BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS
Where Are All the Men?
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Leadership Truths that Transcend the Pandemic
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From the Editor’s Desk: Three forces of good after a year in a pandemic: leadership, diversity and entrepreneurship. - page 02
THE HARBUS
Spring Semester, 2021
Bringing news to Harvard Business School since 1937
April Edition
One Year In: Reflections from Leadership on the Past Year, and a Look Ahead to the Next 12 Months The school’s leadership team was at the center of our collective efforts to navigate the pandemic. Mark Cautela, Contributor
An Interview with Dean Srikant Datar Ahead of his upcoming move into the Dean’s House, Dean Datar takes some time to talk to the Harbus. Israt Tarin (MBA ’22) and Raseem Farook (MBA ’21) report. Israt Tarin, CEO
Raseem Farook, Campus News Editor On January 1 this year, Srikant Datar was appointed the 11th Dean of the Harvard Business School in the school’s 112 year history, replacing Nitin Nohria, who stepped down after 10 years as the Dean. As Dean Srikant Datar prepares to move into the Dean’s house, the Harbus sits down with him to talk about taking on the role in these challenging times. As the Dean zoomed in, he seemed
upbeat, full of energy and very enthusiastic to convey his vision to the students. In our short 30-minute interview we traversed topics such as the Dean’s vision for HBS, what he hopes to achieve during his tenure, the message he wants to convey to students and what he is most looking forward to about living in the Dean’s house. We wanted to begin by congratulating you on being appointed the 11th Dean of the Harvard Business School. We know a lot about your journey from India to the US but we wanted to understand how the experiences in your early life led you into academia and shaped your views and values on the business world. My early experiences
always pulled me toward academia because my father was a professor. He founded the Nautical and Engineering College [in India], pre 1947. I learned from him that the biggest gift you can give somebody is your knowledge, and you should always give it. I saw from the way his students reacted to him that it was a powerful experience— people appreciated being given knowledge. Even though my father never pressured me to or said that I should [become a professor], I always knew that I would. The rest of my early experiences in business came from my work in the Tata Administrative Services with Ratan Tata. As it turned out, by a lucky coincidence, my very first assignment was with him. My thoughts about the business Continued on page 04
On the one-year anniversary of Harvard University announcing that all schools would be transitioning temporarily to remote learning due to the pandemic, we caught up with
the Administrative Operating Managers (AOM) to hear, in their own words, about a joyful or surprising moment in this this past year, as well as what has them excited for the future. Angela Crispi, Executive Dean for Administration What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year?
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IN THIS ISSUE
Alumni Black New Community Venture by Pear VC Competition - page 07
Start-up Corner: Parade - page 10
- page 08-09
Women in Tech Initiative - page 11
How to Fail Bad Advice Well (Satire) - page 13
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APRIL 2021 THE H A RBUS NEWS CORPOR ATION Harvard Business School Gallatin House Basement Boston, MA 02163 phone: 617-495-6528 fax: 617-495-8619 general@harbus.org www.harbus.org Editor-in-Chief NOELIA LOMBARDO GAVA nlombardogava@mba2022.hbs.edu Chief Executive Officer ISRAT TARIN itarin@mba2022.hbs.edu Chief Operations Officer NATASHA LARSEN natasha@harbus.org Chief Revenue & Marketing Officer VAUGHN KURTENBACH vaughn@harbus.org Chief Design Officer GARRETT TONGE garrett@sylvanus-urban.com Campus News Editor RASEEM FAROOK Entertainment Editor FELIPE CERÓN Entrepreneurship Editor MIKE KELLY Partner & Community Editor ANJA DO Women Leadership Editors ZIANA KOTADIA MONIKA BERANKYTE Satire Editors COOPER WILLIAMS HEATHER JACKSON NISHKAM PRABODH Product Manager BASMA AIOUCHE Contributors KEITH BENDER MARINE BERGMAN MARK CAUTELA IBE IMO NIKITA JAGADEESH RAUNAK KASERA ROSABETH KANTER DAVID KLEIN MONICA MISHRA ALEX RAY ANGEL WANG Board of Directors STAN CHANG UPOMA DUTTA GABRIEL ELLSWORTH RASEEM FAROOK NATASHA LARSEN SUMIT MALIK HARSHA MULCHANDANI RYO TAKAHASHI ASHA TANWAR
The Harbus is a publication of the Harbus News Corporation, a nonprofit, independent corporation of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The Harbus is published monthly throughout the academic year, distributed free of charge to members of the Harvard Business School community, and updated continually on harbus.org. Email the editor if you would like to contribute. Off-campus subscriptions are available. Copyright © 2019, the Harbus News Corporation. The Harbus is committed to diversity, and we strive to provide a forum for the free exchange of ideas. As a result, the opinions reflected in articles, editorials, photographs, and cartoons are those of the authors and artists and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Harbus, explicitly or implied, regardless of author or artist. Submissions Policy The Harbus welcomes your opinions, letters to the editor, and other contributions. All submissions must include your name, section, and a telephone number. Please email submissions to eic@harbus.org. The editors reserve the right to edit all submissions and will print submissions at their discretion. All submissions become the property of the Harbus. Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press …
From the Editor’s Desk Three forces of good after a year in a pandemic: leadership, diversity and entrepreneurship.
Noelia Lombardo Gava, Editor-in-Chief A year has passed since Harvard University announced the transition to remote learning due to the pandemic—a year of learning, resilience and surprises. “Each day I have been awed by how staff and faculty continue to come together to tackle every unimaginable puzzle,” shares with us Executive Dean for the Administration Angela Crispi. Support, persistence, teamwork and relationships are words that resonate as a description of the past year. I would have never thought, a year ago, that we would be
celebrating the first anniversary of the pandemic with such positive attributes. It has been a terribly hard year—we cannot ignore the almost three millions deaths by Covid-19, the killing of George Floyd, the riot at the Capitol and many other causes of divide, injustice and frustration. A terribly hard year, but one of growth and learning opportunities. “Covid as a passage for HBS’s future,” says HBS Dean Srikant Datar. We have a lot to do for that future. In his interview for the Harbus, Dean Datar encourages us to think of business as a force of good for society, pushing us to be resilient, adaptable and generous, and putting diversity at the center of the agenda— “Talent is evenly distributed,
but opportunity is not.” There is a lot to remember and a lot to work on, so our team of editors brings you an issue full of stories to inspire you, provoke you and help you. Professor Rosabeth Kanter shares with us leadership truths that transcend the pandemic and Felipe Cerón reports on how to fail well and learn from those failures. Ziana Kotadia calls “all the men” to be equally responsible for gender equity, while a group of students launch the Women in Tech initiative at HBS, reported by Monika Berankyte. In line with Dean Datar’s words, we bring you entrepreneurship stories in which business is used to make a difference in the world—Pear VC’s community for alumni
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startup founders, HBS Black New Venture Competition and Parade’s tool to facilitate startups’ access to branding. Leadership, diversity and entrepreneurship are the forces of good the HBS community has chosen to continue making a difference after a whole year of pandemic and uncertainty— what will you remember from this year and what will you choose to do moving forward?
Noelia Lombardo Gava (MBA ’22) was born in Argentina but identifies herself as a global citizen. She is a biomedical engineer, a management consultant, a storyteller and a lifelong migrant. She loves the outdoors, diving, yoga, reading, and good debates.
