Diane Mulcahy

Diane Mulcahy is a private equity adviser for the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. She manages the Foundation’s portfolio of private equity and venture capital investments and writes and speaks frequently on PE, VC, and entrepreneurship. Mulcahy is the lead author of the Kauffman Foundation’s report, “We Have Met the Enemy…and He is Us.” Her work has been published in the Harvard Business Review and on The Huffington Post, and she is frequently quoted in national media, including NPR, Reuters, Forbes, and PandoDaily.

Mulcahy is based in Boston and is an adjunct lecturer in the Entrepreneurship division at Babson College. She created and teaches the MBA class, The Gig Economy, which was named by Forbes.com as one of the Top 10 Most Innovative Business School Classes in the country. She has lectured at universities worldwide on entrepreneurship and private equity, including Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, and Dar al-Hekma and Prince Sultan College for Women in Saudi Arabia.

Prior to joining the Kauffman Foundation, Mulcahy was a member of McKinsey & Co.’s Corporate Finance practice. Before joining McKinsey, she was a venture capital investor for seven years. She was vice president and an officer of American Century Ventures, Inc., a $100 million startup corporate venture fund. Her portfolio companies included Archipelago, Euronet, StarMine, Tradepoint, and WR Hambrecht. Earlier, Mulcahy was a vice president in the health care practice of Bessemer Venture Partners.

Mulcahy is the author of two books on venture capital. Her most recent book, Venturing Forward, is written for entrepreneurs and is a practical guide to raising equity finance. She also is the author of Angels and IPOs: Policies for the Sustainable Equity Financing of Irish Small Businesses, a public policy book about the Irish government’s financing of the venture capital industry, which she wrote while a Visiting Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. The book’s conclusions were the subject of articles and commentary pieces in the European Venture Capital Journal, The Irish Times, Irish Independent, the Sunday Times, the Sunday Business Post, and Business Plus.

Mulcahy holds Master of Public Policy and undergraduate degrees from Harvard University.