Rob Lalka

Rob Lalka is the Albert R. Lepage Professor in Business at Tulane University’s A.B. Freeman School of Business and Executive Director of the Lepage Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. He teaches courses on business strategy, venture capital, technology governance, and ethical leadership.

He is the author of The Venture Alchemists: How Big Tech Turned Profits Into Power, which was named one of the 22 best business books of 2024 by SABEW and won the 2025 Axiom Gold Medal in Business Ethics – Future Trends. Kirkus Reviews praised it as “an impressive work of research and intellectual reflection… among the most clear-eyed, well researched, and morally uncompromising” books of its kind. MIT Technology Review commended it 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."

Previously, Lalka was a director at Village Capital and a senior advisor at the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. 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, where he received both the Superior Honor Award and the 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, received his master’s degree in public policy from Duke University, and earned executive education certificates in corporate governance and artificial intelligence from Harvard Business School and the MIT Sloan School of Management.