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Continued from cover Amidst the grueling heartache and stressors of the past year, my greatest joy came from people— my beloved family, friends, and colleagues across our HBS and Harvard communities. At HBS, each day I have been awed by how staff and faculty continue to come together to tackle every unimaginable puzzle, pivot after pivot, always committed to each other, our students and alumni, and determined to bring every ounce of their innovative spirit and expertise. Never could we have imagined what the year would entail, yet we embarked on an uncertain path at a scale that was breathtaking. While we have mountains still to climb, we’ll get there as we always do—together. What surprised me? Believe it or not, nothing really. With awe I watched our community push forward with our always hallmark caring, competence, creativity, resilience, and resolve. My confidence in saying “we’ve got this” springs from the joy of knowing that we can collectively do anything. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? Simply put, I can’t wait to see everyone again in person! Janet Cahill, Executive Director, External Relations (ER) What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? Amidst everything this past year, I have found joy in the strength of our compassion for one another and sense of community. These two C’s enabled us to support one another and to do amazing things in the process— as individuals, within our teams, across ER and throughout the School. In ER, we committed to delivering four C’s (Community, Connection, Compassion, and Content) to our alumni, which through the support of so many of our colleagues across HBS, enabled us to do our best work. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? I am most looking forward to applying all of our learnings and innovations from this experience and emerging stronger than ever. For ER, we have the opportunity to reimagine—in the best of ways—all that we do. The “what” —leveraging a hybrid model, where we capitalize on the best of virtual and the best of in-person engagement, lifelong learning, and fundraising. The “how” — utilizing new ways of working together that enable us to be more effective, both across ER and with the rest of the School. The “why” —in service to our purpose and mission. We often talk about being a learning organization, and
this past year has been a powerful reminder of the importance of agility and adaptability. Nancy Dellarocco, Executive Director, Executive Education (ExEd) What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? My greatest joy was that despite having our business model and personal lives upended from one day to the next due to the pandemic, the ExEd team stepped up in a big way to transition our residential programs to virtual ones. It is truly extraordinary how quickly they were able to pivot to 100% virtual programming, not only transitioning program design and schedules, but social and networking aspects as well. It was a very heavy lift for everyone as we had to market in new ways to new markets, redesign processes and systems to accommodate virtual delivery and learn new skills. All of that effort has paid off, not only in generating revenue for HBS, but by providing a great learning experience for participants and allowing us to continue our mission of extending the reach and impact of the intellectual capital of School. As an added bonus, here’s a word cloud one of our teams created as a reflection on the past year: What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? In ExEd we often dream of the day that we welcome our first participant back to campus. We also can’t wait to reconnect with all of our colleagues who partner with us to deliver on campus programs. In addition to that, we are excited by the possibilities of expanding, experimenting, and innovating with our new portfolio of virtual programs. Brian Kenny, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? Although there were joyful moments watching our HBS community and my team overcome all the challenges thrown our way this year, I think I’ll focus my thought here on multiple moments of joy I experienced about something I never knew I was missing. My wife teaches second grade. I know she loves her job and I’ve seen how hard she works and how much she cares about her students. But until last March I’d never been able to see her perform her craft. When she opened the link to her virtual class on that first morning of remote learning, after hours of anxious preparation, I was moved to tears at the sweet little voices of her students squealing with delight. And then I listened as
she masterfully led them in the day’s lessons. I was treated to this moment of joy every day for the rest of school year and it never failed to make me smile. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? I used to hate gathering in the basement meeting rooms in Cotting House, which is where we have our regular team meetings. But boy, what I wouldn’t give for a meeting with my team in T07. Ellen Mahoney, Chief Human Resources Officer and Executive Director, HBS Initiatives What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? V-Day—the day in spring 2020 when classes re-opened after we went remote was a true moment of joy. Having been privy to the amazing work, seven days a week often long into the night, by faculty and staff to create a meaningful experience for students, it was a masterclass in creativity, operational management, and collaboration. It does not qualify as a surprise because I know and trust the community to lean in on behalf of the School. But, the joy was twofold: It was for the online solution and the affirmation of the quality of the people in this organization. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? Lunch! In-person meals with colleagues, family, and friends will never be taken for granted again. And welcoming, in person, all the new members of the HBS community who joined us over the past year. Rick Melnick, Chief Financial Officer What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? The Financial Office generally has a nice holiday lunch together at a restaurant. Time to relax, enjoy each other’s company, do a Yankee swap and talk about upcoming holiday plans. Our get together this year had to be online—and I had lower expectations for “another Zoom.” However, with the creativity and planning of many office members, we had one of the nicest holiday gatherings of any year. There was trivia by Eileen Sullivan, HBS Jeopardy prepared by Rachel Gymiski, and a Secret Santa exchanging of gifts. It was fun, warm and memorable. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? Having worked at HBS for 30 years, I treasure our community. The people are just amazing. While we have been able to run the School successfully over the past year, I truly miss seeing Financial Office and other
colleagues from across all of HBS. I’m really looking forward to seeing people in person all the time. While in person regular meetings will be great, it is the informal gatherings—just passing between meetings and having a quick chance to see people and ask them how they are doing that I miss a lot and look forward to resuming. Patrick Mullane, Executive Director HBS Online (HBSO) What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? My proudest moment over past year was seeing the Harvard Business Analytics Program team at HBSO help lead the way in figuring out how to deliver live online learning. In fact, a year ago today (hard to believe) after a conversation with Nitin I sent an email to my team to set the wheels in motion on using the Harvard Business Analytics Program (HBAP) experience to drive our move to remote learning. The staff on this program were instrumental in showing the way when it came to how to do online well. Online Learning Facilitators, for example, were first used (under a different name) in HBAP. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? Being on campus again! I really miss seeing such wonderful coworkers and the physical beauty of the campus. Andy O’Brien, Chief of Operations What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? There were actually many moments of joy for Operations. As a group we expectedly rose to the daily challenges (and there were many) we faced over the course of the year in managing the COVID 19 pandemic on campus. But in that there were numerous individuals in Operations, both contractor and HBS staff, who truly showed their individual talent, commitment, resilience, and creativity. Those were the bright spots for me. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? A full and active campus daily. Meaning students, Executive Education participants, faculty, staff, partners, visitors, etc. are all present on campus in class, in residence halls, at Spangler and Chao and back working out in Shad. I am hopeful that becomes a reality in the next 12 months. Valerie Porciello, Executive Director, Division of Research and Faculty Development What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year?
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My mother became seriously ill in January 2020. She was hospitalized for more than a month and discharged shortly before the pandemic. When I arrived at her Cape Cod home for a weekend visit on March 14, I learned she had fallen that morning. We spent the day at the emergency department. Thankfully she was not injured badly but she could not be left alone. Meanwhile, at HBS we made the decision to switch to remote work beginning on March 16. I was able to stay with my mother for the next 12 weeks, working remotely. It was a difficult time. After returning home, I spent weekends with my mom. Angela Crispi’s in-laws live in a neighboring town, and on a sunny Saturday afternoon in July we met up for a cold drink. When I walked up to our meeting spot—the lawn across from the Mashpee Library—Angela was waiting for me with deck chairs under a shady tree. She was a sight for sore eyes! We talked up a storm, about HBS and our families. It was remarkably restorative. A true gift, and just what I needed. I’ll always be grateful. What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? Being able to hug my mother. Deb Wallace, Executive Director, Knowledge and Library Services (KLS) What was your one moment of joy or greatest surprise over the past year? My moment of joy is tied to the KLS staff’s incredible resilience and ingenuity. It wasn’t a surprise at all that they embraced the challenge of supporting the HBS community online, totally virtually—across all dimensions of research, teaching, and learning, while also repositioning our physical spaces to support on-campus needs. We put our Digital Baker Strategy on warp-speed and off we went! What are you most looking forward to in the coming year? I’m very excited about how we can continue the momentum—how we can maintain the increase in virtual support (both volume and scope), while repositioning our services to enable the hybrid work environment. Perhaps Baker will become a center for on-campus hoteling and outfitted with a state-of-the-art hybrid meeting space. As noted management consultant, educator, and author Peter Drucker once said, “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” We’re looking forward to doing just that!
In his role as Director of Communications for Harvard Business School, Mark Cautela relies on close to 20 years of industry experience to manage the centralized teams responsible for public relations, social media, content and internal communications. He is always looking for ways to ensure consistent messaging across the school’s many vehicles and to raise awareness of all of the amazing things going on at Harvard Business School with both external and internal audiences. Prior to joining HBS, Mark was Head of Communications for Staples, Inc., where he worked for 10 years. He began his career developing a broad set of communications skills with television production and advertising roles, as well as marketing and public relations positions at several agencies.
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An Interview with Dean Srikant Datar Ahead of his upcoming move into the Dean’s House, Dean Datar takes some time to talk to the Harbus. Israt Tarin (MBA ’22) and Raseem Farook (MBA ’21) report.
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world were formed by the House of Tata, which is deeply oriented toward thinking about business and what it means to contribute to society. We read about Jamsetji Tata and the fact that he founded the steel and the power industry to help the country develop. Then you learned about the trusts, and how you think about trusteeship and what it means to be wealthy. Ratan Tata never shows up in the list of the topmost wealthy individuals in the world. However, if you see who is the most respected, his name is right at the top. Hence, I always thought about business as a very important contributor to society. I always thought of business as a way in which individuals and families are helped. It is a way of lifting people out of poverty. I saw business as a force for good all the time. And then, of course, you think about the kind of work that business individuals do. I always think of it as a highly intellectual activity, because what can be more difficult
than to make decisions under uncertainty? The future is going to unfold, you have no clue what is going to happen and you’re going to take whatever information you have to make decisions. I admired the value that business creates in society, I admired the good that you can do for other people, and I admired the activity of management in itself. Fortunately, in my case, those came together as a professor of business. Thank you for sharing that. You mentioned during the March check-in webinar that you have been on a “listening tour.” What have you heard and what actionable steps have come out of those conversations? I have now engaged with nearly a thousand individuals in either small groups or big ones. I have gathered pages and pages of notes from these interactions. I took all of that— and I should note I unabashedly don’t mind calling myself a geek in terms of thinking about some of these things—and
put it into a machine learning algorithm for natural language processing, because how else are you going to make sense of all of this? I used another tool as well called “topic modeling analysis,” that uses a machine learning technique that I had used in some of my earlier research called Latent Dirichlet Allocation. It tries to form word clouds in different areas and it is very helpful in providing correlations. You can correlate what the students, faculty, staff, and alumni said. You then begin to get a picture that is powerful. I’ve structured what I’ve heard into two areas. The first I call our ambitions. And the second I call our engines. With regard to ambitions, there were three that emerged from all this data analysis. One is how much importance our community gives to the role of business as a force of good in society, and this was very heartening to me. I am not just talking about ESG issues, though clearly we have to think about climate. I’m thinking about equity issues and how we as
business leaders can reduce the divisions that remain in all parts of the world. These are moral questions in some cases, and social questions in other cases. But I think what I learned from my listening tour was that these are first order economic issues right now, and if we don’t address these problems, economic growth is going to suffer. That leads me to the second ambition, which is how we continue to do research that has impact. I’m calling it “research in action.” I don’t want the research to be only for the journals. I want the research to make a difference in the world. How do we make sure that our research is able to do that? How might we combine different research ideas—on society or digital transformation or machine learning or any other areas— such that the sum of all the research that we do is greater than the parts? Towards this, let me share with you one of the ideas that is emerging. As you know, we have research centers all over the world. It is very likely that our next
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research center will be set up in the heartland of the United States. I come at this from a design thinking perspective, which is that you must have deep empathy and a deep understanding of what is happening, and the best way to do this is by being on the ground. The third ambition is transformation of our educational programs. I think there are a lot of interesting things we can do in the MBA program. You’re already seeing some of that in the required curriculum with data technology. We can do much more on entrepreneurship. Clearly we need to do a lot more around differences and managing with differences, so you will see a lot more on equity issues. And of course, what I’m really excited about is lifelong learning—how when you get admitted to HBS, we should be making a commitment, given the technologies we now have, that we would be interested in helping in the development of our students throughout their lives, not just in the two years that they are here.
