Known as “the patron saint of private equity research,” Professor Kaplan presented "What Do We Really Know About Private Equity Performance?" for a full house of Miami Herbert students, faculty, staff and alumni, as well as visiting members of the Chicago Booth community.
Professor Kaplan researches private equity, venture capital, corporate governance, executive talent, and income inequality. He has testified to U.S. Senate and U.S. House Committees about his research on private equity and executive compensation. He is the co-creator of the Kaplan-Scholar PME (Public Market Equivalent) private equity benchmarking approach. A Fortune Magazine article referred to him as "probably the foremost private equity scholar in the galaxy.” A JP Morgan report called him “the patron saint of private equity research.” His findings and opinions regularly appear in business media. Professor Kaplan is a Research Associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Financial Economics and the editor of SSRN.com’s Entrepreneurship & Finance eJournal.
Professor Kaplan teaches advanced MBA, law, and executive courses in entrepreneurial finance and private equity, corporate financial management, corporate governance, and wealth management. His course in entrepreneurial finance and private equity is consistently among the most popular in the school. BusinessWeek named him one of the top twelve business school teachers in the country and one of the top four teachers of entrepreneurship.
Professor Kaplan co-founded the entrepreneurship program at Booth. With his students, he helped start Booth’s business plan competition, the New Venture Challenge (NVC), which has spawned over one hundred companies. The companies have raised almost $1 billion from investors (including Accel, Andreesen Horowitz, Benchmark, Index, and Sequoia) and have created billions of dollars in market value. Companies include GrubHub (IPO market cap of $3+ billion), Braintree/Venmo (sold to eBay for $800 million), MedSpeed, and Simple Mills. The NVC has been rated one of the top two university accelerator programs in the U.S. as well as one of the top eight accelerators of any kind in the U.S. since 2015. He helped start Hyde Park Angels which has been named one of the top angel groups in the U.S.
Miami Herbert Business School’s Distinguished Leaders Lecture Series is made possible through the generosity of Southern Glazer's Wine & Spirits. To learn more or to see a schedule of upcoming Distinguished Leaders Lectures, click here.
