In this conversation, Michael Mancinelli (HBS '21) shares his unique journey from Denver to Harvard Business School through the prestigious 2+2 deferred admission program. As a former Harvard undergraduate who studied electrical engineering while playing Division I football, Michael offers valuable insights into how engineers can successfully position themselves for MBA admissions. He discusses his strategic decision to not immediately disclose his HBS acceptance to his aerospace employer, allowing himself to experience life as a working engineer before committing to business school.
Michael breaks down his distinctive essay approach, which eschewed traditional storytelling in favor of a structured, business case-style format that highlighted leadership lessons from college athletics. He explains how he drew on his football experience to demonstrate skills like self-evaluation, coachability, and decision-making under pressure. The conversation covers his pivot from aerospace engineering to entrepreneurship, his academic excellence as a Baker Scholar, and his current venture in sports technology with his former Harvard teammate who played in the NFL.
Very happy to be here, nice to see you guys.
Not to mention the way I dress. It's a podcast, but I'm wearing a suit. I'm actually supporting the Harvard Crimson. The Harvard-Yale game's coming up this weekend as we're recording, so go Harvard. It's the 13th playing of the game, it's been going on for a while. And it's actually at Harvard this time.
I grew up in Denver, Colorado. I was born and raised there, an Italian American family. My entire family, aunts, uncles, cousins, were all within like a 30 minute sphere, so very tight-knit. Not a lot of people went out of state. My older brother did though, which encouraged me to look out of state. I ended up being good at football because I was a big kid, six feet four inches, I was 285 pounds in high school. I loved math and science and I also loved football, so I had some really good coaches that encouraged me to look at the Ivy League. So that's how I ended up even looking at the Ivy League, and I ended up going to Harvard like you guys mentioned. Did electrical engineering while playing football, which was an absolute perfect place for me, and went off back to Colorado, got married to my high school sweetheart. Actually met Jessica in English class junior year, Mrs. Flanagan's English class, and we got married back in our hometown and lived there for another four years working. I was working in aerospace before going back to business school.
Jessica actually also went to Tufts undergrad, so I'm actually a triple, if you really want to count them all, Alex, I'm a triple Harvard. Masters of engineering, MBA program, and Jessica is a double Jumbo. She got her undergrad and master's degree from Tufts.
Did you invite Mrs. Flanagan to your wedding?
We should have, we should have. She's super sweet, she knows that we got married, but unfortunately with that big Italian family, my third and fourth cousins got a preference over some other invites.
I actually originally got into the MBA through the 2+2 program, so I did my application in the winter and early spring of my senior year at Harvard. Because I went through the 2+2 program, I knew I had the option to go back to the MBA anytime in the next two to four years. I had a decision to make when I started my career: do I tell my new employer I have this option, and because of that I want them to put me in leadership roles or things like that? I actually made the very intentional decision at that time to not tell them. I wanted to experience what life was as an engineer.
Was your mindset actually like, "By not telling them, I'm also living out this life where I could just say no to the 2+2 offer"?
Exactly, because in the back of my head I was still thinking, "I don't necessarily know if I want to pivot away from the deep technical track." That's why I thought it was really important that I let myself experience what it's like to be a real engineer, an engineer without the option of going to business school. I wanted to know what that felt like so that I could really test: do I want to go down this technical route, or is an MBA really a better fit for me? And that worked, because about a year and a half in I found myself getting very squirrely and asking to lead and asking to make decisions and getting more and more involved in non-engineering things. That made it very clear to me that if I have to choose between being the expert or being a leader, I want to be the leader.
What about being a leader in the engineering org? Maybe most of the leaders in engineering orgs do have an MBA background.
I don't actually know that. So when I actually said, "Yes, I'm ready."
