05-26-2026
New Business Fellow Dan Elmhurst is taking his own risk: After nearly 30 years at Intel, he is launching ChipNexus, accelerating innovation by bridging human intent and silicon design with Agentic AI.
A proud Boilermaker with a family tree full of Purdue alumni, Elmhurst possesses a unique combination of deep technical expertise, entrepreneurial courage and a passion for helping others build meaningful careers.
For Elmhurst, becoming a Daniels School Business Fellow is both a way to stay connected to a university that shaped him and a chance to help Purdue better integrate its strengths in engineering, technology and business, calling this “a great win” and noting that business students are extraordinary resources for engineering students. He envisions students and alumni launching more entrepreneurial projects — conducting market analysis, defining value propositions and building business models that turn breakthrough technology into viable companies.
Elmhurst's entrepreneurial journey is rooted in his view that great entrepreneurs see the same data as everyone else but spot connections and inflection points others miss. In his own startup, that means seeing where chip design is too complex, too costly and too slow, and then using AI to create tools, workflows and architectures that remove those bottlenecks.
He’s experienced firsthand how a single technological leap can reshape the world. At Intel, Elmhurst was part of the team that helped bring the modern solid-state drive (SSD) to market. Before SSDs, booting your laptop or running complex searches meant waiting on spinning hard drives. Today, thanks in part to SSDs, your laptop turns on in an instant, your phone responds immediately, and search engines can anticipate your query as you type. Elmhurst didn’t “invent” the SSD, but he led the design team that created the memory technology enabling that transformation — a contribution that, as he puts it, “touched the entire world.”
Elmhurst sees entrepreneurship on two levels: strategic insight and personal character.
On the strategic side, entrepreneurs:
On the personal side, he believes entrepreneurs tend to:
He points to stories from the Acquired podcast, where many iconic companies survived strings of rejections and setbacks — “never just a smooth track forward” — before they broke through.
Across his corporate and startup career, Elmhurst has distilled a set of principles that guide how he leads and how he encourages students and professionals to work:
Integrity, transparency and directness. If something isn’t worth doing with integrity, it isn’t worth doing at all. Elmhurst is committed to answering questions honestly and sharing bad news — paired with a path forward — rather than hiding problems.
Value real work, not just raw intellect. In technology, it’s easy to be mesmerized by brilliance, but Elmhurst prizes the people who are “rowing the boat” and actually moving projects forward.
Seek criticism and invite truth. He wants relationships where colleagues can speak candidly about what’s really happening in a project, because in engineering “it can always get worse” if people aren’t honest about quality and risk.
Continuously improve how you work. Inspired by the idea that “there’s always a better way,” Elmhurst challenges teams to revisit their processes so they’re not “running uphill” forever.
Inclusion and diverse thinking. He’s intentional about pulling quieter voices into the conversation, recognizing that the loudest person in the room isn’t always the one with the best insight.
Outrun, don’t out-argue. Rather than trying to change others, he focuses on outperforming them. Results and actions speak loudest.
Finally, Elmhurst notes that entrepreneurs have persistence as well as an innate pull to move toward difficult, uncertain situations. Persistence, he says, is the mindset that when you hit a wall, you look for a way over or around it. Those who “run toward the fire” also learn from each situation, letting the lessons outweigh the discomfort.
Such mindsets — anchored in integrity, curiosity, collaboration and a willingness to step into the unknown — are what he hopes to model and share as a Business Fellow at the Daniels School of Business.
Elmhurst is already sharing and modeling for emerging professionals, including during his recent visit to the Executive Forum, where he shared insights on careers and his experience developing technologies across silicon, systems, and platform architectures, including next-generation Xeon platforms and the commercialization of solid-state drive technology. With deep expertise in data center, AI, storage and foundry markets, Elmhurst shared about guiding global teams while shaping technology strategy and partnerships.
A Daniels School Business Fellow is a senior industry leader with more than 20 years of experience or a significant contribution to their field. Fellows serve as an extension to the Daniels School’s strategy, representing the school in their industry, engaging with students, faculty, and curriculum, and providing thought leadership to guide our future direction.