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CAMPUS NEWS That now brings me to the three engines. The first engine is racial equity, diversity, and inclusion. I’ve always believed that my role as Dean is to do whatever I can to help every member of our community to develop to their fullest potential and capability and be the best that they can be. If I can keep thinking about that as the gold standard that I want to work with, then that is going to be an important engine. We’ve had a fabulous year in faculty recruiting. We are welcoming the most diverse class in the history of the school. We are also doing a lot of work around the cases that we are developing. The second engine is technology. I believe there is a great opportunity for us in digital transformation. I think if we did digital transformation at the school ourselves, that will allow us to meet all these aspirations that I’ve spoken about. I always think of technology and people as two sides of the coin. Every time an organization says that they want to think about technology, you should always think about people on the other side of it. I often cite Mahatma Gandhi who always talked about science without humanity as a major sin. To me trying to think about these two together is very important. And my last engine is Harvard itself and partnering with the university because we have SEAS and the Enterprise Research Campus coming. I also want to partner with the university on humanities, so we can strike a balance. The school released an action plan for racial equity and social justice a few months ago. Can you give us some updates on the plan, what the metrics are and if we are on track? Also, could you talk about your plan to address other dimensions of equity as well? When I say equity, I am concerned about racial equity, as well as ethnic, gender, and socioeconomic equity. I am equally concerned about the events that happened at Gilroy in El Paso for Latinx individuals and the violence that is happening now against Asian Americans. So I am thinking about diversity in all its forms. Let me tick off a few items. First, we are hiring a Chief Diversity and Inclusion Officer. The search firm that hired Sherri Charleston, the new DEI officer at Harvard, is the same firm that is leading the search. We are down to five very impressive candidates, one of whom we are working towards onboarding by the summer. So that’s going to be important, and will lead to a number of these initiatives that we were talking about. It has been a banner year in faculty recruiting. 13 individuals have accepted our offers. Eight are women. Seven identify as people of color. And five of the seven are underrepresented minorities, including four who identify as black or African-American. Please remember, they were not selected on anything other than total merit. We increased the funnel in a way that we
What advice would you like to like to give our ECs, who are graduating at a time of global crisis and uncertainty? I don’t want to share everything I am going to say at Commencement or no one will show up for my speech! Jokes apart, I want to tell the ECs that 12 to 15 years later when you look back on this period, you will not remember all the things that you missed, which is what we think about right now, but you will remember all the things that you gained. The stories and memories of this time will be unique to this class. You’ve demonstrated a lot of what I think is the advice I am going to give. It will be about resilience. It will be about the way you quickly adapted. It will be about generosity and partnership. As you know, I was very active in thinking about the design of online classes as well as the hybrid classroom. It required a lot of partnership, not just with the students, but with the staff and the faculty. I’ve often said I will remember that period as probably the most growth I had as an individual because of what we did. And I think you will see it the same way when you look back. I also think this period has built in a certain amount of ability to face adversity and still move on while being positive, constructive and optimistic. Also being patient and forgiving when things don’t work out very well. I have always thought about COVID as the passage to HBS’s future but COVID will also be a passage to the future for all of you as well. could get to them. It aligns with my general view of the world—that talent is very evenly distributed, opportunity is not. In terms of increase in cases, we are sourcing cases and tracking diversity, and we are enriching the curriculum through courses like Scaling Minority Businesses. And I could talk to you at considerable length on what we are doing with the OneTen initiative at the school and how that might help the world, and around entrepreneurship in these areas. And of course, all of this is only possible because of the team. I’m just reporting to you because you happened to be interviewing me. I’m not the one who got it done—the team should get all the credit for this. What do you think should happen during your time as Dean for you to consider your tenure a success? It will be achieving the various visions that I spoke about earlier—did we make the shift whereby we thought about business as a good for society in an important way, did we come up with big ideas in research that had a major contribution to the world, were we be able to reimagine the programs that we talked about, were we able to have racial equity and attention to inclusion in that way? And, of
course, I hope it won’t be that long before we are able to do the digital transformation that I have said would be important. Every one of those is a marker, I hope to report on each one of these annually, at least, if not faster, and make sure that there is progress. I think it is a very exciting time for us at the school. Who do you consider to be an effective leader in today’s business world? The two who I’ve admired a lot are Ken Chenault and Ken Frazier. What they are trying to do with the OneTen initiative, which seeks to hire one million black youths who have no college degree over 10 years and provide them living wages in corporations. To even set that ambition—it’s a massive task! There are others on that team, including Ginni Rometty, Kevin Sharer, and Charles Phillips. I just find it inspiring that they want to go after such a big goal. The current RC students took a leap of faith while making the decision to join HBS last year, missing out on key experiences such as FIELD. With the vaccine within reach and a whole EC year ahead of them, what would you like to say to them? I’m hoping it’ll be a really good EC experience. We care
about developing students to become amazing leaders and want to do what we can to help them have a transformational experience. We will continue to be careful in the fall, and take actions that will keep everyone healthy. I’m looking for as much “normalcy plus” as we can get—leveraging what we learned this last year that might otherwise have taken ten years to achieve. Whether that’s asynchronous learning that we might be able to accelerate, whether it is more things that we might be able to do using the hybrid technologies, I think there are a lot of exciting things that we can do, and I want to do it for this year’s EC class precisely for the reasons that you’re asking. There will still be some uncertainty. Depending on the availability of vaccines and visas, we will try to offer more IFCs next January, both internationally and in the US, so that students have an opportunity to do immersive field work in teams. That depends on whether the government is permitting travel and whether it is going to be safe. But we are looking forward to welcoming everyone back on campus and having classes. The density, I am fairly sure, will be higher based on what I’m hearing. So we’ll all be back and able to do all that we’ve done in the classroom.
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What are you most looking forward to in living in the Dean’s house? Well, the first would be having a dog on campus! I’ll have the opportunity to meet a lot of people while walking our dog Tango, who was rescued by my daughter Gayatri. I am looking forward to being part of the community and I love meeting people. So that would be great fun to do. I know Monica and Nitin enjoyed it very much; Swati and I will as well. And then, I must say the short commute—it’s a three minute walk from my house to the Dean’s office. Although, Nitin has warned me it can take much longer because of all the interesting people you meet along the way!
Israt Tarin (MBA ’22) came to HBS after working in the Oil and Gas industry as a Chemical Engineer. She was born in Chittagong, raised in Dubai, and she lives in Houston. She loves reading stories about people and wants to contribute to these stories being told to a wider audience. Raseem Farook (MBA ’21) is a 2nd year MBA student at Harvard Business School. Prior to HBS, he was working in Columbus, Indiana, where he helped to launch two new products in the automotive industry. Originally from Chennai, India, he cannot tolerate cold weather and can be seen wearing sweaters in August.
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B’Well B’School A group of health and wellness enthusiasts launch a brand new HBS student club.
Marin Bergman, Contributor
Monika Berankyte, Women Leadership Editor Now more than ever, focusing on health and wellness has become a staple for staying sane in our new day to day. As many elements of our lives continue to change, we have noticed a pull towards healthy living, whether through at-home workouts, herbal remedies,
clean products within our homes, or emotional grounding through meditation and self-care techniques. When it came time to sign up for clubs during the Fall 2020 Fair, a small group of partners (myself, Abi Phillip, Alex Oates, and Courtney Strauss) got together as we noticed a gap in this space. “Where’s the club for lovers of Gweny Paltrow’s Goop? How can I connect with others that are addicted to Poosh? Where is my plan-based crew at?”. This small group began a group chat, which developed into gatherings, and now in 2021, the start of the Harvard Business School Health and
Wellness Club. You may be thinking, “do you just sit around and read blogs?” No, not in the least. Of course, “The Club,” as we fondly refer to, is keen on discussing new trends in the health and wellness space, gathering for in-person and virtual wellness events, hearing from expert speakers and pioneers in the industry, but we have got even more up our sleeves. Did you know global wellness is a $4.5 trillion market? Our access to entrepreneurs in the health and wellness space will support
our members’ goals, whether they want to learn more about the industry or possibly launch their own start-up. If you are a health and wellness hobbyist, interested in learning more about trends, looking into the wellness space as a future entrepreneur, or want to sign up for one of our fantastic events such as private yoga practices, local chef sponsored cooking classes, or The Great HBS H&W Bake-Off, join us! And as if you needed more reason to join HBS’s newest and healthiest club, there will be no dues for the spring semester! B’Well B’School!
