Steven Beck Ph.D

Steven Beck Ph.D General Information

Biography

Dr. Steven Beck serves as Board Member at Regen Organics. He is a Co-Founder and serves as Managing Partner at NovaStar Ventures. He also serves as a Board Member at Bridge International Academies, Komaza, Sanergy, and Paradigm. He began his career in management consulting and spent 18 years advising business leaders of global Fortune 200 companies on strategy, organization, and change management. As Managing Director of Gemini Consulting (a division of Cap Gemini), he then led the company's most profitable division with some 500 consultants and $200 million in revenues from nine offices in Europe, Asia, and South Africa. Later, he joined Monitor Group as a Senior Partner, co-leading the Group's business in Europe and Africa. During these years in consulting, he honed his understanding of competitive strategy and organizational leadership. Seeking an outlet for his academic training and passion for international development, he took a leave of consulting in 2002 to help lead a new philanthropic advisory and grant management firm focused on humanitarian relief and development in the Global South called Geneva Global. Under his leadership, Geneva became a recognized leader in results-focused international philanthropy, managing $80 million of grants to more than a thousand community-based projects in global health, human liberty, microfinance, education, and conflict recovery. During his time traveling to East Africa with Geneva Global, he began to see the possibility of pursuing philanthropic motives through commercial for-profit ventures. He began investing alongside like-minded friends in early-stage companies serving the aspiring mass market in East Africa in 2009, shortly after leaving Geneva Global. Through Novastar Ventures, the informal private investor circle he founded, he and his partners backed a handful of entrepreneurs whose success proved the viability of Novastar's investment thesis. He earned an A.B. with Distinction from Stanford University in Economics and International Relations, and a Ph.D. from the London School of Economics. He served as Board Member at Soko.