To come to HBS, in my mind I was like, okay, I'm going to go to Cambridge, Boston for two years, and I'm going to come back and I'm going to be a program manager at my same company. That was my definition of success when I was coming in to HBS, and boy did that change. So that really changed what I got exposed to through the business school program, really changed that. And the last thing I'll say is the MS/MBA program was created while I was in my deferment period. I had to reapply, which no one applying now will have to go through this type of rigmarole, but I had to reapply to the MS/MBA, and that allowed me to essentially not make the decision. So I got to still do both, which was a lot of fun.
You pivoted hard to the entrepreneurship side of things while at business school. Was entrepreneurship always in the back of your mind, even back as a senior in college when you were thinking of applying?
No, never really. Honestly, my definition of entrepreneurship was a lot more scoped to running a small business of call it five to 25 employees, which I think is a very successful type of entrepreneurship, but my definition of entrepreneurship in general got much more broad, and I really caught the
I met a bunch of really interesting people, and for me it felt like I found a real community and a real place for me in my skill set, because I'm such a weird guy. I like so many different things. I like to be working on a circuit board and soldering things together, and then I like to do a financial model once I learned how to do financial modeling, and I like to do pitch decks, and I like to sell, and I like to go to a conference and speak. Where else can you do all those random different things that you do in the first couple years of the startup? So it seemed really attractive to me.
It's a blessing and a curse to have so many different interests. It's the same thing with my hobbies. I want to learn a language, learn an instrument, and train to climb a mountain at the same time, and just don't have time to do all those things.
How do you think your engineering tendencies and training impacted how you performed in the classroom? Did it help, did it hinder, how did the engineering mindset help you at business school?
Any chance we had to be analytical, I was right in my comfort zone. A particular class comes to mind. It was a marketing class about, I think it was some music related business, and we got this huge data set, and I just loved it. I just chewed on the data set, and magically I actually got picked on in that class and I was able to share all my results, and it was like the one helpful comment that I had in all of marketing. That's when I was comfortable. But to kind of almost dodge your question, what I gained from business school was it pushed me out of that comfort zone. I'm so used to having all the data and the time to find the right answer that the case method in business school forced me to have to pick an answer, to take a stance, to say something without having the time or the data.
It's very uncomfortable, but it's also just super fun when things do work. I'm an athlete, I'm a competitor, and I feel like I get that same sort of exhilaration when things do work in this type of industry, I guess you could call it. It satisfies some of that competitive edge that I don't get to satisfy anymore, now that I'm not playing sports every day of the week.
So my essay, I think, is going to be a little interesting for you and your listeners, because I took the stance of almost writing something that would look like it came from HBS. What I did was, I said I wanted to connect the leadership and self-evaluation skills that I got from playing college football. So things like game-time decisions, on-the-field decisions, watching film. For every two hours of practice that we did, we watched one hour of film. So immediate, constant feedback and evaluation. And there were a couple other things too. I think there were like five total. So I had five sections where I had a paragraph expanding on those things and how I learned them from playing college athletics, and how I wanted to apply them as a leader in the business world. And then at the top I put a summary, a brief of the whole thing, the whole argument, in just one paragraph. And the last couple sentences were how HBS is going to be the place where I put all these puzzle pieces together and figure out how to do that.
So I did that for a couple reasons, that structuring. One was, I really appreciated on the HBS website, and when I read example cases and stuff, that they have everything condensed. So if you're in a rush - I don't know how admissions works, but I imagine that they open an essay and they're trying to figure out what the essay is really quickly - I wanted to just give it to them up front. And if they're trying to decide whether they're going to read every word, they decided whether or not to read every word just by reading the first paragraph. I tried to use structure instead of story, which is very engineering of me.
Did you touch on engineering at all, or were you kind of just like, my undergrad is going to speak for my technical skills?
I don't think I even mentioned engineering or my technical skills once in the essay, because my view of the application was that they're going to, if they have a big table, they're going to put out each piece and see how is this interconnected, and is this well-rounded, and is this a student we want in our classroom. And I thought my resume answered technical. The engineering degree, I got a minor in astrophysics, and while playing football. I don't think I need to describe that. And I was fortunate - if anybody's listening, you got a network - I was fortunate to have internships every summer that were in engineering firms, and I got really good feedback from those. So I just knew that that was covered with the resume. So everywhere else I focused on trying to show them that I was more than an engineer, and I want to be more than an engineer. I want to lead technical engineering organizations.
