Alex Cowan

Education: Studied Industrial Engineering and Economics at Stanford University

Alex teaches five courses for generalists engaged in digital product development: Digital Product Management, Project Management, Digital Product Design, Coding with GPT, and the Digital Capstone. He also teaches in the M.S. in Business Analytics.

With Darden, he created the Coursera specializations "Digital Product Management" and "Coding with AI for MBAs," which together have had over 800,000 enrollments. He is the author of Hypothesis-Driven Development, The Economics of Code, and Cybersecurity. His work on hypothesis-driven development is widely used by practitioners and instructors as a systematic approach to developing new products and ventures.

Alex divides his time between teaching, writing, and advising new ventures. He has delivered workshops to student and professional audiences at Stanford's d.school, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Carnegie Mellon, Swissnex, the UVA i.Lab, and General Assembly. He currently serves on four corporate boards and advises startups and "intrapreneurial" ventures.

Before Darden, Alex was a five-time entrepreneur and a one-time intrapreneur. His last company, Leonid Systems, was acquired by Broadsoft (now part of Cisco) in 2015. His last investment, Singularity Networks, was acquired by Cisco in 2019.