Birthing of Giants” held at MIT, a program in which he still teaches today. Founder and CEO of Gazelles, a global executive education and coaching company with over 210 partners on six continents, Verne has spent the past three decades helping companies scaleup. The “Growth Guy” syndicated columnist, he’s also the Venture columnist for FORTUNE magazine. He’s the author of the bestseller Mastering the Rockefeller Habits which is translated into 9 languages; and along with the editors of Fortune, authored The Greatest Business Decisions of All Times,” for which Jim Collins wrote the foreword.

His latest book Scaling Up (Rockefeller Habits 2.0) has won seven major international book awards including the prestigious 2015 International Book Award for Best General Business book. Verne also chairs FORTUNE Magazine’s annual ScaleUp and Growth Summits and serves on several boards including chairman of The Riordan Clinic and the newly launched Geoversity.

A private investor in many scaleups, Verne resides in Barcelona, Spain, with his wife and four children and enjoys piano, tennis, and magic as a card-carrying member of the International Brotherhood of Magicians.