About

Denise Hearn is Director of Strategic Initiatives at The Long Now Foundation. She founded Long Now Labs to build cross-disciplinary collaborations that produce tools and frameworks for long-term governance.

Denise has spent the last decade building coalitions to reshape economic rules and thinking: She founded the Antitrust & Sustainability initiative at Columbia University's Center on Sustainable Investment, co-founded the Access to Markets Initiative and First Principles Forum (housed at Stanford PACS), and served as Advisory Board Chair of The Predistribution Initiative, which reimagines investment structures to address inequality, biodiversity loss, and climate change.

She is co-author of The Big Fix: How Companies Capture Markets and Harm Canadians (2024) with Vass Bednar – a finalist for the Balsillie Prize for Public Policy. Denise also co-authored The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition with Jonathan Tepper – named one of the Financial Times’ Best Books of 2018.

Her work has been endorsed by Nobel prize-winning economists, central bank governors, and elected officials across political parties. Her writing has been cited by Congress and the Canadian Parliament, as well as translated into 12 languages and featured in publications including the Financial Times, Bloomberg, The Globe and Mail, Stanford Social Innovation Review, and The Washington Post. She has spoken at venues worldwide, among them the Oxford Union, the Goethe Institute, UN Principles for Responsible Investment, the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents' Club, and the International Women's Forum.

Denise also advises financial institutions, governments, and nonprofits on organizational strategy, economic policy, and long-term governance. She is currently a Fellow at the Berggruen Institute, where she is researching planetary data governance.

Denise has an MBA from the Oxford Saïd Business School and a BA in International Studies from Baylor University.