2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Daniel Blaseg, Esade Business School

Daniel Blaseg
Esade Business School 

“I was very fortunate to have Daniel Blaseg as a professor during my MBA at Esade. The foundation of Daniel’s class, Entrepreneurship: Finance Growth & Innovation, was his own research and data that he had gathered from the industry. It was a live data driven insight into how the industry operates that could be directly leveraged by a hopeful entrepreneur such as myself. Now that I am in the process of developing my own startup I have reconsulted on multiple content the content that Daniel taught. Aside from the content quality of his lectures Daniel possessed the factor that differentiates a good professor from a great professor, that being a passion for one’s field. After completion of my MBA, Daniel has always been available for advice and consultations while developing my startup idea. For which I will always be grateful.” – Brendan McCourt

Daniel Blaseg, 37, is Associate Professor of Entrepreneurship in the Department of Strategy and General Management at Esade Business School in Barcelona.

His research is interdisciplinary, drawing on entrepreneurship, marketing, and finance to investigate how entrepreneurs build legitimacy, secure resources, and scale ventures under uncertainty and information asymmetry, with a focus on strategic narratives, market frictions in entrepreneurial finance, and organizational design. His empirical work combines field experiments, large-scale archival analysis, and computational methods including computer vision and large language models, and he is increasingly active in agentic AI for research workflows.

His research has been published in leading FT50 journals including Marketing Science, Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice, and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. His work has received thirteen research awards from academic and practice-oriented institutions, including the INFORMS TIMES Best Dissertation Award, the Roman Herzog Research Prize, the Wolfgang-Ritter-Prize for Outstanding Research in Management, the BAI Science Prize in Alternative Investments, and best paper awards at the Academy of Management.

Before academia, Blaseg advised on startup transactions as an M&A consultant and served as Chief Financial Officer of two ventures. He remains an active investor and advisor to early-stage companies. 

BACKGROUND 

At current institution since what year? 2019 

Education: Dr. rer. pol. in Economics and Business Administration (Goethe University Frankfurt); LL.M. in Law and Finance (Goethe University Frankfurt); M.Sc. in Finance (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management); B.Sc. in Management, Philosophy, and Economics (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management). 

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach: Financing Growth and Innovation (MBA); Applied Research Methods in Management (PhD) 

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR 

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when …  I didn’t plan to. I was aiming at investment banking, took a detour as CFO of a startup that went badly, and then took a mandatory marketing class with Christian Schulze at Frankfurt School during my master’s. That class was where I found the answers to why our startup had failed. The PhD started as a detour to chase a few more of those questions. A decade later, I am still on it. 

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? Startup pitch decks. In a pre-registered field experiment with nearly 35,000 investors, my co-author and I find that the visual fluency of a deck rivals its substantive content in driving investor engagement. The uncomfortable implication is that founders without design resources are systematically penalized for reasons that have little to do with whether their business will work. Everyone says design matters. Almost nobody invests in it the way the data says they should. 

If I weren’t a business school professor…  Conductor of a classical orchestra, in a parallel life with more talent. In this one, learning the hard way how difficult being a VC really is.  

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? I went through five years of qualitative comments from my teaching evaluations to answer this. The words that repeat most are passion, practical, credible, and well-structured. I think the combination is what stands out. I am very organized in how I build and run a course, and I anchor every session to live events through exercises and guest speakers. 

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor:  That much of what matters in this career comes from serendipity. The job is learning to say yes often enough to stay lucky, and no often enough to still get work done. 

Professor I most admire and why:  It feels wrong to pick one. Bernd Skiera set my bar for discipline. Christian Schulze showed me that being intellectually demanding and personally generous are not opposites. Martin Schreier and Michael Koetter made me see that serious work can be done with ease and grace. Matteo Prato and Gary Dushnitsky taught me the value of sharp questions. And Adalbert Winkler gave lectures I took more than a decade ago, and I still cannot articulate exactly what made them stick. 

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? What happens after the course ends. Students who launched ventures from class projects, who keep emailing me about deals years later, who go on to make bold moves in their careers. Some come back as guest speakers, bring projects, and pitch to the next cohort. That virtuous circle is the point. 

What is most challenging? Providing real value to a room with very different starting points. The session has to go deep enough for the most experienced student, stay clear enough for the newest one, make the material stick for both, and stay compelling throughout. 

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as…  Demanding. I believe in normal distributions with fat tails, meaning genuine excellence is rewarded, and weak work receives weak grades. 

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM 

What are your hobbies? Skiing, baby-swimming, and playground hopping. Plus Eintracht Frankfurt, a weekly lesson in ecstatic highs and crushing lows. 

How will you spend your summer? One half implementing the agentic AI ideas I have queued up and keeping up with how fast the field is moving. The other half with the laptop closed. 

Favorite place(s) to vacation:  The Swiss Alps in the summer, to escape Barcelona’s heat and tourists. 

Favorite book(s): The Count of Monte Cristo. The best novel ever written about pivoting, patience, and preparation. 

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much?  The Lives of Others and The Pursuit of Happyness. Both are stories of quiet heroes making bold moves. 

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? LaBrassBanda, Irie Révoltés, Shantel, and Seeed. Brass, dancehall, Balkan pop, ragga, all high energy. And, unrelatedly, a committed Mozart fanboy. 

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS 

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this…  Slack and productive frictions. Curricula are engineered to fill every hour and reward agreement, at exactly the moment when AI is making fluent agreement effortless. Students need protected time where they pursue their own ideas, and structural opportunities to go against consensus and stress-test it. Slack without friction produces comfort. Friction without slack produces noise.  

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…  Living up to what they preach. Most organizations claim to fund the best, hire the strongest, and decide on data. Most are pattern matching on what looks familiar, chasing short-term numbers, and treating weak correlations as evidence.  

I’m grateful for…  All the privileges I have. The older I get, the more I notice how much of my story is other people’s patience. 

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

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