Ethan Berg is the Founding Partner of G4 Investments LLC, a private investment partnership founded in 2010 and focused on the identification of durable competitive advantage across long investment horizons.

He serves on the advisory board of OMX Ventures, a life sciences venture platform, where he evaluates early-stage companies building tools and thereapeutics at the frontier of human healthspan extension. His chapter in this volume formalizes the Competitive Advantage and Value Cascade (CAVC), an integrative analytical framework he has developed and applied over more than three decades of investing and advising companies.

Berg’s intellectual formation is rooted in the competitive strategy tradition. He spent seven+ years at Monitor Company (1992–2000), including several years working directly for Michael Porter — a period that shaped his conviction that sustainable investment returns and durable business advantage are, at their core, the same analytical problem approached from different vantage points. At Monitor, he was exposed to the firm’s distinctive applied strategy methodology and contributed to major competitiveness engagements, including foundational work on executive development and regional economic development. He left Monitor in 2000 to invest full time.

The CAVC framework synthesizes the Monitor-era competitive strategy tradition — Porter’s Five Forces and value chain analysis, Roger Martin’s Strategy Choice Cascade, and Bruce Chew’s geometry of competition — with the Graham-Doddsville value investing lineage. That lineage runs from Benjamin Graham and David Dodd through Warren Buffett, Bruce Greenwald at Columbia, and the contemporary work of Christopher Begg, who stewards the Columbia Security Analysis course that traces directly from Graham’s original teaching. Berg has attended the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting since 2001 and the wit and wisdom of Buffett and Munger are reflected in the chapter’s treatment of this intellectual tradition.

Berg’s investment activity spans both public equities and private opportunities. Public positions have included companies in high-growth infrastructure sectors, professional sports teams, in addition to longevity-adjacent platforms in genomics and synthetic biology. His early-stage life sciences and longevity investments — several of which are examined as case studies in this chapter — were evaluated through the CAVC.

He is the founder of TEDxBerkshires, a longstanding independently organized TED event focused on ideas at the frontier of science, technology, and culture, which he has organized since 2010. He convenes scientific programming at The Winthrop Estate, a Gilded Age estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, which serves as a setting for the kind of long-form intellectual exchange that complements his investment research. Speakers and collaborators in the longevity science field, including leading researchers in geroscience and epigenetic reprogramming, have joined him there for working sessions.

His engagement with longevity science is personal as well as intellectual. His son is a research associate for a company dedicated to conquering age-related diseases through mitophagy upregulation — a proximity to frontier science that has deepened Berg’s appreciation for the gap between biological discovery and investment-grade advantage.

Berg holds a B.A. from the University of Michigan. He is based in Boston, the Berkshires of western Massachusetts, and Nosara, Costa Rica.