Daveed Gartenstein-Ross

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross is the founder and chief executive officer of Valens Games. Daveed founded Valens Games in 2024 with two core ideas driving it. The first core idea is a style of gaming Daveed pioneered known as Immersive Exercises, which are designed to provide meaningful insights into the real world in a distinctive manner. The second core idea is that Valens Games boasts a market-leading game design platform that allows rapid and deep creation of new games. Some distinctive aspects of Immersive Exercises include their rich media environment (news, social media, video, team memos, role players) to represent the game world; careful attention to world-building; narrative arcs that tell a compelling story; and high entertainment value, in addition to the games’ ability to provide education or generate insight. The participant feedback that Valens Games has received for its distinctive Immersive Exercises has been enthusiastic, with 95% of over participants (~700 total) rating these exercises a 3 or 4 on a 4-point scale. Daveed has led Immersive Exercises for a variety of customers, including major tech companies, the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Canadian Department of National Defence, the Global Counterterrorism Forum, the Canadian Defence and Security Network, the Canadian Network on Information & Security (CANIS), American University, Carnegie Mellon University, Duke University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, the University of Bath, the University of Hawaii, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Daveed has a background in entrepreneurship as well as the national security sphere. As an entrepreneur, Daveed previously founded and led Valens Global, a private firm that was twice named to Entrepreneur Magazine’s E360 list of the best entrepreneurial companies in America. He has held positions with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and Google, and in 2019, he led Valens Global’s efforts to support the drafting, threat assessment, and crafting of priority actions for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s 2019 Strategic Framework for Countering Terrorism and Targeted Violence, which received widespread acclaim and has guided the Department’s counterterrorism mission since then. The International Herald Tribune described Daveed as “a rising star in the counterterrorism community” during his career in that sphere. He holds a Ph.D. in world politics from the Catholic University of America and a J.D. from the New York University School of Law. He is the author or volume editor of over 30 books and monographs, including volumes published by popular (Penguin, Wiley) and academic (Columbia University Press) presses.