Craig Hatkoff's multi-faceted career spans finance, publishing, innovation and human-AI collaboration; a structured finance pioneer, entrepreneur, successful children's book author, and co-founder of the Tribeca Film Festival whose career has consistently sat at the intersection of capital markets, emerging technology, and cultural change. In 1980, as a 26-year-old at Chemical Bank, Hatkoff authored the three-page memo that pioneered the "slice and dice" technique for commercial mortgage securitization - the architectural blueprint that became the modern CMBS market. He went on to co-found Capital Trust with Sam Zell and brings more than 50 years of cumulative public-company board experience, having served on seven public boards including as a director at Capital Trust, Colony Captial, Taubman Centers and Taubman Centers. He currently serves as lead director and audit committee chair of Captivision Inc. (NASDAQ: CAPT). For more than two decades, Hatkoff worked alongside the late Clayton Christensen — the Harvard Business School professor universally regarded as the father of Disruptive Innovation Theory — and Rabbi Irwin Kula to extend Christensen's disruptive innovation framework into the domain of identity, values, and worldview, a body of work known as Quantum Innovation. He launched the Disruptor Awards with Christensen in 2010. Hatkoff served as an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School for ten years, where he created the nation's first Real Estate Capital Markets course and later developed the course Disruptive Innovation and the New Frontiers. His current work is focused on building a new epistemology for a trustworthy AI ecosystem. Through Dragon Camp, his AI methodology lab, he is developing the Humagentic™ and Verimatics™ frameworks — addressing how humans and AI systems can collaborate transparently, how AI outputs can be rated and verified, and how institutions can adapt to a world in which machine intelligence increasingly mediates knowledge itself. Hatkoff is also a #1 New York Times bestselling children's book author (the Owen & Mzee series, over 12 million copies published through Scholastic), co-authored with his daughters.
