Michael Hopkins

Michael Hopkins, a writer, business journalist, and graduate business teacher, is currently editor at large of Inc. Magazine and writer/leader of the Real-Time Case – an award-winning management-school course taught simultaneously at universities around the world. The course enables students to examine the challenges and choices faced by one entrepreneurial company as they're confronted in real time.

At Inc., the nation's foremost authority on the entrepreneurial economy and on the challenges and opportunities faced by company builders, Hopkins was executive editor for 12 years and headed up annual special issues on the state of small business as well as the magazine's 20-year anniversary issue, published in 1999 (titled "The End of the World as We Knew It"). He also has written numerous cover features for the magazine; one of them, "Paradise Lost," was chosen for inclusion in The Best Business Stories of the Year, 2001.

Prior to joining Inc. in 1987, Hopkins was himself a company builder, leaving journalism for two years to create and grow a bootstrapped retail venture that reached almost $3 million in annual sales before it was sold. Earlier in his career Hopkins wrote and edited for regional newpapers in New Jersey and for Dow Jones & Co.

Hopkins graduated from Amherst College, in Amherst, Massachusetts, and Cambridge University, Cambridge, England. He lives outside Boston, with his 15-year-old son.