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Marin Bergman is originally from Los Angeles, CA but most recently moved to Cambridge from Stamford, CT where she has lived for the past 4 years with her husband Eric Bergman (MBA ’22) and their dog Del. Marin loves to cook, watch bad reality television with a glass of wine, and go on pizza crawls. Monika Berankyte (MBA ’22) is from Lithuania and lived in London prior to coming to HBS. Monika is a whole-foods plantbased enthusiast, who loves the outdoors and swimming in particular. She describes her happy place as reading an exciting book
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Pear VC Launching Community for Alumni Startup Founders Keith Bender (MBA ’20) and Raunak Kasera (MBA ’23) report on HBStartups, the community for early-stage startup founders among the ranks of HBS alumni which goes live this month. Keith Bender, Contributor
Raunak Kasera, Contributor
At Pear VC, we recognize that entrepreneurship is perhaps the most popular way that HBS graduates meet their alma mater’s calling to be “leaders who make a difference in the world.” An oft-cited statistic holds that nearly half of all HBS alumni start companies within 15 years of graduation. With so many alumni beginning the first steps of an entrepreneurial endeavor each year, we saw an opportunity to help connect founders across class years. This month, Pear is teaming up with HBS alumni to launch HBStartups, a community platform dedicated exclusively to HBSgraduate-founded, early-stage entrepreneurs. Each month, we will showcase the newest companies led by HBS alumni looking to make a difference in the world, across industries such as software, healthcare, financial services, and e-commerce. Along the way, we will host regular fireside chats with HBS founders, investors, and advisers, and connect our community members to mentors within our network. Our hope is that HBStartups will be the gathering place for the many HBS alumni founders we have met over the years—and for the many more to come. HBS-graduate founders have often mentioned that they miss the camaraderie found among section and class cohorts at HBS— specifically within the community that forms around entrepreneurially-focused EC courses and programs. Often, this community continues after graduation informally and briefly in the WhatsApp and Slack groups that accompanied these courses and programs. But, as one founder told us, these channels soon atrophy.
“I find that there’s not a ton that goes on there,” said Ross Lerner (MBA ’20), founder of OnRamp, an enterprise software company for customer onboarding. “Most activity is limited to people posting ‘We’re hiring—does anyone know great engineers?’ It turns out that we’re all looking for great engineers!” Perhaps the larger limitation for these channels is their inability to include founders at the same stage from other class years— or to scale to include new founders from the same graduating class. As artifacts of programming long-since concluded, they typically lack defined moderators, and they rarely expand as communities. HBStartups aims to change this by offering a unified, enduring hub for alumni founders at pre-seed and seed stages. Pear has invested in sixteen HBSfounded startups in the past eight years, and we have seen time and again the power of connecting entrepreneurs through their commonalities as early-stage founders, a shared connection that transcends industry, geography, or graduating class year. We are excited to help support the community of HBS alumni founders as it continues its staggering growth. While not all alumnifounded ventures pursue venture capital backing, those who do have collectively raised nearly $20 billion since 2015, according to data from Crunchbase. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of venture investment dollars in companies led by HBS graduates flow to later rounds of financing—HBS alumni raised $3.9 billion in Series B financing rounds and later in 2020, marking 47% year-over-year growth in funding totals for the past five years. But investor interest in seed financing for HBS grad-founded companies has increased, too—growing 42% year-over-year from 2015 to a record $205 million in 2020. As more HBS alumni start companies each year, we know that a network of peers will be among the most important resources a
founder can have—we have heard it many times over from founders. “In retrospect, we would have really benefited at the early stage—when we were seeking initial product-market fit—from someone to speak with for a low-pressure, friendly conversation who understood the challenges of the stage,” said Andrew Knez (MBA ’18), founder of Covalent Networks, a cloudbased workforce qualification platform that has raised $5M to date. HBStartups aims to facilitate precisely these types
of conversations—insightful, empathetic, and low-pressure. For that matter, the HBStartups motto, if it had one, might be this: the best pitch decks have a little Skydeck in them. We are sure that is a message that will resonate with HBS alumni founders beginning their entrepreneurial journeys around the world.
Keith Bender (MBA ’20) is an investor at Pear VC in Palo Alto. He joined Pear after graduating from HBS, and invests at pre-seed, seed, and Series A rounds across industries. Previously, Keith worked at Bessemer Venture Partners and BCG. He is a graduate of Harvard College and is originally from Arizona.
To learn more about HBStartups or join our community, please visit www. hbstartups.co or email team@ hbstartups.co.
Raunak Kasera (MBA ’23) is a Product Manager at Microsoft and a Pear VC Fellow. He graduated with a Masters in Computer Science from Stanford and previously worked at Amazon, Salesforce, and two Bay Area venture capital firms.
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HBS Black New Venture Competition
Ibe Imo shares the stories of Crystal Evuleocha and Pierre Laguerre at the HBS Black New Venture Competition. Ibe Imo, Contributor
Through the Black New Venture Competition, A Black Woman Founder Gained National Exposure LOSANGELES,CALIFORNIA —Crystal Evuleocha is the CEO and co-founder of Kiira Health. Kiira Health is a virtual clinic connecting women to health experts. Candice Fraser is Evuleocha’s co-founder. Following a health emergency she encountered, Evuleocha leaned into her powers to build a venture that is revolutionizing collegiate women’s health and helping solve care disparities for Black women. Evuleocha was born in Lagos, Nigeria. She was 16 years old when she graduated from a boarding secondary school in Eastern Nigeria. One year later, she boarded a flight from Abuja—Nigeria’s capital, to Houston, Texas. At Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport in Abuja, people arrived and departed. She hugged her family goodbye and went through airport security. Evuleocha was leaving home for college at the University of Houston in Texas. The four-hour layover she planned at Heathrow Airport became overnight and a full day stop. Evuleocha would have to sleep on hard and cold chairs. Her boarding secondary school days in Nigeria prepared her for moments like this. “Being away from my parents at a young age helped me become independent,” she said. Even though Evuleocha did not have a visa—permitting her entry into the U.K., she was determined to find her way to a decent hotel in Greater London. Relentless, Evuleocha spoke to five different immigration officers, “I petitioned for myself,” she said. “I stated all the reasons they needed to grant me entry.” She successfully convinced them and was given a visa on the spot. The next day, she returned to Heathrow Airport and made the connecting flight to Houston. At the University of Houston, Evuleocha was navigating her new life as a migrant and young adult. During her menstrual cycles, she experienced unusual and severe abdominal pains. Like many other young women, she googled, diagnosed, and prescribed medication to herself. A few years later, the pains persisted, and on one fateful day, she passed out. Evuleocha was rushed to the hospital. She had
to undergo emergency surgery. All these years, Evuleocha relied on Google, and her diagnosis was incorrect. This sudden and traumatic hospitalization inadvertently inspired her. The hospitalization sparked her idea to create a virtual clinic that connects women to health experts. As an international student, it was tough to find on-campus jobs. Evuleocha found ways to make extra money, doing hair and nails, and even making clothes for other students. During her senior year, she started her first venture, Benóla Crystale—an e-commerce company that made and sold men’s accessories. “It was meant to be a side hustle,” she said. The following year, Evuleocha graduated with a bachelor’s degree in economics and business and moved to Austin, Texas. She realized that Benóla Crystale could generate more revenue. “The moment I stopped treating it as a side hustle, it started to thrive and grow,” she said. Even though Evuleocha saved a year’s worth of rent, she still felt she needed a job. As a first-generation migrant, she needed a safety net—a financial backup plan. A safety net in the event her entrepreneurship aspirations did not come to fruition. “I did not have a car for three years,” she said. “I cut out unnecessary expenses, including shopping and eating out.” Her entrepreneurial aspirations were becoming shrouded in her career trajectory. Perhaps, the more responsible choice was to seek employment and find simpler ways to make an impact. In her dilemma, she thought to herself, “apply to law school and make a partner at a firm or pursue entrepreneurship.” Evuleocha had to understand her true motivations. She wanted to make an impact, and there were multiple and simpler ways she could. “I had to choose the most fulfilling path,” she said. Evuleocha accepted a role as an investor relations analyst at Arixa Capital—a real estate financial services company. She moved to Los Angeles. When she started the role, she had a clear end in mind, “I knew that I wasn’t there to climb the ladder,” she said. “Even though I loved that job, I was passing through.” At Arixa Capital, Evuleocha learned to build relationships with investors. She continued building up her savings and conducting market research for her future venture. The right time to leave Arixa Capital came when she met her goals. Late in the spring of 2018,
Image credit: HBS African American Student Union
Evuleocha launched Kiira. Kiira was formerly known as Kliit—a digital health platform dedicated to enabling multicultural women to talk to trusted experts about their sexual and reproductive health. “A key lesson I learned was to seek to understand possible reasons why my venture would not work.” “Raising capital as a Black and migrant woman came with a unique set of biases and challenges,” Evuleocha said. “Though personal savings started the journey, the funds that kicked off Kiira came from pitch competitions.” At the 2019 AfroTech conference in Oakland, Evuleocha and her former co-founder pitched and won $10,000. “A lot of our funding came from the Black community,” she said. In 2019, Kimberly Foster (MBA ’20) and Tyler Simpson (MBA ’20), Black female students in the MBA program at Harvard Business School (HBS),
began an independent project that grew into HBS’s Black New Venture Competition (BNVC). The BNVC invited eligible Black founders across the US to pitch early-stage technology ventures for a chance to win $175,000 in prize money. Evuleocha pitched and won the $25,000 Google for Startups Innovators Award. “Through BNVC, we received exposure on a national platform. We utilized the funds to build out our initial product,” she said. Black women founders are often cold-shouldered by investors, “but there is also something powerful in being underestimated,” Evuleocha said. “Because I am often the only one, I am challenged to be the very best.” Since Kiira’s launch in 2018, Evuleocha has won numerous awards, including 2020 Forbes 30 under 30. Leading Kiira, Evuleocha and Fraser, her co-founder, have raised capital from investors that include a publicly-traded social
