Galloway attended UCLA, where he earned Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics in 1987, and the UC BerkeleyHaas School of Business, graduating with an MBA in 1992. In 1992, he founded Prophet, a brand and marketing consultancy firm that employs over 400 professionals in the United States, Europe, and Asia; in 1997, Galloway founded Red Envelope, one of the earliest e-commerce sites. In 2005 Galloway founded the digital intelligence firm L2 Inc, which was acquired in March 2017 by Gartner, for $155 million, and the now defunct Firebrand Partners, an activist hedge fund that has invested over $1 billion in U.S. consumer and media companies. He was elected to the World Economic Forum's "Global Leaders of Tomorrow," which recognizes 100 individuals under the age of 40 whose accomplishments have had impact on a global level. He has served on the board of directors of Eddie Bauer, The New York Times Company, Gateway Computer, Urban Outfitters, and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. Galloway is also known for his public presentations and TED-style talks, called Winners & Losers, in which he presents L2's Digital IQ Index results, ranking over 2,500 global brands across numerous dimensions including e-commerce, social media, and digital marketing. Galloway teaches brand management and digital marketing to second-year MBA students. Much of his research focuses on "The Four," or "the Four Horsemen." His first book, The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google, was published in 2017. It analyzes the four companies' peculiar strengths and strategies, their novel economic models, their inherent rapacity, their ambition, and the drastic consequences of their rise that people face in both social and individual terms. In May 2017, Galloway anticipated Amazon's acquisition of Whole Foods Market, a transaction that became reality the following month. He denied any insider knowledge and said he was "just lucky" on that call. On Friday, September 28th, 2018, Recode and the Vox Media Podcast Network launched , a weekly news commentary podcast co-hosted by Kara Swisher and Galloway. In February 2020, Galloway launched The Prof G Show, a weekly podcast answering listener questions on business, money and tech.
Positions
Since 2017, Galloway repeatedly called for U.S. government antitrust intervention against the four consumer technology companies Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Google, ultimately breaking them up. He advocated against Facebook's Libra cryptocurrency plans in July 2019 due to the company's "gross negligence of user privacy". In 2019, he endorsed Michael Bloomberg's presidential 2020 candidacy as he "fulfills the Democrats' need for a strong centrist candidate". In December 2019, he called for the removal of Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey while declaring to own more than 330,000 shares of Twitter stock. Relating to the Apple-FBI dispute, he sided with the U.S. government and said that "security agencies should have access to data wherever it is if a judge deems that data is key to people's safety or national security". Galloway self-describes as an atheist and advises his students not to follow their passion, but to follow their talent.
