On this date in 1964, marketing professor and entrepreneur Scott Galloway was born in New York City. He grew up in California. In a post on his blog No Mercy / No Malice (June 11, 2018), he wrote: “Religion has played almost no role in my life. My parents weren’t religious, and I had no exposure to God until, at age seven, a babysitter told me I had to stand in the corner with my arms raised (like Jesus?) whenever I said “God” in a blasphemous manner (i.e., ever).”
After his parents divorced, he occasionally attended a synagogue with his mother and felt like he “fit in” with westernized Judaism. He accompanied his stepmother to Presbyterian services on some weekend visits to his father’s.
Galloway earned a B.A. in economics in 1987 from the University of California-Berkeley and an M.A. in economics from UCLA in 1992. He worked as a Morgan Stanley fixed income analyst from 1987-89. In 1997 he founded Red Envelope, an early e-commerce site. He started the digital intelligence firm L2, Inc. in 2009. It was acquired in 2017 by the tech research firm Gartner for $155 million.
From 2002 until this writing in 2022, Galloway has been a clinical professor of marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business, teaching brand strategy, digital marketing and luxury marketing to second-year MBA students and researching emerging technology platforms. He and his wife Beata, a property developer from Germany, have two sons.
He made a $4.4 million gift to UC-Berkeley’s business school in 2017 to fund fellowships for undergraduate and graduate students who come from immigrant families. It was the school’s second-largest gift ever from an MBA alumni.
He has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company, Gateway Computer, Urban Outfitters and Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. Galloway’s public presentations and TED-style talks called “Winners & Losers” draw wide audiences. His 2019 book “The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning” puts in print some of those ideas.
He has repeatedly called for antitrust intervention to break up Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, endorsed Michael Bloomberg’s presidential 2020 candidacy and sought the removal of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. At the time, Galloway owned over 330,000 shares of Twitter stock.
“Most agnostics are closeted atheists,” declared Galloway in a 2018 blog. “I don’t know when exactly I turned off religion. My belief, similar to Ricky Gervais’s, is that good people do good things, bad people do bad things, and when you find good people doing really bad things, religion is usually involved. Finding atheism for me was significant, as I learned the core of atheism is not a denial of God, but an acceptance and tolerance of others’ beliefs, including those of us who don’t believe.”
