Aaron Dinin
About Aaron Dinin
I teach entrepreneurship at Duke University with a focus on social marketing and personal brand building. My courses have been featured by the Today Show, Bloomberg, WIRED Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and even Cosmopolitan (yes, **that** Cosmopolitan). I also write extensively about entrepreneurship, venture capital, business, sales, marketing, and other startup-related topics on Medium.com, where I'm one of the platforms "top writers." You can read everything I write by subscribing to my weekly newsletter, Entrepreneur Office Hours (https://entrepreneurofficehours.com). Prior to teaching entrepreneurship, I was a software engineer and founder of multiple venture-backed technology companies. I'm a 2012 Microsoft Fellow, a 2013 graduate of The Startup Factory, and a member of 500 Startups Batch #19. In addition to being an entrepreneur and software developer, I have a PhD in English. My research focuses on the relationship between 19th Century literary celebrity and 21st Century digital social media influencers. If you're wondering what kind of software engineer has a PhD in English, you probably shouldn't ask me unless you've got time for a long explanation about how languages are technologies of information storage and dissemination. I'll probably begin my answer by referencing Foucault and Derrida, then I'll start describing the ways texts by authors like Dickinson, Whitman, Eliot, and Shakespeare are recreated in software. As I ramble, your eyes will glaze over, you'll mentally revert to a bored-10th-grade-English version of yourself, and you'll quickly regret having asked the question.