Duke Professor in Strategy, Innovation & Entrepreneurship

Max S.

Hi, I'm Max – I'm a professor at Duke University where I teach Strategy and Innovation & Entrepreneurship courses for MBA, graduate, and undergraduate students.

I am a patient, communicative, deeply technical educator that loves to explain the purpose behind challenging technical concepts. My job is to ensure you know both (a) why you are doing something and (b) how to actually do it.

My courses at Duke are designed to help student founders start, develop, and scale their ventures through lectures, guest speakers, in-class presentations and extensive hands-on workshops. I cover traditional business content (marketing, sales, financing, financial modeling, product development, management, and everything between) and provide hands-on operational support for student founders.

My course was ranked the "Favorite Course of MBAs" by Poets&Quants in 2024.

Before teaching, I graduated from Duke with a BS in Mathematics and founded a software company in the funeral industry. I grew it to 25-employees before selling in 2022.

Along the way, I stayed connected and involved at Duke University as a volunteer entrepreneurial coach and advisor to student founders. Upon selling my company, I was offered a formal professorial position at Duke – which is where I am today!

I'm here because I love educating people of all ages on the fundamentals of business, and how to apply academic knowledge in the real world. In addition to general entrepreneurship, I frequently give lectures on financial modeling, public speaking/presentations, software development, business model/metric analysis, and –occasionally– mathematics.