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media company and Serena Ventures—a venture-capital founded by tennis star Serena Williams. Most recently, she was listed in Pitchbook’s 53 Black founders and investors to watch in 2021. Evuleocha and her team have closed the pre-seed round for Kiira. “I am happy to solve a problem based on a personal experience. There is a deeper connection,” she said. Looking forward three to five years from now, Evuleocha hopes Kiira will become a publicly-traded entity. “Our core goal is to make an impact for young women and reduce disparities in health care.” The Black New Venture Competition is a Demonstration of Leadership to Help Solve the Challenges Black Founders Face BROOKLYN, NEW YORK — Pierre Laguerre is the Founder and CEO at Fleeting. Fleeting is a company that connects CDL
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ENTREPRENEURSHIP drivers to shipping and trucking companies. Laguerre’s journey to building a $2 million start-up began from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In 2020, he won a $50,000 grand prize at Harvard Business School’s inaugural Black New Venture Competition. Laguerre was born in Portau-Prince, Haiti. He was 15 years old when he left Haiti’s sunshine, crystal blue beaches, sunsets, and political violence. In September 1997, Laguerre’s dream of migrating to the US came true. Arriving with his mom and three siblings at JFK Airport in Queens, New York, “it was just like the movies.” Coming to America was the opening of a door of opportunity. “It felt like a new beginning,” he said. Laguerre and his family settled in Brooklyn in New York City. The 1990s in Brooklyn was a decade of gang activity and gun violence. Laguerre’s American dream was now a nightmare. “Brooklyn was very rough on the edges. It was nothing like I imagined,” he said. Language barriers exasperated Laguerre’s culture shock. He was fluent in Haitian Creole and could not speak English. Laguerre was in the ninth grade and received his fair share of bullying. The turning point came when other schoolboys snatched his school boots. “I realized I had to adapt or get crushed,” he said. Four years later, Laguerre is a Brooklynite. Like a dark cloud, Brooklyn’s gang activity and gun violence were still looming. Like other teenage boys in the city, Laguerre realized he could become a statistic. He was desperate to get out. Right before Laguerre graduated high school, his uncle took him on a Caribbean cruise. They visited the Cayman Islands, The Bahamas, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. Laguerre realized that the world did not revolve around Brooklyn and Haiti. The world was beautiful and had a lot more to offer. The trip was an eye-opener. He graduated high school and gained admission to CUNY New York City College of Technology to study electrical engineering. “The fear of becoming a product of my environment was my driving force,” he said. After one year at CUNY, Laguerre’s hope to become an electrical engineer and leave Brooklyn began to slip away. He was coming to terms with his family’s finances. Tuition bills were mounting, and he had to support his mother and siblings, “I could no longer afford college,” he said. “I started thinking of ways to make some money.” Still determined to stay off the streets of Brooklyn, Laguerre dropped out. “I thought, I’ll just drive a truck and never come back,” Laguerre said, pondering his new dilemma. Laguerre became a truck driver at HP Logistics. He delivered food to local restaurants, hospitals, and his former college. “I remember being so ashamed. I did not want my former classmates to see me.” A defining moment came when Laguerre bumped into his former professor, “He told me to own it and be the best trucker I could be.” Laguerre embraced trucking. This moment shaped his life, career trajectory, and
Image credit: HBS African American Student Union
entrepreneurial journey. A year later, Laguerre had saved enough money to purchase his truck. He also became an owner-operator. He fell in love, got married, moved to a New Jersey suburb, and started a family. Life was good. As an owner-operator, Laguerre found trucking, shipping logistics, and freight brokerage fascinating. He was eager to make the best of time and money. Laguerre took a massive online course in supply chain logistics. “The course helped me understand supply chain logistics and trucking on a macro level,” he said. With this new knowledge, he realized there was an opportunity to create mutually beneficial work arrangements between CDL truckers and shipping and trucking companies. Laguerre realized that he could be more than an owner-operator. Laguerre’s success streaks were short-lived. He was working hard and driving long hours. Recently married with a child, the long hours on the road began taking a toll on his family. The next few years came hard and fast. First a divorce, and then an injury in a car accident. Laguerre could not work for eight months. He lost everything. “My truck and car got repossessed,” he said. He returned to Brooklyn. “I was pretty much back to square one.” The first days back at Brooklyn mocked Laguerre’s prior entrepreneurial accomplishments and aspirations. He had made it out of Brooklyn only to find himself broke, seeking shelter at his cousin’s house. “I could not afford meals and rent,” he said, recalling days when he and his daughter survived on peanut butter and bread. One day, Laguerre found a book lying around the house. The book was titled What the CEO Wants You to Know. As he flipped through, each page, each word, and each chapter gave him a new perspective. From the book, Laguerre garnered concepts of value, profit margin, and scale. He thought
of ways to solve uncomplicated problems and monetize them. Since he had no capital, he figured he could clean windows. With willpower, cleaning supplies, and the help of a friend, Laguerre set out to the streets of Brooklyn. He began knocking on doors, beauty salons, barbershops, bars, and restaurants. If Laguerre could get 100 store owners to pay $10 for each glass, he could make $1,000. He found 72 store owners. In three months, he made $62,000. Though Laguerre’s windowcleaning gig was thriving, his eyes were set on the unsolved problem of connecting CDL drivers to shipping and trucking companies. He still wanted to solve a real problem and build a profitable venture doing so. He had saved some money cleaning windows. Laguerre started a staffing agency. In 18 months, the staffing agency accrued over one million in revenue. He then reinvested the earnings and started another trucking company. Laguerre was running two successful companies. There are tons of books, cases, and lessons on business and entrepreneurship. Experience is the school of hard knocks. Laguerre had successfully applied the concepts from the book What the CEO Wants You to Know. His staffing agency and trucking business scaled to 6,000 drivers and ten trucks. It was a large and profitable operation, “But I had challenges delegating. I made several mistakes and learned hard lessons,” he said. The events and lessons that followed were more brutal and much more personal. Laguerre had a son who was born with Down Syndrome and had to undergo a series of surgeries. One day in Brooklyn, while running an errand for the hospital, Laguerre was attacked by robbers. His skull was cracked, with 67 staples in his head, he laid in a coma. Again, everything fell apart: the staffing agency and trucking business. Slowly recovering, Laguerre found inspiration in his son’s battle for survival, “Watching
him fight for his life gave me courage. I, too, was determined not to give up.” Laguerre made a personal commitment to rebuild his venture. This time, technology would be enabled, and most importantly, he learned to trust his team and delegate. Two weeks later, Laguerre was discharged, and Fleeting was born. “Fleeting is a technologyenabled platform that gives drivers access to trucks and freight and allows them to operate on their own,” Laguerre said. Though Laguerre had 17 solid years in transportation, logistics, and entrepreneurship, he did not have a technical background. Laguerre also knew very little about raising venture capital. One day, a friend introduced him to an accelerator based in Florida. “I made an investment of $10,000 myself. I started learning how to build a technology company, how to build pitch decks, and how to speak to investors,” he said. From then on, Laguerre was off to the races. Pitch competition after pitch competition, Laguerre was learning by doing. Each time he got a challenging question from an investor, he went back and did his homework. “Pitching in New York City, I was one of the biggest losers. I still knew I had a great idea.” Amidst several “nos,” and “it-won’t-work,” Laguerre refocused his energy on market research to understand Fleeting’s product persona. “I kept my head down and continued speaking to drivers,” he was testing how viable his idea was and seeking ways to improve it. Raising venture capital in itself is a challenging and lonely path. Laguerre had to travel this path as a Black founder without social capital or an Ivy League education. At times, when Laguerre pitched, he felt unsaid signals. It was sometimes difficult for investors to relate to him or his journey. “There is an opportunity for more venture capitalists to invest in Black founders. A lot of money is left on the table,” Laguerre said. A few months later, Fleeting
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was accepted by Quake Capital Partners in New York City—a venture accelerator focused on making seed investments in early-stage ventures. Laguerre now understood more about raising capital. “I focused on learning how to tell the story.” With an initial investment of $250,000, Laguerre put together a team and launched Fleeting’s minimum viable product. The following year, Laguerre applied to Harvard Business School’s (HBS) inaugural Black New Venture Competition (BNVC). “To pitch at HBS was a dream come true. The BNVC was a demonstration of leadership to help solve the challenges Black founders face.” Fleeting won HBS’s BNVC grand prize of $50,000 in undiluted capital. Laguerre and his team continued building out Fleeting and raising capital. Over the past two years, truck drivers have logged over 15,000 hours on Fleeting’s platform. Fleeting has also moved over 1,500 loads for their customers and generated over $1.5 million in revenue. Laguerre is the first Black American to max out a crowdfunding campaign and has led Fleeting to raise over $1.8 million in funding. Reflecting on his journey, he said, “I feel I have a moral obligation to build a company that can revolutionize trucking by giving drivers flexibility and helping other trucking companies as well.”
Ibe Imo is a feature writer, HBS Online participant, and Harvard graduate student focused on journalism and digital storytelling. His storytelling chronicles inspiration from every-day human experiences. Ibe enjoys outdoor activities, including kayaking and trail cycling along the Charles River. He lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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Start-up Corner: Helping StartupFounders Create Their Own Brand, No Designer Required David Klein and Alex Ray (MBAs ’20) share how their startup, Parade, combines machine learning and design theory to help founders launch a professional brand online in minutes.
Alex Ray, Contributor
David Klein, Contributor
What is the problem that you are trying to solve? Startups spend $3,000 to $20,000 to develop a brand identity. It is so important to have an attractive brand to get customers and investors to take you seriously, but that price tag prevents a lot of new companies from making the investment. Even companies that do spend thousands will receive their brand identity (logos, colors, fonts, visuals) as a static PDF brand guide, and they still need to hire a designer to turn that into a website and other assets. As companies scale, the problem grows. People in customer-facing roles like sales and marketing often face a tradeoff between waiting weeks for the creative team to make collateral they need or hacking something together themselves to meet an urgent opportunity. They burn time building ineffective, off-brand materials, and the brand team gets frustrated that their guidelines were ignored. What is your solution?
