DIANE HESSAN
Member of the Board of Directors
Sago
Diane is an award-winning entrepreneur and innovator in the market research field and a nationally recognized expert on the American voter. Since 2016, she has been engaged in an in-depth longitudinal study of the electorate, looking for trends, shifts, and common ground culminating in the book, Our Common Ground: Insights from Four Years of Listening to American Voters.
She is the founder and Chairman of C Space, formerly called Communispace, which was the first company to leverage social media to help major brands get insight and inspiration from their consumers. Diane was CEO of the company during fourteen years of exponential growth, as C Space worked with hundreds of global corporations across twelve countries. She has been honored as a disruptor in the market research industry because of her work in conducting breakthrough research via the internet. Diane recently consolidated all of her investment and advisory work into a new company called Salient Ventures, which helps accelerate the next generation of startup companies in tech.
She serves on the boards of Sago, Panera, Eastern Bank, Brightcove, Mass Challenge, Tufts University, and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Diane has received many honors, including the Most Admired CEO award and Boston Power 50 awards from the Boston Business Journal, Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, and the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Entrepreneur of the Year. She has been inducted into the Babson Academy of Distinguished Entrepreneurs and she received the Asper Award for Global Entrepreneurship from Brandeis University.
She received a BA in economics and English from Tufts University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.