Scott Galloway

Galloway was born in San Diego and grew up in Los Angeles, California. His father was a Scottish immigrant to the United States who worked as a sales executive. His mother, a Jewish immigrant from London, England, worked as a secretary.

Following his graduation from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1987, Galloway worked as a fixed income analyst at Morgan Stanley. He then went on to earn his MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, graduating in 1992.

In 1992, he founded Prophet, a brand and marketing consultancy firm.

In 1997, Galloway founded RedEnvelope, as 911Gifts.com, an e-commerce site specializing in expensive and monogrammed gifts, which designed many of its own products. The company went public in 2003, but declared bankruptcy in 2008.

In 1999, he was elected to the 1999 class of the World Economic Forum's "Global Leaders of Tomorrow", which recognizes 100 individuals under the age of 40 whose accomplishments have had an impact on a global level.

In 2010, Galloway founded the digital intelligence firm L2 Inc, which was acquired in March 2017 by Gartner for $155 million, and the now defunct Firebrand Partners, founded in 2005, an activist hedge fund that invested over $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies.

In 2019, he founded the executive-education startup section (formerly Section 4), which raised $30 million in Series A funding led by General Catalyst in 2021, bringing total funding to about $37 million.

Galloway has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company, Gateway Computer, Urban Outfitters, and UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business. He is also known for his public presentations and TED-style talks, called Winners & Losers, in which he presented L2's Digital IQ Index results, ranking over 2,500 global brands across numerous dimensions including e-commerce, social media, and digital marketing.

Galloway teaches brand management and digital marketing to second-year MBA students. Much of his research concerns big tech, including Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Apple, which he refers to as "The Four" or "the Four Horsemen". His first book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, was released in 2017 and analyzes the big four's peculiar strengths and strategies, novel aspects of their economic models, tactics of expansion, as well as resulting social and individual consequences.

In September 2018, Recode and the Vox Media launched Pivot, a weekly news commentary podcast co-hosted by Kara Swisher and Galloway.

In February 2020, Galloway launched The Prof G Show, a weekly podcast answering listener questions on business, money, and technology.

On September 28, 2021, CNN announced that Galloway would be a host on its CNN+ streaming platform, but the platform went off the air shortly after launching.

In 2022, Galloway's weekly newsletter No Mercy/No Malice won the Webby Award and Webby's People's Voice Award for best business, news and technology websites and mobile sites.

In 2026, Governor Gavin Newsom appointed Galloway to the Regents of the University of California.

Galloway met his second wife, Beata Galloway, a real estate developer born in Poland, at the Raleigh Hotel pool in Miami. She is 17 years his junior. They have two sons together. Galloway and his family have resided in London since 2022.

Galloway is Jewish but philosophically atheist.

In 2017, Galloway donated $4.4 million to UC Berkeley for immigrant student fellowships as well as smaller sums to UCLA and NYU. In July 2024, he donated $12 million to UCLA and UC Berkeley to establish the UC "Excelerator" program.