I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, if they are impressed by that or not, but I think it's creative, it's a different thing. It at least is going to help you structure your argument because you're forcing structure on yourself.
You chose structure over story. How did you also make sure it was engaging to read at the same time?
I chose to prefer it to be easy to read, which is very engineer of me. Discount that, everybody, because I don't know which way is best, but it fit me, it fit my style, frankly. But there was still - it wasn't completely dry. Like I mentioned in that brief, I tried to tell a quick story, which was: I've been exposed to amazing leaders. I'm very fortunate that I had really good coaches. I had an excellent high school football coach that encouraged me to even leave Colorado and go to the Ivy League, and then I had an amazing head football coach at Harvard. Very rare - he's been there since 1993. He's like an institution. He's an amazing developer of people, not just athletes. And I want to share some of the learnings that I got from these individuals, and that my ears are open, my eyes are open. I want to emulate these guys, but I'm not gonna go be a head coach. I'm gonna go create engineering organizations.
Let's be honest, business isn't sports. I don't want to be one of those guys or gals that just says business is sports. And that's where the story was: I want to take some of these skills and experiment with them. Once again, context, 2+2, so I have two to four years. I'm going to take some of these skills, experiment with them in the real world, and then I'm going to come to HBS and hopefully hone those and also round out my skill set, because I didn't know what the time value of money was. I do know how to do differential equations and all these crazy things, but I never learned how to do debits and credits.
If you guys haven't listened to the Linda Lee episode, you should, because she has an absolutely stunning essay that is in a completely different direction than mine. So I encourage, if you're looking to apply to business school, look at different examples and find the one that feels like it fits you, because if it fits you it's going to be better.
I remember I bought an HBS essay pack that had like 12 different essays in it, and one of them was an engineering one that was very straight to the point, arguably a little drier. But what I had also heard was - so I was someone who had an undergrad business degree, and so the question is more like, why do you even need another business degree? And there's more storytelling versus, for an engineer, you don't even need to explain it. It's like, yes, I have the technical skills, I've been working on the technical skills in my internships and job experience, and the why business school is more obvious for an engineer in some ways. You didn't learn how to do a DCF model in electrical engineering.
That reminds me of something I wanted to fit in, which is something I tell to folks that I'm advising, either getting into business school or they're doing a startup and they've applied for a fund or an accelerator: your success in this world is not defined by what you get accepted to. If you just decide in your head that you're going to be successful and you want to go out and achieve something, it's going to happen, and just that mindset alone is probably going to come
Every applicant should have the mindset that Harvard Business School, or you name the business school, they should want me, and it's your job to show them why, because they can't know that if you just write your first and last name, unless you're super famous. That's a mindset everybody should take.
I think confidence goes a long way, and to your point, you're backing up the why. But I do believe in the power of you receive what you put out there. If the wavelength you're putting out there is, yeah, I did this, you should want me, and I also want to go there too, and I think this is a good relationship and we're on the same wavelength, mindset is huge.
Did you enjoy doing this application? What we've heard in other interviews is "I'm glad I did this even if I didn't get in, because it helped me crystallize who I was and what I wanted to do." Was that your experience as well?
It's a really good forcing function for trying to get your mind and goals and ambitions in order. This is a bulletin board for writing or journaling in general, but forcing yourself to get your thoughts organized down on paper or typing it out is just a really useful tool. So it helped me a lot, and it helped me get to that really simple decision tree that I just presented earlier, which is: do I want to be the expert or the leader? Before I boiled it down to that question, it was this whole swirl of uncertainty and what can I do and what should my career look like, and it was just so much more intimidating until I boiled it down on paper to: do I want to be the expert or the leader?
