Steven Koltai was a fellow in New America's Bretton Woods II program. He is a hybrid business executive/entrepreneur and foreign policy expert with a focus on international entrepreneurship development. He created and ran the Global Entrepreneurship Program at the U.S. Department of State under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (2009-2011), and has his own consulting firm, Koltai & Company LLC, working in the same field. He is a repeat successful entrepreneur having co-founded the Luxembourg-based SES (Paris/Frankfurt SES), today the largest commercial satellite system in the world (52 satellites, 6200 channels of audio, video and data and a market capitalization of $15 billion). Steven also has a 30+ year business career including stints on Wall Street working in international project finance (Salomon Bros), management consulting (McKinsey & Co), and as an entertainment industry exec spending a decade as head of corporate strategy and development at Warner Bros.
Steven has a BA in history magna cum laude from Tufts University, a license in European economics as a Fulbright Scholar from the University Libre de Bruxelles, and an MA in international economics from the Fletcher School of Law & Diplomacy, also at Tufts. Steven was a fellow at the Council On Foreign Relations, and is currently guest scholar at the Brookings Institution where he has authored Peace through Entrepreneurship: Investing in a Startup Culture for Security and Development, to be published by the Brookings Institution Press, Summer/Fall 2016. He is an active angel investor and board member on both for-profit and not-for-profit boards. He was born in Budapest, raised in Los Angeles and Kansas City, and resides in Washington D.C. and Lincolnville, Maine.