David Kyle

Background and Education

David’s 38-year career has been almost evenly spent between commercial finance and a social enterprise path, both as an investor and as an entrepreneur. Along both paths his focus has been on talent development, team building and growing businesses. Currently he runs an advisory firm and teaches entrepreneurship both at Emory University’s Goizueta Business School in Atlanta and at Johns Hopkins’ School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC where he obtained his Masters in 1979. David has extensive experience with start-up companies, both leading them from scratch and advising other entrepreneurs on launching theirs.
 
David started his career in the Brazil Division of the World Bank in 1979. In 1981 began a 20 year career with Citibank’s Corporate and Investment Bank in Brazil, followed by positions with Citi in Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia and Portugal where he was country manager from 1991-1996. In 1996 he moved to London to lead a start-up internet project for Citibank which resulted in the launching of an intranet platform linking all customer relationship teams around the world. His final role with Citigroup was as COO of the Latin American Investment Bank, which he left in 2001.
 
Following his career at Citibank David moved to the social enterprise world first as head of Global Marketing for Save the Children, followed by 4 years at Acumen Fund from 2003-07 as COO and CIO. In 2007 David left Acumen and moved to Hyderabad, India for 3 years where he was the Founder and CEO of the Indian School Finance Company, a for-profit finance company that provides medium term debt capital to private schools serving very low-income families. The ISFC has since grown in to a flourishing nation-wide business. After returning to the US in 2010 David was COO of the Calvert Foundation in Bethesda, Maryland which he left in 2013 to start Impact Business Leaders, a Washington, DC-based non-profit which focused on matching experienced business professionals looking for career change to full time roles with social enterprises. IBL succeeded in helping 109 business managers find new career paths with growing companies around the world. In early 2018 David was prompted to pass IBL to new entrepreneurial teams for family reasons.
 
Since 2006 David has pursued parallel teaching activities in entrepreneurship in several graduate programs in the US and abroad in the cities where he was living at the time starting with Columbia SIPA (2006-7); Hyderabad-based Indian School of Business (2008-10); Emory University’s Goizueta MBA program (since 2011); and, at Johns Hopkins-SAIS (since 2015). David went to Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and has an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University.