If you guys want to talk process, I was looking it up earlier today, but I found some of my initial versions where I just had bullet points of random things I wanted to talk about that I thought were compelling about me. I had random things about hobbies, I had things about engineering and technical skills, and I had things about sports and leadership. What I did was I pulled that out, and once again, I'm very visual and very structural, so I viewed those things and I grouped them and I said, I want to pick one of these groups. And then it was back to: what group has not been addressed in my application so far? So I focused on that group and then I started writing.
Another piece of advice I have for the non-pros and the procrastinators alike out there is to start writing immediately and then leave it alone for a week and come back, leave it alone for a week, come back, leave it alone for a week, because then all of a sudden you become your own editor.
I've done that before, and sometimes I come back and I'm like, oh yeah, this was better than I thought it was. And then in other areas it's like, okay, now a step removed, that's not getting across the point that I thought it was getting across. So leaving enough time to do that is very important.
I have always, to my detriment, done things myself, so it was self-driven. I could have used resources that were readily available for me, and I should have. It would have taken a lot of stress and uncertainty off my shoulders, but I did all of this - I shouldn't say on my own, because I used friends, family to help with bouncing ideas off of the essay and other parts of my application, for talking through who my recommenders should be, those types of things. So I definitely didn't do this on my own, but I didn't use some of the more structured resources that I could have used.
Who did you have read your essay - was it friends, family - and did you find the advice and input helpful?
I had my parents read it, which was very helpful, especially because I've done that a lot, so I've learned how to interpret their feedback. So that's another piece of advice: try to use the same people, because then you start to understand how their feedback is used. I also used a couple of my roommates that are still best friends of mine, so it was very easy for me to distinguish, okay, I'll take that comment or I won't. And then, back to the confidence piece, even with all the feedback I still wanted to make sure it was mine, and make sure my style. I saved you guys from reading it out loud, but some of my sentences were a little clunky and things like that, but it was me. I wrote very conversationally, even though it was structured. I still write like that, but I didn't let my editors take that over, and it worked out.
Could you just read the intro paragraph that you talked about, and maybe the last sentence or two that you mentioned as well?
Let me open it. All right, you guys ready? Never so excited. Okay. "Over the past decade I have been playing football, most recently for Harvard University, as an offensive lineman. Football started as a fun activity with my neighborhood friends and has evolved into a major component of who I am today. My continued involvement in football through my college career has not only given me valuable experience with time management and balancing interests, but also allowed me to attain other applicable skill sets as direct byproducts of the Harvard football culture. I have been amassing experience and skills in self-evaluation, coachability, decision-making, leadership, goal setting and work ethic" - so, sorry, there were six - "all of which are pertinent to the business world, both in terms of traits a company should exhibit as well as traits of a successful individual. Below I expand on my experience with each of these critical traits. My pursuit of Harvard Business School is driven by my desire to continue to develop and refine these traits for use in leading the aerospace or energy industry. I am motivated to gain valuable skills, experience and education that will build upon my experiences in athletics and construct the foundation for my future career as a leader and visionary." So that was a brief - maybe not quite as I described it earlier.
It says what you're going to say, and the reader can continue to go on or not. If they want to learn more about self-evaluation, coachability on the field, decision-making, leadership structure, goal setting and work ethic, they can. And if they're like, this kid's a no, I've saved them time and they have some goodwill for me. Maybe my descendants will get in.
Another thing, if they are football savvy, is that as an offensive lineman I never caught a touchdown pass. I have no stats. The only time I get called out is if I mess up.
I've always been in a position where I'm there to support the team, and there's other people on the team that are getting the postgame interview, showing up on the Jumbotron. If we're lucky, if there's enough time between the ad breaks, they show the five offensive linemen's photos for ten seconds. So that's probably why I got so many penalties too, is I like to hear my name over the last week.
So that was it. I have the sections, and there's no wrap-up, it's just done. I fit it to two pages exactly.
