Matt Aronson ’11 is 2024 Senior-Alumni Luncheon Speaker

On May 21, we were proud to welcome Matt Aronson ’11 to campus as the keynote speaker at our 2024 Senior-Alumni Luncheon. The Senior-Alumni Luncheon is a tradition that officially welcomes graduating seniors into the Alumni Association.

Following GDS, Matt attended Georgetown University, where he graduated in 2015 with Magna Cum Laude honors in Economics and Business Administration. After college, Matt worked briefly in management consulting before joining Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s leadership development venture, Powerforward, in 2017. There, they created case studies with top executives and entrepreneurs and used them to train the employees of companies such as Deloitte, Labcorp, and others.

In 2018, Matt became a founding Partner & President of JDS Sports, a sports and entertainment private equity firm that owns 30-year-old basketball magazine SLAM and has invested in more than 30 companies across media, tech, and consumer goods.

He serves on the board for many of these investments and acts as an executive producer at their film studio. His upcoming releases include a three-part docuseries on Coach John Thompson and an animated movie, Sneaks, starring Martin Lawrence, Chloe Bailey, and Anthony Mackey. 

In 2021, he was named one of ‘30 new voices in sport’ by the Sports Business Journal. He is an angel investor in startups on the side, including Jay Shetty’s tea brand, Juni, and Emma Watson’s gin brand, Renais. 

During his speech, Matt said to seniors, “I encourage you to take some pressure off yourselves to ‘get it right,’ embrace and enjoy the journey of your time in college and your career, and just try to tap into what feels like the right next thing for you. By doing that, you’ll end up stringing together experiences and find yourself in some incredible positions in the future that you could have never imagined possible sitting in your seat right now.”