Bill Bygrave is the Director of the Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College, where he also teaches Free Enterprise. He has also been a successful entrepreneur himself: he founded a high-tech company that was funded with venture capital; he managed a division of another high-tech company that was listed on the NYSE; he co-founded a pharmaceutical database company; and he was a member of the investment committee of a venture capital firm. He spent the 1992-1993 academic year at INSEAD where he introduced an MBA course in Entrepreneurial Finance and led a pan-European team from eight nations that studied entrepreneurs' attitudes toward realizing value and harvesting their companies. One of the outcomes of that research was the initiative that led to the founding of EASDAQ (the European equivalent of NASDAQ). In 1997, he and Michael Hay at the London Business School started the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), which examines the entrepreneurial competitiveness of nations. Bygrave was the 1997 winner of the Ernst Young Entrepreneur of the Year award in the supporter category for New England, and one of the three finalists in this category nationwide.
Andrew Zacharakis is the Paul T. Babson Term Chair in Entrepreneurship and Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Arthur M. Blank Center for Entrepreneurship at Babson College. His writings and research focus on two major areas of entrepreneurship: the venture capital decision-making process, and the impact of entrepreneurship on the economy. His 1999 article on new venture failure received editor's award for best article in Journal of Small Business Management and his dissertation received the Heizer Award for outstanding thesis in entrepreneurship in 1995. Zacharakis has been interviewed in newspapers nationwide, including The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Boston Globe and The Los Angeles Times, and by several magazines, including Inc., Entrepreneur and Kiplinger's. He has also appeared on television in the Bloomberg Small Business Report and radio on NPR Morning Edition. Prior to his work at Babson, he held investment banking/venture capital positions with The Cambridge Companies. He also previously held positions at IBM and Leisure Technologies.