Scott Galloway (professor)

Scott Galloway (born November 3, 1964) is a Clinical Professor of marketing at the New York University Stern School of Business, public speaker, author, podcast host, and entrepreneur.

Early life and education
Galloway grew up in Los Angeles, California. His father was a Scottish immigrant to the United States who worked as a sales executive. His mother, a Jewish immigrant from London, England, worked as a secretary.

Galloway was rejected after his first application to the University of California, Los Angeles despite a 76% acceptance rate at the time. On his second application, the UCLA admissions director accepted Galloway, despite poor grades, because Galloway was a "native son of California" and deserved a shot. He earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics in 1987, graduating with a 2.27 GPA. Despite his grades, he was accepted into UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, graduating with an MBA in 1992.

Career
Following his graduation from UCLA in 1987, Galloway worked as a fixed income analyst at Morgan Stanley.

In 1992, he founded Prophet, a brand and marketing consultancy firm. In 1997, he founded RedEnvelope, an e-commerce site specializing in unique and personalized gifts. In 2005 Galloway founded the digital intelligence firm L2 Inc, which was acquired in March 2017 by Gartner for $155 million, and the now defunct Firebrand Partners, founded in 2005, an activist hedge fund that invested over $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies. In 2019, Galloway founded the online education startup Section4. He raised $30 million in the Series A round in 2021 for a total funding of $37 million.

He was elected to the 1999 class of the World Economic Forum's "Global Leaders of Tomorrow", which recognizes 100 individuals under the age of 40 whose accomplishments have had impact on a global level.

He has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company, Gateway Computer, Urban Outfitters, and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Galloway is also known for his public presentations and TED-style talks, called Winners &amp; Losers, in which he presented L2's Digital IQ Index results, ranking over 2,500 global brands  across numerous dimensions including e-commerce, social media, and digital marketing.

Galloway teaches brand management and digital marketing to second-year MBA students. Much of his research focuses on the Big Four tech companies, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Apple, which he refers to as "The Four" or "the Four Horsemen". His first book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, was published in 2017. It analyzes the Big Four's peculiar strengths and strategies, their novel economic models, their inherent rapacity, their ambition, and the drastic consequences of their rise that people face in both social and individual terms.

In May 2017, Galloway anticipated Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods Market, a transaction that became reality the following month. He denied any insider knowledge and said he was "just lucky" on that call. In early 2018, Galloway predicted the planned Amazon HQ2 would be located in either the New York metropolitan area or the Washington metropolitan area; with the decision to create two locations, Galloway ended up predicting both correctly.

In September 2018, Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network launched Pivot, a weekly news commentary podcast co-hosted by Kara Swisher and Galloway. In February 2020, Galloway launched The Prof G Show, a weekly podcast answering listener questions on business, money, and tech.

In August 2019, Galloway published a highly critical analysis of WeWork's initial public offering filing, criticizing the company's unprofitability as well as its culture, corporate structure, nepotism, and the evidence of self-dealing on the part of founder Adam Neumann, while also castigating JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, the investment banks underwriting the launch, saying that they "stand to register $122 million in fees flinging feces at retail investors. Any equity analyst who endorses this stock above a $10 billion valuation is lying, stupid, or both."

On September 28, 2021, CNN announced that Galloway would be a host on its CNN+ streaming platform, though the platform went off the air shortly after launching.

In 2022, Galloway's weekly newsletter No Mercy/No Malice won the Webby Award and Webby's People's Voice Award for best Business, News & Technology Websites and Mobile Sites.

Positions
Since 2017, Galloway repeatedly called for U.S. government antitrust intervention against the four consumer technology companies Apple, Meta Platforms, Amazon and Alphabet, ultimately breaking them up. He advocated against Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency plans in July 2019 due to the company's "gross negligence of user privacy". In 2019, he endorsed Michael Bloomberg's presidential 2020 candidacy as he "fulfills the Democrats' need for a strong centrist candidate".

In December 2019, he called for the removal of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey while declaring to own more than 330,000 shares of Twitter stock. Relating to the 2015–16 Apple–FBI dispute, he sided with the U.S. government and said that "security agencies should have access to [personal] data wherever it is if a judge deems that data is key to people's safety or national security."

Galloway has called for taxing endowments of universities whose enrollment growth is not commensurate with population growth, suggesting exclusivity makes such universities a "luxury brand" as opposed to a public service. He has written about growing up an unremarkable child of immigrant parents and has said the goal of universities should be to educate not just exceptional students, but also the unremarkable.

As of March 2019, Galloway donates 100% of his NYU compensation back to the university. He donated $4.4 million to Berkeley for immigrant student fellowships as well as smaller sums to UCLA and NYU.

Galloway self-describes as an atheist. He advises his students not to follow their passion, but to follow their talent.

Personal life
Galloway is married to his second wife, Beata Galloway, a real estate developer born in Germany, whom he met at the Raleigh Hotel pool in Miami. They have two sons together.

Since 2022, he and his family have resided in London.

In popular culture
Galloway is played by Kelly AuCoin in the 2022 series WeCrashed.

Books