Through a series of simple questions, Parade’s machine learning-based software helps startup founders articulate the vision for their company, translate it into a design aesthetic, and launch it online in under ten minutes. Once your brand is on Parade, it is easy to create a website, marketing emails, social media posts, and more, all without a graphic designer. On Squarespace, Webflow, and Canva, founders have to search for a generic template and then edit it to look like their brand. That process is time-consuming and requires design skills to do well. Parade’s technology helps you define your brand identity based on how you want to be perceived and then uses your choices to generate on-brand templates for you, letting you focus on the specifics of your content. Parade is fun and empowering, and our customers love feeling proud of their brand. What was the inspiration behind your company/idea? Alex: At HBS, I saw some of my classmates struggling to go from an idea to a real business. Design was their key blocker—they knew what they wanted to work on and generally how they wanted it to look and feel, but didn’t have the skillset to make it themselves or the extra cash to pay a designer. I hated that for them, so I helped several of my classmates set up
basic websites to help them sell their idea to customers. Since college, I have been fascinated by algorithms that create art using machine learning. While helping classmates get their companies set up, I realized that creating brands would be a really interesting problem to solve with an algorithm. During the Field Y class at HBS, I started building software that generates marketing collateral for companies after someone answers a few easy questions, no design skills required. The tech really started coming together around April of last year, so I pitched David on ditching his plans of finding a “real job” and instead working on turning this concept into a business. David: At a philosophical level, there is a lot of talk about how machine learning is automating away people’s jobs, but I am really interested in applications of machine learning that augment human capability, increase joy and job satisfaction, and empower people to be more creative. When Alex told me about his experiences as a brand designer and the opportunity he saw to bring machine learning to this domain to help founders, it immediately clicked for me, because I have felt this problem many times from the customer perspective. Before HBS, I built a new business unit at General Assembly from scratch through product-market fit, selling to hundreds of the Fortune 500
around the world. As we scaled, we constantly faced the tradeoff between hacking together visual assets to get in front of customers quickly, or waiting for the design team to produce quality assets for us. Who is the team behind your startup? In addition to the two of us, we also have a Head of Design, Ben Barrett-Forrest. We met Ben through one of our close friends from HBS and we hit it off immediately while getting Ben’s feedback on our product. Ben has deep expertise in Typography and Branding. He is the producer of a series of educational playing card decks on Design and Typography, and his animated short film called The History of Typography has 1.6M views on YouTube. We’re growing quickly! We recently hired another product designer who is starting soon, and are currently seeking an MBA Intern to help with growth, strategy, and operations this summer! How did you get started? Alex started this during Field Y in the Spring of 2020, and David joined before they graduated in May 2020. Things really took off last summer when we did Y Combinator, served a cohort of beta customers, and raised a venture round. One thing worth noting—we committed to start working together before we really knew in earnest what the business was
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going to become. If we had one piece of advice to give to HBS students thinking about starting a company, it would be this: it matters way more who you are working with than what you are working on. Find someone who you like and trust and who has complementary skills, and go for it! What’s next? This month, we are launching a completely new experience on Parade that is the fastest way to go from an idea to a fully-branded, live website collecting leads in 10 minutes. If you are reading this and have a business idea, go try it out. It is insanely fun and just might inspire you to go start that company. You can even do it from your phone. We will be expanding that product this summer and adding tools to create on-brand social media posts, email newsletters, and pitch decks right from Parade.
Alex Ray (MBA ’20) is from Jackson, Mississippi. Prior to HBS he worked in tech and venture capital. Parade is his third machine learning startup. He lives in Seattle, WA. David Klein (MBA ’20) is from Washington, DC. He has worked in product and strategy roles at General Assembly, Strava, and Techstars. He lives in Freeport, Maine.
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WOMEN LEADERSHIP
Launching the Women in Tech Initiative at HBS Angel Wang (MBA ’22), Nikita Jagadeesh (MBA ’21), Monica Mishra (MBA ’21) and Monika Berankyte (MBA ’22) report on the inauguration of the Women in Tech Initiative at HBS. Angel Wang, Contributor
Nikita Jagadeesh, Contributor
Monica Mishra, Contributor
Monika Berankyte, Women Leadership Editor This past year the HBS Tech Club launched a new group called the HBS Women in Tech Initiative. The mission of this group is to connect women who are interested in the tech industry and to empower women with the skills, confidence, and network to pursue a meaningful tech career. The motivation behind the group was to address the lack of diversity in technology and provide a platform to connect HBS women as they embark on their own journey in technology. The Motivation Historically, women faced widespread challenges in gaining employment and growing professionally at technology companies, as evidenced by several industrywide statistics:
• Women represent 47% of
•
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employees across all US job sectors, but the five largest tech companies (Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft) only have 34.4% women in their workforce (Source: Built In); Only 26% of executive, senior-level, and management positions in tech companies are held by people identifying as female (Source: Statista); 27% of female respondents to a PwC study considered a tech career, compared to 62% of males respondents (Source: PwC).
In light of these industry trends, five RC and EC members came together to launch the inaugural Women in Tech Initiative.
The founding members of this group included ECs Monica Mishra (MBA ’21) and Nikita Jagadeesh (MBA ’21) and RCs Angel Wang (MBA ’22), Jordan Naylor (MBA ’22), and Sadhana Bala (MBA ’22). This group brought together a mix of past experience as tech operators, investors, and engineers from companies such as Facebook, Bridgewater, Nutanix, Tenable and McKinsey. Goals and Charter of the Group As a new group, the team was focused on establishing a stable foundation upon which future generations of women in tech could continue to grow. This included goals to:
• Build partnerships with
• •
companies looking to hire and companies working on initiatives to increase diversity and inclusion; Run workshops and panels of relevant topics to women in tech; Help build community for the group through small group events and act as a
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liaison for the various other women groups on campus; Publish communications and resources around women in tech events and community.
Activities and Events from this Past Year Since its founding, the initiative has hosted a series of speakers including Michelle Zatlyn—COO, Co-Founder of Cloudflare (MBA ’09), Carey Kolaja—CEO of Au10TIX, Kaye Kirschner—Director of Product Development at Mastercard Artificial Intelligence Express (MBA ’16), and Lara Awoyemi— Facebook Business Integrity and Operations Manager, with over 100 attendees total across all events. The HBS group also formed relationships with MIT Sloan School of Business by connecting with SWIM (Sloan Women in Management) to host the first-ever MIT x HBS Pen Pal program. Over 80 women were paired in small groups to meet, connect, and support
one another. Finally, the group sent newsletters with resources, reading, and advice for women in tech. The group also met with representatives from tech companies, including Google and Accenture, to identify partnership opportunities. Looking ahead we are so excited to grow this initiative and take it to new levels in 2021. We feel fortunate to have this opportunity to found this group and look forward to seeing this community grow!
Angel Wang (MBA ’22) is a Michigander, ex-management consultant, and former Facebook Operations Manager within the Trust & Safety team, focused on political and electoral ads. She loves playing tennis and walking dogs in her spare time.
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Nikita Jagadeesh (MBA ’21) is a native of California. Prior to HBS, she worked in Silicon Valley, in product management at Nutanix, a fast growing cloud computing company and as a strategy consultant at McKinsey. Her background is in product and go-to-market strategy for earlystage tech companies and she loves all things outdoors. Monica Mishra (AB ’17, MBA ’21) was at Bridgewater Associates prior to HBS and writes about her glory days as a software engineer and other tech topics on Medium. She is passionate about closing the gender gap in tech, her home state of Colorado, and T-rex jokes. Monika Berankyte (MBA ’22) is from Lithuania and lived in London prior to coming to HBS. Monika is a whole-foods plantbased enthusiast, who loves the outdoors and swimming in particular. She describes her happy place as reading an exciting book coupled with fresh mint tea.
