Douglas Levin

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

He is an Executive Fellow 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.

Career

Early years

Levin began his career as a product evangelist at Microsoft, working on the initial launch and subsequent releases of Microsoft Excel, and other marketing program initiatives from 1987 to 1995. He was a member of the team that created Microsoft’s first volume licensing program, which was eventually extended to all of the regions and countries in which the company did business. In his last role for the company, Levin ran Microsoft Germany’s corporate sales and marketing operations.

More Start-Ups

He then served as CEO of MessageMachines (acquired by NMS Communications in 2002) and X-Collaboration Software Corporation (acquired by Progress Software in 2000), two VC-backed companies based in Boston. He also helped found and fund Lucid Imagination, which became Lucid Works, and subsequently served on the company’s boards of directors and advisors. In January 2010, he founded Ayeah Games.

Today he serves as a business, finance and technical advisor to Dowsers (Blockchain); Hyka (Wellness); InfoSec (Cybersecurity); JigsawML (Cloud & AI); Praxos (InsurTech); Resec (Cybersecurity); Stynt (Dental Office Staffing) and TeamLift (Skills Assessment).

Education and awards

Levin has an advanced degree in International Economics from the Collège d'Europe in Bruges, Belgium and a BA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has also attended Columbia University, New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he took computer science, accounting and finance coursework.

In 2007, Levin was awarded CEO of the Year by the Mass Technology Leadership Council.

In 2009, he was named a fellow at New England Clean Energy Foundation.

Personal

Levin lives in Boston with his wife, Susana.