Princeton University’s Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy is pleased to welcome David Derryck as the most recent addition to the Sugarman Practitioner in Residence program.  As founder of web platform company BuyBlack.org, David intends to spend his time as Sugarman Fellow leveraging behavioral and decision science, gamification, and geolocation to significantly increase discovery, traffic, and revenue to Black-owned businesses.

While a growing number of consumers in the United States desire to diversify the beneficiaries of their spending—notably wishing to support black-owned brands, suppliers, and vendors to a greater extent—data has not shown demonstrable increases in revenue to Black-owned businesses.  David's project aims to identify and remove barriers within the online consumer ecosystem to close this action-intention gap.

Prior to his selection as a Sugarman Fellow, David had worked at the intersection of business and social impact for two decades. An entrepreneur in his own right, and an executive and operator working in a range of sectors from fintech to re-entry, he has launched, advised, run and restructured numerous enterprises. He has led revenue model development, operations, systems development (finance and technology), talent management, strategic partnerships, acquisitions, and sales. Most recently, David launched BuyBlack.org to drive traffic and revenue to Black-owned businesses using web3 tools. Prior to this David was the Chief Impact Officer at SaverLife.org, a non-profit fintech that employs gamification and behavioral science to build savings habits for low to moderate income individuals. He led the product, marketing, and research teams and was overall responsible for defining and executing the strategy for the digital savings platform that reaches over 600K people. David holds a Bachelors of Arts degree from Wesleyan University and a Masters of Business Administration from Columbia Business School.

Established through a gift by Jay S. Sugarman ’84, the program is intended to support practitioners in a variety of fields to pursue a breakthrough solution to a society-relevant problem, the success of which depends on understanding certain aspects of human behavior, and which could benefit from the support, guidance, and mentorship of members of Princeton's academic community. Each Sugarman Fellow has proposed a project, hypothesizing that the gap between the current state and an improved future could be solved by addressing some aspect of human motivation, judgment, decision, or perception, whether individual or collective.

David has joined an existing cohort of Sugarman Fellows Bryant Adibe and Chukwuemeka Chukwuemeka who joined the Center in Fall 2022. The next call for proposals will be open to potential applicants in early 2024 for a Fall 2024 start.