PA G E T W E LV E
APRIL 2021
THE HARBUS NEWS
WOMEN LEADERSHIP
Where Are All the Men? Ziana Kotadia (MBA ’22) reports on the role of men in helping achieve gender equity. 500 being women, the remaining 94% of male CEOs are in a considerable position of power. This skewed distribution of power is similar across industries. In VC, only 12% of decision makers are women, and most firms do not have a single female General Partner. Given this, it is clear that men’s collective influence has the ability to change some of the biggest organisations in the world, and their actions can make considerable impact. Having their allyship is critical. Men’s words are seen to be more credible, they are seen as being less self interested when pushing for gender inclusivity. Engaging men in this discussion, shifts the conversation from being “a woman’s problem” to “our societal problem,” and encourages us to frame gender inequality as an issue that we are all responsible for solving. Indeed, working towards a more equal society and breaking down gender norms is in everyone’s interest. From firms, which can leverage more diverse perspectives, to families, who can share child care, we all benefit from greater freedom and choice. We hope that after reading this article, men will feel encouraged to be a part of creating a more
Ziana Kotadia, Women Leadership Editor As part of the International Women’s Day celebrations the WSA organised a talk with Colleen Ammerman, Director of Gender Initiative at HBS, to discuss the role of men in helping achieve gender equity. For those unable to attend the session, we wanted to share some of our learnings from Director Ammerman in the hope that they will encourage and support you in your journey to becoming a male ally. Why are men missing from this discussion on gender equity to date? While a minority believe it is a zero sum game, that women’s success will necessarily come at the expense of male advancement, the majority of men are concerned about backlash and whether it is their place to speak up. A few years ago, the WSA and the Harbus did a survey among students to better understand male attitudes towards gender equity. When asked how big the issue of gender equity was, on a scale of one to seven, where one was “not important” and seven was “very important,” the average score of respondents was six. Men know this is a problem but question their psychological standing and ask, “is it ok for me to be in the conversation, is it my place to engage and participate, and how do I enter the conversation in the right way?” Research shows men are also worried about the potential backlash of speaking up. This concern is validated by social norms where men are seen as the breadwinner, or are not entitled to long periods of paternity leave. While barriers exist to men talking about gender inequality, their engagement is critical. Men can be allies in five distinct ways: as a mentor, a champion, an inclusive manager, a repairman and a role model. Mentorship and sponsorship in the workplace is important. We were given the example
of one incredibly successful woman, Michele Hooper, who was mentored by the CEO early on in her career and given the responsibility of leading the Canadian subsidiary of the business. Hooper was a black female in a white dominated company and support from the CEO, who silenced the executives with doubts, gave her the opportunity to be a success. While Hooper’s fight to the top was undoubtedly still more difficult, as a result of her gender, race and other social prejudices which were all too common in the 1980s, this male allyship was invaluable. Similarly, Douglas Conant, ex CEO of Campbell soup, intentionally ensured protégé Denise Morrison was given a series of high profile leadership roles within the organisation over a period of six years, so that when the Board of Directors was deliberating who should succeed him, Morrison was a well qualified contender and set up for success. In these cases, the male mentors did not let homophily determine who they supported, a key lesson for us all. Inclusive management is another way for men to help the gender equity cause, and there is room for considerable impact given how many people we are likely to manage over the course of our careers. Director Ammerman gave the example of Jack Rivkin, who managed the equity research department in the 1980s at a large Wall Street bank. Rivkin encouraged equity research analysts to develop their own strengths, and eliminated the expectation for women to mould themselves to fit into the male dominated environment. Rivkin saw the differences that women brought to the team as an asset. 60% of women in the team were given star ranking, which was more than double versus peer institutions, and became the highest performing department. Other examples of male allyship include refusing to speak on panels when women are not present and challenging HR policies, particularly when women are underrepresented on interview lists. With just 6% of CEOs in the S&P
gender equal world, because it cannot be achieved without them. We would like to thank Director Ammerman for hosting the session and for her invaluable insights. If you would like to learn more about the role of men in helping solve gender equity, her latest book, Glass Half Broken, which is co-authored with Professor Boris Groysberg, will be released in the coming month. Definitions Psychological standing: whether a person feels they have the legitimacy to perform an action with respect to a cause or issue. Homophily: the tendency for people to seek out or be attracted to those who are similar to themselves.
Ziana Kotadia (MBA ’22) is from the UK, and most recently made the move from London to Boston. She loves to travel, learn about new cultures and enjoys eating her way through cities. She loves to cook and is passionate about great food.
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APRIL 2021
THE HARBUS NEWS
PA G E T H I RT E E N
COMMUNITY
How to Fail Well (II/II) Felipe Cerón (MBA ’22) interviews HBS professors about their failures and learnings. Felipe Cerón, Entertainment Editor Following up on the past issue (in which we interviewed entrepreneur and HBS Professor Christina Wallace), we interviewed Professor Iavor Bojinov, who teaches TOM at HBS. He holds a PhD and an MA in Statistics from Harvard and a MS in Mathematics from King’s College London. Bojinov’s research interest is at the interface of causal inference, experimental design, and large-scale computing with the overall goal of democratizing statistical methods in order to help firms innovate and grow. No simple stuff. Given his background we thought he had several notorious insights from a life in academia, and that these probably came accompanied from a number of failures. He gracefully shared his major learnings from them. First thing we talk about when we start going into the topic is a book called Growth Mindset. Bojinov jumps straight into it, saying that it is a must read for people seeking a more positive perspective on failing. He mentions that he read it at a young age, and it became a turning point in the way he faced life. “The biggest reason people suffer from failure is because they don’t have a growth mindset. The book mentions how there are two types of mindsets, fixed and growth. These get ingrained in our minds when we are very young, thus being very hard to change. On the former you are wired to believe your successes happen thanks to fixed attributes, like intelligence or physical attributes. For example, continuously praising a kid for being very smart will condition him to believe the reason they are doing well is a function of their intelligence, not their effort. The flipside is that when they eventually don’t do well (which is bound to happen at one point) they will believe that they are not intelligent. Given their past conditioning they will tend to think that if you are smart everything will come out easily, which is not always the case, even for smart people. Since intelligence is a fixed attribute, failing becomes exasperating and a sign that something is wrong.” Even geniuses fail often. Maybe even more than regular people. Maybe that is what allows them to reach a status in which we call them geniuses. The Beatles, George Washington, Ronaldo, Albert Einstein all geniuses in their own accord, invested their 10,000 hours and reaped the benefits of an enormous number of failures. Did they have a growth mindset? The Beatles could barely find a gig in Hamburg and were
rejected from numerous record labels. John Lennon failed his examinations and his teachers said he was headed for failure. George Washington surrendered in his first battle and was demoted. Ronaldo did not make it into Flamengo. Einstein was an okay student in his school in Switzerland. Definitely they would not have gotten far with a fixed mindset. “On the contrary, if you have a growth mindset, the conclusion in the face of failure is not “I’m not good enough” but rather “I didn’t put enough effort.” There is an experiment in which subjects take a test and some are randomly told they worked really hard, and some are told they are really smart. Just by saying that sentence you generate an impact. On a subsequent test, the people that were told that they worked really hard had significantly superior results. We see an example of that in HBS Online students. People that do bad on the first stages of the program are a lot more prone to drop off, probably because they’re visualizing the failure from a fixed mindset.” What changed in your perspective on failing after reading the book? When you feel you have a major failure, you should not focus on the failure itself, but the path you carved out that was dependent on the failure being a success. We tend to believe that a failure renders the whole plan a failure, but there are many paths to success. Maybe you are overindexing on the failure regarding your end goal and, in reality, there might be another way. Receiving feedback also changed. Before, I felt it was a criticism of me as a person and that made me afraid. A major eye-opener was realizing that feedback was not a criticism towards me, but a measure of how well I understand and how much effort I put in. Constructive feedback means there was something I didn’t understand but that I eventually can. Another thing that helps with tough feedback is understanding that the person giving it probably put in a lot of effort to do so. This must mean that they really care about my improvement. What has been a big failure for you and what did you learn from it? My last year in high school in England. Based on the topics you decided to focus on the last years, you’d apply to a university for a particular subject. You can apply to only six to seven; it is very limited and competitive I have an older sister; she was top of her class and got into Oxford, which is very hard to do. I thought I should copy my sister; it seemed great and that it could apply to me. I had no particular
reason to do any of that stuff, but I also saw everyone going in that direction. I applied to Oxford for economics and management and got a conditional offer. This means that you get in if you get the grades you are supposed to get on your finals. I was lazy and bombed my final exam in economics, which I thought I really liked. Instead of getting the A I needed, I was one point below and got a B. This meant Oxford rescinded their offer. It was a huge shock to my system. It made me question a lot of things, mainly, why was I studying something that I wasn’t willing to put an effort into? It was at this point that I stumbled into the Growth Mindset book and it made me rethink a lot. I took a year out. I wanted to understand what I actually liked, and that year was crucial to reflect. I decided I liked math, and that led me to Harvard, data science and becoming a faculty member. What changed for you after that learning? I understood that while it is good to have a plan, it is key to remain flexible in the process. This makes failing much easier to handle. If one path is closed due to a failure, another one opens. This small change in mindset brought a huge impact on me. If you fail, don’t sit and think “what if.” On the contrary, be committed and embrace where you are 100% of the time. If you spend even 10% of your time thinking “what if” then you are not hearing the now. That is probably the biggest failure. Further, I started linking success and failure to hard work and determination, avoiding being overconfident. This will allow you to learn as opposed to being upset by your mistakes. The last thing that I learned from it is optimize for what makes you happy. If you are reflecting on your failures, try to realize if the path you are in is something that genuinely makes you happy. Failure is detrimental if you are doing it for something that doesn’t make you genuinely happy. Do you talk to people about your failures or keep them to yourself? Any rituals? I try to celebrate them. In academia you have a ton of failures. For every published paper you have, there will be two to three rejections. When this happens to me, my mentality is to think “cool, let me see why.” And sometimes I disagree as to why the paper was rejected and can’t get over the fact completely, but I do my best to turn it into something good. Sometimes I open a bottle of wine and celebrate with my friends our collective rejections. Also I don’t assume bad
intent, on the contrary. At least people that review papers put in an effort to write how they felt. I don’t think they did it to be malicious. They wanted to help me improve. How do we get comfortable with failure? How can we change our mindset to thinking it is something good? It is all about the mindset and redefining success. Just notice that the most successful people are actually the ones who failed the most. The reason I love experimentation is because everything is done to learn more, it inherently has a growth mindset. It is not whether I moved a metric, but rather if I did something that made me learn. I am optimizing for learning, and the more you fail the more you learn. Additionally, make sure you have direction and flexibility, embracing failure as part of the process. Find me a failure that someone is upset about that is not a necessary step for a long term goal. Show me a successful company that has not had a ton of failed products. Google lens was a failure; what would have happened if Google just gave up? Now, this doesn’t mean I don’t get nervous or stressed about failure, but just knowing there are so many paths to reach success gives me perspective. I find it helpful to define success in these terms. Another great example of how failures led to success is Don Rubin, a famous statistician that got rejected from six or seven journals. His ideas were so new and radical that people didn’t quite get them. Eventually he persevered and essentially created a field. He has thousands of citations! How would you motivate people to be more open to sharing failures? Is this a thing we should be doing? We have biweekly meetings with all junior faculty and senior members, like a round table in which we share early stage
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research. At the beginning we have 10-15 minutes saying good and bad things that have happened through the research. Here even senior faculty say how they got their papers rejected, and it has a tremendous impact! What I mean is that the motivation needs to come from the top. If you think they have never failed, you would be terrified of failures and nevermind sharing them. If you hear failures from people you admire it changes your perspective and willingness to share. Following this mentality, I try to share with my PhD students the rejections I get from my papers. Another example is that when I teach I tend not to pick the strongest people to set the pace, because if you have someone modeling perfection everyone else feels like they can’t make mistakes. What would you say about failures to HBS students? Just because you fail at something it does not mean you are a failure. You need to disentangle it, step back and reflect on your life and you will find the sum of your successes is greater than you thought. Which mindset is better? Which one do you have? What steps will you take towards a growth mindset?
