Leadership
About Dan French
Dan is Founder and Principal of dbForesites, a global advisory boutique translating planetary megatrends in economics, energy and environment into actionable intelligence for funds, family offices, corporations and governments. Mr. French is a former corporate attorney with unique domestic and international capability brainstorming and troubleshooting at the highest level. Known for his intense candor, cutting insights, sharp analyses, unorthodox strategies and deep experience with exotic classes of real estate, and risk, encompassing tens of billions of dollars in due diligence completed and billions in successful transactions. He collaborates closely with clients to provide high caliber decision support, in the C-Suite on down, baselining global grand strategies, providing transaction support, building tactical solutions and executing. Dan and his team help facilitate both ideation and implementation from the strategic level to the tactical, from developing grand strategies and macro frameworks to identifying actionable options and decision-making matrices, and from building broad decision-support programs to specific decision-taking initiatives re individual investments, site selection, real estate development, portfolio de-risking and divestment.
Formerly the Founder and CEO of Brownfield Listings, an online redevelopment marketplace, Mr. French also is a leading innovator and accomplished market-maker. His trailblazing work to fix broken markets, spark fresh ideas and manifest new investment for brownfields and brightfields has opened new opportunities for thousands of projects across the country and connected tens of thousands of professionals, often breaking previously impossible ground.
A powerful speaker and thought leader, Dan has also produced dozens of development events and conferences in states from California to Virginia. Now also serving as the Founder and President of Brightfield Productions, he is known for producing deeply substantive and market-moving solar energy development events, including the Virginia Solar Summit in Richmond, and most recently the inaugural Solar Farm Summit in Chicago, launching the first dedicated agrivoltaics development conference and catalytic forum for interdisciplinary collaboration and professional cross-pollination.
His education includes an LL.M. in International Business Law from Erasmus University Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, a J.D. from St. Louis University School of Law specializing in transactional and corporate law, and a B.A. in the history of science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he also studied economics.
BOOKINGS FOR KEYNOTES, CONFERENCES AND SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
In addition to the difference-making guidance he provides government officials, C-Suite executives and professionals across multiple industries around the world, Mr. French also occasionally speaks at public events and to students. His expansive diversity of knowledge, front-line perspective, rigorously objective outlook and contagious passion is a powerful experience for everyone in the audience. Whether engaging today's leaders or tomorrow's, Mr. French's formidable functionalist worldview and brilliant insights deliver invaluable takeaways for the foremost experts and entry level professionals/students alike. A renowned thought leader known to be at once serious and humorous with even the most substantive subject matter, Dan makes a big impression and is known for leaving his audiences both electrified with renewed passion and empowered with new ideas.