Faculty Directory | Julia Austin

Julia Austin joined New York University Stern School of Business as a Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations in September 2026. 

Austin brings a practitioner's edge to entrepreneurship education, preparing founders and business leaders to navigate the realities of building and scaling ventures in a rapidly changing world. Her insights have shaped how the next generation of entrepreneurs think about operations, team-building, and the unglamorous work that turns ideas into enduring companies. 

Austin is the author of After The Idea: What It Really Takes to Create and Scale a Startup, a practitioner-grounded guide drawn from decades at the intersection of technology and venture building. Her three signature courses at Stern — The Startup Toolkit, Your Startup Journey: Ready or Not, and After The Idea: Startup Management and Operations — reflect a curriculum philosophy built around the full arc of the entrepreneurial journey, from first instincts to operational scale. 

Before joining Stern, Austin spent over a decade at Harvard Business School, where she served as faculty co-chair for the Rock Center for Entrepreneurship. There she developed and launched experiential courses for MBA students interested in starting, joining, and investing in new ventures, spanning dozens of industries and geographies. She is also the founder of Good For Her, a nonprofit that fosters community among founders who identify as women. 

A credentialed Professional Certified Coach (PCC) through the International Coaching Federation, Austin focuses her coaching practice on founders, working with entrepreneurs navigating the personal and professional demands that come with building companies. 

Austin's operating experience grounds everything she teaches. She held technology leadership roles at Akamai Technologies, VMware, and DigitalOcean — three companies that each grew from early-stage ventures to publicly traded companies — giving her a firsthand understanding of what it takes to scale from the inside.