Rob Lalka is the Albert R. Lepage Professor in Business, and the Executive Director of the Albert Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He has received the A.B. Freeman School’s Excellence in Intellectual Contributions Award three times, most recently for the critically acclaimed new book, The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power, from Columbia University Press.
The Venture Alchemists was recognized as one of the 22 best business books of 2024 by the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing. It has been cited in Newsweek, Forbes, Rolling Stone, NBC News, The Guardian, and other publications. Kirkus Reviews called it “An impressive work of research and intellectual reflection,” adding this praise: “The body of work addressing this subject now seems inexhaustible, but this book must count as among its most clear-eyed, well researched, and morally uncompromising examples.” MIT Technology Review commended the book for “deflating the myth that these entrepreneurs were somehow gifted seers of (and investors in) a future the rest of us simply couldn’t comprehend or predict,” while exposing “the price we’ve paid in handing over unprecedented power to Big Tech—and explain[ing] why it’s imperative we start taking it back.”
Lalka moved to New Orleans from Washington, DC, where he was a director at Village Capital and a senior advisor at the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. Prior, he served in the U.S. Department of State's Office of Global Partnerships and was on the Secretary of State's Policy Planning Staff, for which he was recognized with the State Department's Superior Honor Award and its Meritorious Honor Award.
Lalka currently serves on the boards of Public Democracy, Inc., and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Louisiana. He graduated from Yale University, cum laude with distinction in both history and English, holds his master's degree in public policy from Duke University, and earned executive education certificates from Harvard Business School.