Felipe Cerón (MBA ’22) is a Chilean who previously worked in consulting and retail. He is a musician, and he is an avid fan of film and television. Having a laugh over a beer, getting in a challenging workout, and reading inspiring books are among his favorite pastimes. While he thinks sparkling water is the best beverage ever created, he is also currently the owner of the most luxurious home bar in SFP. He sures hopes to learn a lot about failure before finishing his MBA.
PA G E F O U RT E E N
APRIL 2021
THE HARBUS NEWS
COMMENTARY
Leadership Truths that Transcend the Pandemic Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter shares lessons on leadership she has learned throughout the years. memories. Ghosts of the past, past resentments, are always lurking in a corner somewhere and ready to surface when you ask those people to do something new. That’s one reason for “Kanter’s Law:” Everything can look like a failure in the middle. If the idea is right, persist, pivot, and keep persuading.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Contributor © copyright 2021 by Rosabeth Moss Kanter One of my favorite aphorisms is: Change is a threat when done TO me; it is an opportunity when done BY me.
Relationships and relationship skills matter the most. The great CEOs and public sector leaders I’ve known show great empathy—the ability to figure out what’s going on with other people. This doesn’t mean they lack blind spots. But they believe in the inherent goodness and good will of those around them, or surround themselves with people of good will. That was President Nelson Mandela’s success secret in South Africa— reaching out to former enemies rather than seeking revenge and saying “they’ll come right in the end.” A global CEO consistently won deals and partners over competitors by showing a personal touch, knowing enough about the other to show support and listening to his or her deeper goals. But leaders can be too trusting, as I saw when one alliance fell apart because one of the CEOs turned out to be sneaky and deceptive. That’s where the ability to read other people can be an asset.
No wonder this Covid-19 pandemic year has been so disturbing. It has tilted heavily toward change done TO us. People feel threatened by numerous changes imposed on them in every part of life, not to mention their anxiety about the disease itself. There’s nothing worse than standing by, wallowing in uncertainty, and waiting to be told what to do. The happiest people, by contrast, find ways to be useful by contributing to solutions, especially ones that empowered others to take charge of their circumstances. The challenge is how to maintain a sense of agency and efficacy by finding or creating the opportunities ahead. How to avoid helplessness and passivity and instead keep moving toward goals, even if the timeline is pushed out. Points of crisis like this show the need for leadership— our own inner leader and the national and global leaders we count on. Through the years, and through many crises, I’ve distilled numerous lessons about leadership for dicey situations. Here are some of them. Leadership and change go hand-in-hand. When things are going smoothly, it’s possible to ride the momentum regardless of who’s in the driver’s seat. Leaders are most necessary when there’s a need for change and most visible when they create change. Entrepreneurs, of course, are always in the change business. They look for opportunities in the gaps, in what’s not working, and then convince people to try something new. Change is a journey and not a destination. I’ve worked with founders and CEOs through multiple stages of disruption and many efforts to “get it right.” They never get it permanently right. Organizations, industries, communities, or nations are always evolving, adapting, reacting, or boldly shaping change, and then reacting to competitors’ and stakeholders’ reactions to their changes. For this reason, some businesses come and go like shooting stars. But I have leaned
toward the ones that can sustain themselves over time, turning around when they need to, shifting shape when they have to, but always maintaining their sense of mission and purpose. I’ve accumulated multiple cases on IBM, Verizon, Publicis Groupe, Procter & Gamble, and Sesame Workshop, among others, at many choice points. You can’t rest on laurels, but you can’t wallow in setbacks either. You’re only as good as your last performance but you can be better in the next performance. If you can’t do it right the first time, do it better the second time. Have your next idea waiting in the wings. I’ve translated this
lesson to advise MBAs that the second job after the degree is often more important than the first. The first job gets you into the general territory—the city (geography still matters) or the industry. Find the connections, and work on the next idea. I wish someone had given me that advice when I got out of school. As a “pioneer”—often the first or only women, and the second tenured female faculty member at HBS—I didn’t have guides. I had to learn by trying. I learned that looking back isn’t as rewarding as looking ahead. Nostalgia is the enemy of change. Change is a campaign and not a decision. Leaders are
always selling. They must also work to win hearts and minds, even after the vote is taken or the acquisition approved. Leaders can’t declare victory at the stroke of a pen or the excitement of the announcement. Bold strokes must be accompanied by long marches that convince people that change will be good for them, as they are the ones who eventually change the culture. Selling starts early, well before decision dates. Innovative leaders must sell the idea in the first place to assemble backers and supporters. It’s best to anticipate resistance and be wellfortified by supporters. People who are opposed have long
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Lift others up. It’s okay to be personally ambitious, but you need allies to get anything significant done. So you must be ambitious for them too. All of us who aspire to lead are in the massage business—ego massage, or making people feel you will help them get what they want and need. Of course, this must be authentic, or it falls flat. Leadership is not about the leader. It’s not about what the leader does but what he or she enables others to do. Leadership helps other people find their voices, contribute their ideas, and make meaningful contributions—even when life throws a pandemic at them. Leaders can transform people from passive victims to active, energized participants in the journey of change.
Rosabeth Moss Kanter is the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor at Harvard Business School, has founded and directed the Harvard-wide Advanced Leadership Initiative, and is the author or co-author of 20 books, including her most recent, Think Outside the Building: How Advanced Leaders Can Change the World One Smart Innovation at a Time. On Twitter @RosabethKanter
APRIL 2021
THE HARBUS NEWS
PA G E F I F T E E N
SATIRE
Bad Advice Mitsi Picot (MBA ’22), superstar RC and winner at life shares advice on navigating life at HBS; Nishkam Prabodh (MBA ’22) reports. Nishkam Prabodh, Satire Editor The sun is back. And not just shiny, it is warm and everything. Arms are back in fashion! The sight of beautiful people steeped in inane conversations on Spangler lawns is such a welcome sight after months of white and black snow. Stupid, vicious snow. Bless you, good Boston weather. I had no idea you meant so much to me. On one of these sunny mornings, I had the pleasure of sitting down with an old friend. While the original plan was to catch up and talk about people and the general state of affairs around us, our chat, as it often does, inadvertently turned into a counselling session. Here are some excerpts from my chat with popular RC, winner at life, summer intern at a high growth unicorn, and my personal life coach: Mitsi Picot (MBA ’22). How are you finding the Spring semester so far? Loving it. The courses are such an upgrade. The beer simulation was such an improvement over last year’s. That, plus pre-made DCFs, critiquing entire nations and judging famous criminals? Oh yeah, that’s the life! And how cool is that curling rink? Love it. Use it all the time. Are you set for the summer? How has recruitment been? Like most things in life, recruitment is about expectation management. You can’t have a set plan. Goalposts will shift in your search for perfection. My own goalpost shifted 23 times in the last five months—I have been everything from an aspirational consultant, wannabe PM, a wishful investment professional. Eventually it was a toss between a strategy role at a start-up and a PE internship. Turns out I am an entrepreneur after all. Of course, my consulting firm is footing my tuition, so none of that really matters. My internship is remote. It is unsafe to go to the office, what with Covid-19 and all. So I am going to travel in the summer and work from wherever I am. Looks like we will get the vaccine soon. That is good news, right? Well not good enough! You do realize how important we are to the world, don’t you? I mean, who else will provide arrogant perspectives with the benefit of hindsight to businesses who don’t need advice from MBAs? You think all those firms will
appraise their own NPV? How are HBS students not in the top priority? I am speaking up for my classmates, of course. I already got all the antibodies I need the old-fashioned way. Just a day of fever and some body aches. I’ve had worse after skiing trips. Don’t know what all the fuss is about. Must be all those deaths, I guess. Have you been on any trips this semester? I have been in Cambridge throughout. The beach photos you saw were Zoom backgrounds.
Any tips on activities outside the classroom? How do I productively utilize my time here? You could do one of those conference things. We can never have enough Zoom in our lives, right? Oh, and embellish it with a cause or a passion, keep it real. Makes it easier to network that way. Other than that, you need to keep that aggressive drinking game up. As much as it devastates me, we’re all getting on in years. Last few years left to party. Lastly, if you are still single, you need to date aggressively too. Last chance to find love, really.
So are you doing well on the dating front? Oh, you know. A little of this, a little of that. I think I have been on too many Hinge dates. Good ones lead to more dates. Bad ones end in BOMO. The worst ones end in spirited debates about Bitcoins and recent IPOs. Uggh, hate those! The key thing to remember is that while dates may come and dates may go, you need to go on. Here is some proper advice, though: prioritize looks. A lot of people will talk to you about values, humour, empathy and all that hogwash. Trust me, none of that matters as long as you
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look good. Gosh good looks are underrated! Picot left in a rush as she had to attend her RC advisory session (remember those?). I was hoping for parting words of somber wisdom but all I got was a swift elbow bump. Ah well, while they still exist.
Nishkam Prabodh (MBA ’22) lived and worked in India before coming to HBS. Or so he says. His accent is definitely Scottish.
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APRIL 2021
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