The wrap-up would have just been a repeat of what I said anyway. I already said it: my pursuit of Harvard Business School is driven by my desire to continue to develop and refine these traits.
Maybe I delivered on that promise once or twice. I felt like I was always like, I'm probably talking too much, but let me keep going.
That was my goal, yes. I'm so glad that that's the case.
Two quick comments on that. The first one is for applicants to the 2+2 program: it is by nature of it more competitive, on a per-student basis, than the general application. So if you don't get in, it's not the end of your journey. Once again, take that mindset of like they need you, you don't need them. Keep going, crush the first couple years of your career, and then if business school is still an attractive avenue for you, apply again. It doesn't mean that you're rejected from every business school forever. It doesn't even mean you're rejected from that particular school forever. So it's not the end of your journey. I start and end with that advice for anybody applying to 2+2.
And then the second thing is, if you're accepted and you're in your career, once you feel like you've stopped doubling responsibility over a six-month period, growing really quickly, learning a lot, taking on responsibility, that's when it's time. Your life post business school will just seem so different for a whole handful of reasons. A reason to not go is because you want to earn another 12 months of income. It should be focused around learning. If you're not learning and growing very quickly, it's time to go back to school.
Yeah, exactly.
I got so much out of it. I could take up 60 minutes talking about what I got out of it, so let me jump to maybe the more interesting thing for people: having a partner. I was married, and those were some of my apprehensions going into the program. But at any of these business schools, especially the ones that you guys are targeting with this podcast, there's a good community for partners. My wife at HBS felt immediately part of the community, part of the section experience, in a good way, not in a creepy way. She especially liked it once, after like three or four months, friendships build that go beyond talking about the class that day.
So as the partner who was in school, that was something I had to manage, and I think was successful, was making sure that when she was there we weren't just talking about school, because there's no faster way of alienating someone in a conversation than people just talking about the class they just took.
And then the other thing that was very helpful for me and Jess was she was in a program that was even more intense than mine, way more intense, maybe an order of magnitude. She was in the physician assistant program at Tufts University, so she was super busy. And we already had a deeply entrenched relationship, so it wasn't like we were building our relationship. We were in a great place. We were very fortunate.
Is that why you're a Baker Scholar? Because you saw how many hours of homework she had and thought maybe you should put some more time into that?
That definitely helped, that definitely helped. And this is probably advice people here: there are so many things you can focus on at business school. There's the academics, there's the networking and maybe an offshoot of that is the career search, there's travel and having a good time. COVID helped reduce the travel for sure, and I like to have a good time but with a small group of people, not in a crazy way. So I super indexed on academics, and I was kind of weird about jobs. I went to I think zero networking events. I didn't take advantage of that side of business school because I got so interested in building my own venture. So I super indexed on academics, and that's why I think anybody's capable of getting a Baker Scholar. They just happen to hand out that award to people that index on academics. They don't hand out the best partier award.
So my first year, I was working with another MS/MBA classmate on a software startup that was for instant feedback in the workplace. We were doing almost like Spark or Pulse reviews and things like that. It was a fun startup, but we both just weren't compelled enough in it to continue it. And then I got hooked up with one of our sectionmates and a couple guys at MIT, and we were building a drone robotics startup, which was a lot of fun, but we were probably a decade early.
A unique business school experience: the three other co-founders were all Japanese citizens, which is, as that kid growing up in Colorado who didn't think that he was going to go to school out of state, to just a few years later co-founding a company with three Japanese guys and doing drone robotics. That's what I was talking about earlier with my definition of what I could do with my career. It just totally changed in a way that I couldn't even imagine as that aerospace engineer that said that, clicked the box, "Yes, I'm gonna go."
How did you navigate all those decisions once your aperture opened and everything felt possible?
