Doug Green

From Serial Entrepreneur to MMS Instructor: Meet Doug Green

Doug Green

Doug Green is a former serial entrepreneur who began his career as an engineer and manager at IBM before serving as the VP of marketing at two tech startup companies, Chromatis Networks and Ocular Networks, the two of which were acquired for a total of over $5 billion. He also served as the Director of Product Marketing at Ciena Communications, now a NASDAQ listed company with a market capitalization of $3.9 billion, and the Director of Product Marketing at NetEdge Systems, a telecommunications start-up acquired for $35M.

After his startup career, Green worked for Globespan Capital Partners as an entrepreneur in residence and later founded the Bradam Group, a consulting firm providing marketing and strategy advice to venture capitalists and high-tech startup companies. After temporarily leaving his consulting business in order to teach at the high school level for a few years, he returned to The Bradam Group in 2010. Green also began serving as a Visiting Associate Professor for both Markets and Management Studies (MMS) and Innovation and Entrepreneurship (I&E) at Duke University. 

He helped to create the first entrepreneurship course at Duke, leading to him later teaching one of the MMS Capstones and Marketing for Entrepreneurs. He brings his extensive knowledge and history of working in and with startups and the technology sector to his classroom, teaching students how to how to incorporate entrepreneurial thinking into their careers.

Instructor Green shares with his students that, “at its core, entrepreneurship is about finding an unmet need and building a business around meeting that need. In the process, one may indeed find success and financial independence, but these are the fruits of entrepreneurship, not the seeds.”

While some students want to be entrepreneurs, most MMS students do not desire to and are not going to go on to be entrepreneurs. For this reason, Green works to incorporate entrepreneurship thinking into his courses. He says that, especially for MMS courses, he tries to think about the kind of things that are associated with evaluating and starting a business that are transferable to wherever students may end up working. He says every class he has students who ask “is this course for me if even if I don’t want to be an entrepreneur” and his answer is always yes because the skills he teaches are transferable to their future careers.

Green strives to make sure students are receiving an interdisciplinary education by encouraging students in his capstone to apply their other knowledge and coursework to help them analyze and solve problems in his classes. "I think we have to be very intentional about making that happen," he explains. "It starts at the level of are you applying the things we’ve already learned in the class in the past to what we are doing now and then it kind of goes out from that to are you applying things you’ve learned in other classes while you’ve been at Duke and then even broader, are you bringing in things that are completely outside of your educational experience.” He shares that by the end of the semester, this process of incorporating past knowledge and connections becomes more natural for students and he finds it to be one of the rewarding aspects of teaching.

One of the things he hopes to teach his students is to think creatively about their futures and know that there isn’t one right path for them to take. “There are many ways that they can achieve what they want to in life,” he tells us. “There’s not one path to success that they have to follow when they leave to go to some traditional path that is expected of them.”

“I keep getting asked back and I keep saying yes because I enjoy teaching." We at MMS are thankful for the dedication of Instructor Green and others like him who continue to find ways to share their knowledge with our students.