David S. Kidder

David is a renowned keynote speaker who has spent two decades helping the world's largest organizations grow, decide, and lead through change.

He is direct, generous, and deeply human, bringing radical candor and the kind of practical wisdom you only earn by building companies and guiding leaders through the moments that define what comes next. His stories come from experience, and his delivery carries the presence of a founder, investor, and guide who has lived the journey from startup to scale.

As one of very few speakers who is an active founder, everything David speaks about he is currently living, and every engagement is custom, built backwards from the outcome your organization needs, whether a keynote, workshop, or full-day intensive.

He draws on decades of experience installing the operating system for corporate innovation and growth for leadership teams at Nike, Procter & Gamble, Citi, GE, and forty other Fortune 500 organizations, giving them a repeatable process for finding new growth and building it out without putting the core business at risk. That business became one of Accenture Song's most successful acquisitions in history, catalyzing more than $10 billion in new revenue growth for those partners, and the methodology is taught as a Harvard Business Review case study on enterprise growth and innovation.

Today he is founding two AI-native companies, PreMortem and Apogee, while speaking about leading through AI disruption. PreMortem is a commercial decision system that tells leaders whether their most consequential initiatives are on course before capital and credibility are locked in, and Apogee combines behavioral science with AI to change how leadership teams collaborate, decide, and perform under pressure. On stage, he addresses how leaders make better decisions, adopt AI without losing human judgment, and build organizations that move at the speed the moment demands.

He is the author of The Startup Playbook, New to Big, and The Intellectual Devotional series, with more than one million copies sold across 18 languages, and a super angel investor in more than 150 startups. His work has been recognized by Adam Grant, the late Clay Christensen, and Marc Andreessen.

Books & Movies

Interested in placing an order for books or videos by this speaker for your event? Please contact us for more information or to process your order.

Order