That was another place where having my partner with me was super helpful, because she's just such a rock for me and supportive of what I want to do. Very quickly in I said, "I want to try to create a venture." I feel like that's the best use of my skill set, it's the best way to try to really be a leader in the rawest way. It may not be the best way to pay off the loans we just incurred, and I'm also not much of a gambler, so the whole idea that the startup thing could lead to a big payout is actually not why I'm in it. So there's a little bit of a mismatch there that maybe we diagnose when I'm 40 years old and living in a one-bedroom apartment somewhere, but, sorry, I digress.
For me it was just, for some reason I did not plan this at all, very soon in I got latched onto the idea of entrepreneurship and I almost put blinders on. I was like, I don't need to go to the career fair or to this consulting event, or even when engineering or aerospace companies came to campus or offered jobs, I didn't apply. Once again to the confidence piece, which I don't always practice what I preach, I just want to say this: I'm not confident all the time. But when it came to career, I was like, if at any point these startups fail and I do need to go get some job to pay the bills, those companies are going to be there, be able to apply, probably some of my friends will be in these companies and I can help network into them. It's going to be fine, and you'll land higher than you would have otherwise. I feel like that's what I learned in the entrepreneurial failure class: you land a couple years ahead of if you just started there right out of school.
That was with Tom Eisenmann. That class, because he was a co-chair of the program, when he published his book Why Startups Fail, he gave each of us a book. He signed it for everybody and he had slightly different notes, and for me it said, I'm paraphrasing a little bit, but he's like, "I can't wait to write a chapter on you." Here's what he actually said. He said, "But if you fail, fail well," and then in parenthesis he said, "again," because this was a couple weeks after we shut the drone robotics company down. So there was a little bit of a jab, not quite as blatant.
When people think about going to business school, it's like, oh, well, it can be this skyrocket to success and this opportunity, but in reality a different way of looking at business school is the ultimate insurance policy. You can go do and try anything, but the net to catch you, if this startup doesn't work, your net's right there, so leap as high as you want because the bar that net has gotten raised now. To use the skyrocket analogy, I almost view it as business school gives you the key code to hundreds of different launchpads, and you need to go over and hit the code and go into it and then start your skyrocket in whatever little thing you're going to go into. There's a lot of memes and jokes out there about MBAs, and the reason that they're funny is there's some truth in it, that when we go into some specialty, whatever it is, relative to someone that's been in that specialty for six months, we know nothing. But we have the capability to learn extremely quickly and to bring a lot of value extremely quickly, and we have context of so many things that a lot of folks that didn't have this educational background don't have. So that's our advantage. But this illusion that if you go through business school you're going to be ready to be the head of and make every decision, I think that's going from confidence to hubris. It's a line you don't want to get near.
Right after graduation I actually decompressed. I tracked down a cargo van, retrofitted it to be a camper van, and I drove it across the country with my dog Malt while my lovely wife was still suffering in her graduate program. We drove from Massachusetts to the Oregon coast and back. We were on the road for 31 days. It was awesome, a lot of fun.
Then I got a job at a post-series-A startup called Highland. They sell electric school buses as a service, so I was flying around the country the last year pretty much helping them sign up school districts to make the transition from diesel buses to electric, which is a lot of fun. I got to meet a lot of people, and it was just the type of thing I'm looking for in entrepreneurship. I got to do everything from trying to sell and negotiate a seven-figure contract with a school district, to financial modeling and doing underwriting-type stuff, to creating one-pagers and doing some marketing things. So it was a good stretch and stress test of some of the things I learned in the MBA.
Then very quickly I was ready to start my next venture. My college roommate and best friend Adam Redmond, we played offensive line together in Harvard undergrad, and then he went and played in the NFL for six years, a couple of those years with the Cowboys. So him and his wife and son Walter have set up camp in Dallas, Texas, and convinced my wife and I to move over to Texas and we'd start a business together. So we are running a business. I won't even tell you the name of it because we need to change it, trademark issues, but it's a sports technology startup helping athletic departments define the performance and health data of their athletes.
And so you'll be selling to schools, maybe the same schools that you sold the electric buses to?
