Jeffrey Rayport

Jeffrey F. Rayport is a strategic advisor in marketing services, online media, and e-commerce, with a focus on new business opportunities enabled by emerging digital technologies.

Rayport currently serves on the Faculty of the Harvard Business School in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit, where he teaches in both MBA and Executive Education programs.

Prior to his affiliation with HBS, Rayport was as an Operating Partner at Castanea Partners, a mid-size private equity firm specializing in retail, consumer brands, and marketing services, and a Special Advisor to Bain Capital Ventures. He was also Founder and Managing Partner of Marketspace LLC, a digital strategy and advisory firm. As a spin-off of that business, he co-founded and grew a custom executive development and e-learning business, which he established as an affiliate of Monitor Deloitte, where he was a Senior Partner. In related pursuits, Rayport was a co-founder and faculty member of several corporate universities, including at Omnicom Group (NYSE:OMC); Bertelsmann AG; and Amgen (NASDAQ:AMGN). As a keynote speaker, he is represented exclusively by Washington Speakers Bureau.

Previously, Rayport was a Faculty member at HBS for nearly a decade, teaching and doing research in Marketing and Service Management. While at HBS, he developed and delivered the first graduate-level e-commerce course in the nation, enrolling nearly 2,000 MBA students. In building the course, Rayport authored nearly a hundred case studies and related materials. Business plans written by students gave rise to dozens of start-ups, including Yahoo! Prior to his taking a leave from HBS, Rayport coined the term “viral marketing.” He was also voted Outstanding Professor for three years in a row by the HBS Students Association.

Rayport has published a series of leading MBA-level textbooks on strategy in the networked economy with McGraw-Hill/Irwin (e-Commerce, Cases in e-Commerce, and Introduction to e-Commerce) with co-author Bernard J. Jaworski. He and Jaworski also published a bestselling trade book for Harvard Business Review Press on reinventing service businesses, Best Face Forward: Why Companies Must Improve Their Service Interfaces with Customers.

Rayport has written as a blogger for Harvard Business Review Online and a columnist for Bloomberg BusinessWeek Online. He has contributed to other publications, including Bloomberg BusinessWeek, CIO Magazine, Financial Times, Fast Company, Forbes.com, Harvard Business Review, MarketWatch, McKinsey Quarterly, Strategy & Business, and MIT Technology Review.

He has served as a director of both public and private corporations. These include International Data Group; Hanley Wood; MediaMath; Monster Worldwide (NYSE:MWW); and Shoprunner. Past directorships include Conversant (NASDAQ:CNVR); GSI Commerce (NASDAQ:GSIC), now eBay Enterprise, where he was a founding director; iCrossing; CBS MarketWatch (NASDAQ: MKTW); Agency.com (NASDAQ:ACOM); and Be Free (NASDAQ:BFRE). He is a Trustee of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; an Overseer of Beth Isreal Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, MA; and Chairman of the Board of From the Top (the #1 U.S. classical music radio and TV program, distributed through National Public Radio and PBS) also based in Boston, MA.

Rayport earned an A.B. at Harvard College; an M.Phil. in International Relations at the University of Cambridge (U.K.); and an A.M. and Ph.D. in Business History at Harvard University.