Doug Levin

Douglas (Doug) Levin is an American serial entrepreneur, technologist and business school adjunct faculty lecturer.

He is an Executive-in-Residence at the Harvard Business School and teaches the “Startup Academy” course in the Harvard Business Analytics Program. He also has taught a range of entrepreneurship and startup finance courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for many years.

He presently serves on the Board of Directors of ReversingLabs (cybersecurity), FiVerity (digital fraud detection) and SmartOne (data labelling for AI).

Levin is the author of the Substack “Lessons from a Startup Life” blog posts and podcasts.

Levin also founded or co-founded five companies including Black Duck Software, where he served as the sole founder and first CEO. For the first eighteen months he financed the company with his own funds before taking venture capital investments. Levin identified that developers’ use of open source code in commercial products created code management and license compliance concerns among enterprises. In addition, he recognized early on the application security risks associated with open source software. He started and built Black Duck Software to address those issues. Today, the company’s products are the de facto standard for open source software security development and management – a mandatory check box for most app dev projects and software. Black Duck Software was acquired by Synopsys in 2017.

Earlier in his career, Levin held senior management positions at Microsoft Corporation over a nine-year period.