Part of our strategy right now is to sell to school districts and colleges in the form of an annual contract, as opposed to trying to go out and sign up individuals for, for example, an $8-a-month subscription. That's a steep road to climb. So we're going more of the B2B route and think it's actually bringing a lot of value to some of these higher-level stakeholders in these organizations. I use some of the skills I got from Highland with this new startup, which is great.
You have a doubled experience with Harvard. What is a stereotype about Harvard Business School that is true, and one that is not true?
One that is true is that it is a top academic institution. Like I said, I indexed very heavily on academics and I learned a lot. Their materials are excellent, especially now that I'm out of it and trying to relearn some things. I didn't save all my cases and things like that and I'm regretting it now.
Now a myth that's false: I don't want to go with the one that everybody talks about, that people are snobby jerks. How about this one - there's a myth that Harvard doesn't have a football team. They do, and they've produced a lot of good football players. This is actually a fun fact. My senior year of undergrad, there's five - for those of you who don't know, there's five starting offensive linemen and four of them went on to play enough years in the NFL to earn a pension. I was the fifth that did not go to play in the NFL.
Who do you think is the coolest alumni or class guest that you got to meet?
The obvious one is Jean-Claude B. But if I'm going to be honest, the person that came to mind before him was the Apex boot guy. Not because I liked him - I didn't like him - but the Apex boot guy was interesting to me because he was our first guest that just really aggressively disagreed with any comments that we made. For me it was an opportunity to observe maybe how I should act if I'm ever in the fortunate position to be a guest like that, or how not to act.
The other takeaway from that one - as much as he was unpleasant, that's the more PC way to phrase it - is from a marketing opportunity he was pretty smart. He got up there and said we'll give you, I think it was like 50% off boots, and I remember going to house parties and suddenly there were all these boxes of Apex boots from people who had taken out student loans and were using it to pay for new ski boots. So he had something up there that he was thinking about for sure.
What would you say was your most embarrassing moment during business school?
I don't know. There were moments when I made comments in class and I was just so uncomfortable or scared of what I had just said that I almost blacked out, and the comment just finished, and once the attention moved to the other side of the room I'd lean over to seatmates at the time and be like, what did I just say? Did I say something - hopefully I didn't say anything offensive or that could have been misinterpreted. But I'm sure that happened a few times. Which is what's really nice about the HBS classroom: for the most part our classmates were very forgiving of people trying to explore their thoughts in a very intense environment.
Quick plug, my former seatmate Philip Jones, now a mayor elect, which is pretty cool. To take everything back and edit my answer - who is my favorite Harvard alum or guest? It's Philip Jones, the mayor elect of Newport News, Virginia. And he absolutely crushed it, in terms of raising money and turnout. He absolutely crushed it.
It's just exposure therapy almost, so you're more comfortable with being uncomfortable, so that when an investor is putting you on the spot and you say a response and you're like, I blacked out, but it's probably okay.
For your undergrad or your business school, if you had to pick a new mascot for Harvard, what would it be?
I would just put a Th in front of Crimson - the Crimson. The reason this hasn't been rapid fire is because I can't help myself, and I think the fact that Harvard's mascot is Crimson is super cool, because they're so old that they didn't even know what mascots were supposed to be when they were like, we're the Crimson. And they're so confident in who they are. They're like, I don't need to pick a mascot. Look at Yale, they picked the Bulldogs, they sold out. We are confident, we're a Crimson, and it's going to stay that way.
And to reference something else you said - you're talking about how you put on the blinders and you just have to focus on what you're trying to get out of things and tune out the noise. And Harvard's like, we've got other stuff to deal with other than choosing an animal mascot. Absolutely. And haven't you seen that man, or girl, who dresses up in the full Crimson suit? I don't actually know if I have. I went to Harvard-Yale, but I was really working hard on achieving that other award we were talking about, which was best partyer, so I don't have a great memory of the event.
I snuck it in, that your success is not defined by an acceptance to a program, an award, anything like that. Your success is defined and it starts up in your head and your intention, and it'll happen.