Doriot was born in Paris, France in 1899, to Berthe Camille Baehler and Auguste Doriot, the pioneering motorist, racer, engineer, factory manager, dealer and car manufacturer. Doriot enlisted in the French army in 1920. He emigrated to America to earn an MBA and stayed on, becoming a professor at the Harvard Business School in 1926. He became a U.S. citizen in 1940 and the following year was commissioned a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Quartermaster Corps. As Director of the Military Planning Division for the Quartermaster General, he worked on military research, development and planning, eventually being promoted to brigadier general.
Educator
In 1930, Doriot co-founded the CPA - Centre de Perfectionnement aux Affaires - which became part of HEC Paris in 2002, then rebranded as the HEC Parisexecutive MBA, de facto one of the oldest executive MBAs in the world. In 1957, Doriot founded INSEAD, the world's top global graduate business school in France with a group of his former Harvard MBA students.
In 1946, Doriot returned to Harvard and the same year he founded American Research and Development Corporation, one of the first two venture capital firms along with Ralph Flanders and Karl Compton, to encourage private sector investments in businesses run by soldiers who were returning from World War II. ARDC's significance was primarily that it was the first institutional private equity investment firm that accepted money from sources other than wealthy families although it had several notable investment successes as well. ARDC is credited with the first major venture capital success story when its 1957 investment of $70,000 in Digital Equipment Corporation would be valued at over $38 million after the company's initial public offering in 1968. Until his death, Doriot remained friends with Ken Olsen, Digital's founder. ARDC continued investing until 1971 with the retirement of Doriot. In 1972, Doriot merged ARDC with Textron after investing in over 150 companies. For his role in the founding of ARDC Doriot is often referred to as the "father of venture capitalism".
The Doriot Climatic Chambers at the U.S. Army Soldier Systems Center, Natick, Massachusetts were named in his honor in 1994. The Doriot School of Capital was created in his name by the so-called Zeitgeist University, Geneva, Switzerland and Mexico City, Mexico Campus in 2020. with the goal of educating leaders and building companies.
