Carnegie Mellon University
Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship  ›  About  ›  Entrepreneurs-in-Residence  ›  Dave Mawhinney

Dave MawhinneyDave Mawhinney

Founding Executive Director, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship; Executive Director, Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship; Full Teaching Professor of Entrepreneurship

dmawhin@andrew.cmu.edu 

Dave Mawhinney is the founding executive director, Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, and executive director, Donald H. Jones Center for Entrepreneurship. He serves as the managing director, Open Field Entrepreneurs Fund, and director, i6 Agile Innovation System, a collaboration between InnovationWorks and CMU. Dave is also a full teaching professor at the Carnegie Mellon Tepper School of Business.

Prior to joining Carnegie Mellon, Dave was co-founder, chairman and CEO of mSpoke, an internet content and advertising recommendation engine, that was acquired in 2010 by LinkedIn, the world’s leading professional social networking site. In 2006, Morgan Stanley’s MSCI/Barra business unit acquired mSpoke’s first business line, a quantitative investment recommendation engine.

Before mSpoke, Dave was general partner of PNC Technology Investors. Earlier in his career, he co-founded three successful startup ventures, including Premier Health Exchange (acquired by Medibuy), Hawk Medical (acquired by McKesson), and Industry.Net (merged with AT&T Business Network to form Nets, Inc.). 

Dave is an active board member at MedSage Technologies (now NewCare Solutions LLC), EZ-FLO Injection Systems and the Indiana University of Pennsylvania Alumni Association (ex-officio, past president). He is an Advisory board member to InnovationWork’s AlphaLab, Pittsburgh Equity Partners and Carnegie Mellon University’s Project Olympus. Dave also served as Executive-in-residence at the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse, working with healthcare information technology startups.

Dave holds an MBA with Distinction from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.S. in physics, Summa Cum Laude, from Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Dave was a 2017 recipient of the Tepper School Alumni Award. He lives with his wife Kristan and three sons in Fox Chapel, Pa.