Buck Goldstein

More recently, Goldstein served as Chairman of MedFusion, a Raleigh-based medical information technology company acquired by Intuit in 2010, and as Board Observer and advisor for iContact, an email marketing company based in the Research Triangle Park acquired by Vocus in 2012. Additionally, Goldstein has served as an advisor to Liquidia, a nano-technology company founded in the UNC chemistry department, and as a board member of Nourish International, a non-profit organization that engages college students across the United States in on campus social businesses and international poverty reduction projects.

Goldstein joined the university faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2004 to help build The Carolina Entrepreneurial Initiative, a project to make a broad definition of entrepreneurship part of the intellectual culture of the campus and support students and faculty to turn innovative ideas into self-sustaining enterprises. The UNC entrepreneurship curriculum has been named by a variety of national publications as among the nation’s best. Goldstein recruits alumni and other university supporters with entrepreneurial expertise to serve as mentors for faculty and student projects and to provide off-campus internships for students. As Professor of the Practice at the university, he teaches both small seminars and large lecture courses in entrepreneurship and supports the continuing development of the undergraduate Minor in Entrepreneurship and its internship program.

Buck Goldstein has been involved in entrepreneurship most of his professional life. After four years of working at a corporate law firm, he co-founded Information America, an online information company that was the first to make courthouse information available from remote terminals in lawyer’s offices. The business began as a two-person start-up and grew to over $40,000,000 in revenues, eventually going public and trading on the NASDAQ. Customers included virtually every major law firm in the United States, most of the Fortune 500 and many large federal agencies including the FBI, the DEA and the CIA. In 1994, Information America was acquired by West Publishing, the largest legal publisher in the world and soon after was acquired by Thomson Corporation, a multi-national information publishing company.

Goldstein attended public school in Miami Beach, Florida and graduated from Miami Beach Senior High School in 1966. He received his B.A. with Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1970 where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and the Order of the Golden Fleece. He received a M.Ed. from the University of Massachusetts in 1973 and a J.D. with Honors from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1976, where he served on the editorial board of the North Carolina Law Review.

Buck Goldstein (born March 11, 1948 in Atlanta, Georgia) is the Entrepreneur in residence and a Professor of Practice in the Department of Economics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the co-author of the book Engines of Innovation – The Entrepreneurial University in the 21st Century, in which he contends that the world’s biggest problems can be effectively addressed by large research universities through a combination of skillful innovation and execution. He was named Entrepreneur of the Year by the Information Industry Association and Information America, the company he cofounded, has appeared numerous times on the Inc. 500 list of fastest growing companies.

Goldstein and Chancellor Holden Thorp co-authored Engines of Innovation – The Entrepreneurial University in the 21st Century, suggesting that the top 125 U.S. research universities can play a crucial role in revitalizing the American economy. Goldstein and Thorp are also working to transform UNC, a 29,000-student public university, into an engine of innovation.