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Steven N. Kaplan is the Neubauer Family Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business (GSB). Professor Kaplan joined the faculty in 1988.

 

Professor Kaplan is one of the foremost researchers in the world on private equity, venture capital and entrepreneurship. His papers on LBOs from the late 1980s and early 1990s are still the standard references in the field. He has testified to U.S. Senate and U.S. House Committees about his research. His findings and opinions regularly appear in prominent business media.

 

Kaplan founded the entrepreneurship program at the Chicago GSB in 1997 and serves as the faculty director of the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship. Through his leadership, entrepreneurship has become the second most declared concentration (of 13) at the Chicago GSB. Only finance, with a decades long history, has more concentrators. With his students, Professor Kaplan also helped start the GSB’s business plan competition, the New Venture Challenge. Now in its 12th year, the New Venture Challenge has helped launch more than 40 companies that have raised more than $100 million in angel and venture funding.

 

Professor Kaplan teaches an advanced M.B.A. course in entrepreneurial finance and private equity and a course built around the New Venture Challenge. Every two years, Business Week surveys graduating students and asks them who their favorite professors were. Kaplan has been named one of the top five professors at Chicago GSB every time since 1992. Business Week named Kaplan one of the top four entrepreneurship professors in the U.S. in 1996—the only time the magazine compared entrepreneurship professors across schools. Business Week named Professor Kaplan one of twelve “Masters of the Classroom” in the United States in 1994—the only time BusinessWeek compared all professors across schools.

 

Professor Kaplan currently serves as the academic co-dean of the Kauffman Fellows Program, an educational program designed to educate and train emerging leaders in venture capital and high-growth companies. Each year, 20-30 venture capitalists from around the world enter the two-year program.

 

Professor Kaplan serves on the board of directors of Accretive Health, Columbia Acorn Funds, and Morningstar (MORN). He also serves as a director of the Illinois Venture Capital Association and the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

 

He earned his Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University. He received his A.B., summa cum laude, in Applied Mathematics and Economics from Harvard College.

 

He and his wife, Carol Rubin, live in Chicago with their two sons.