In this conversation, Behram O'Habib (HBS '21) shares his unconventional path from nanotech engineering to Harvard Business School. He discusses growing up in Pakistan, immigrating to Canada as a child, and how his parents' sacrifice to provide better opportunities shaped his worldview. Behram details his experience co-founding a startup, living in China for over two years, and the challenging co-founder dynamics that ultimately led to the company's dissolution.
He explains how the startup's failure prompted his MBA application, his decision to focus on Harvard Business School over other top programs, and his essay strategy centered on his family's immigration story. Behram reflects on the true value of an MBA, emphasizing that while business school provides significant advantages and opens doors, success doesn't require it. He advocates for deep self-reflection about what you're willing to sacrifice for, arguing that understanding your motivations is more important than following conventional paths.
I think I was typecast a little bit. I'm quite, you know, I'm a man of God and I'm pretty pious, so I think that's part of the problem with business school. You just get typecast as the wrong person.
What motivated you to torture your section mates on day one?
Honestly, I think we might have had a conversation or something before, and it seemed like you could take a joke. In hindsight it's probably a little bit too aggressive. That's how I try to make people feel comfortable, by making them uncomfortable, by saying that you can joke around with me like that too. But the thing that's kind of important for me is, if somebody says, hey, you know, that was hurtful or that was a bit too much, I think you should be quick to apologize. The people that just go, hey, that was a prank bro, that's just the wrong attitude. You should be very, very quick to apologize and make people feel comfortable. And then also you should be able to take a joke yourself, so that's the other part of it.
This is kind of relevant to my essay too, so I guess I'll go way back. I was actually born in Pakistan and I lived there until I was eight, and my parents moved to Canada. Unlike a lot of other people who have to do it because of political or economic reasons that are really critical, my parents would have had a much better life had they stayed there, but they realized their kids wouldn't have the same life or opportunities. So they made the move when I was eight, in their early and late 30s respectively.
I grew up in a city called Waterloo, about an hour from Toronto. Most immigrants stay in Toronto, and there's a lot of brown people and Asian people. Half the city is white, half the city is Asian and brown. But my parents wanted to move to Waterloo because my dad was an engineer and he liked the engineering school. It's a really big tech feeder now. There's a couple other colleges, and what you guys call junior colleges we just call colleges, and another university there. A lot of good education opportunities, smaller town, and they just wanted to take us to a place where if we just studied and worked hard we'd be able to get into a good school and become a doctor, lawyer. That's all I thought was available to you, or an accountant, whatever it is. You could just have a good career and a good life. So that was their outlook, and why I ended up in Waterloo and where I grew up.
How much of growing up in Pakistan until you were eight do you remember? Is it vivid memory, or at that age are you not recording memories particularly well?
The memories are still there. I remember a fair bit. I remember having a fight with a kid, I remember what nights and neighborhood stuff felt like. I have a lot of vivid memories of what it's like to grow up there, probably not the nuances, but I do remember quite a bit. The interesting thing is I grew up in an unusual environment because my dad studied in Bulgaria. The Soviets and Pakistanis had some exchange program and a lot of those, mostly guys at the time, went there and then they came back and they worked at this steel plant that the Soviets and Pakistanis had set up. So a lot of my childhood friends, my parents' friends, were pretty liberal. We didn't grow up in a big city, we grew up in what I guess was a factory town, but it was a bit like a golf resort. It was nicer and pretty liberal, and a lot of my dad's friends ended up immigrating to Toronto and Waterloo anyways. So it was a similar community that just kind of teleported eventually. So to answer your question, I do remember it, but it wasn't all that unusual, at least internally and how it felt with my parents and community.
So you have a doctor, lawyer, an engineer, and you went to business school instead. Did the Harvard name make up for it, or do you think your parents still would have wished you were a full-time engineer by trade?
No, actually all my parents wish now is just that I settle down and marry somebody. That's all they're concerned about. Honestly, the reason I talked about the background stuff is that's really all they were hoping for, that you have a good education and a good career. That was their dream. HBS, they still once in a while, Mom will bring up in conversation that she can't believe a son of hers went to Harvard, that type of thing. I think they feel it and enjoy it more than I did. We all get heads down, we get into it, and once in a while we talk about it like it's pretty unusual and it's awesome, but it's the human thing to do. For better or worse, you get used to your circumstances. So I think we kind of lose sight that there was a moment where it may or may not have been a pretty unusual reach or a dream to go.
But for me it was a bit out of left field how I applied, and we can get into that later, but it wasn't really part of the plan. I applied 2+2 kind of on a whim, obviously didn't get in, I hadn't done anything at that point. I was pretty disengaged with engineering. I got through engineering, but I'm not an engineer in the way some people are that I've met. I can do it, I like it, but I care more about applying the tech to stuff, and then I've met people who just love tinkering all day. So I'm not an engineer in that way.
Going to undergrad, I stayed where I was, so I went to Waterloo. University of Waterloo is pretty good, and this is where I wish I had known more about what was available even in undergrad. So my dad, when we first moved, he was an engineer but he had to study again to get certified, and his first few jobs were progressively better. His first job was literally shoveling snow, a few weeks after they got there, and then he was a technician, and then he started working as an engineer by the time I got into school. But when I was applying and thinking about it, I was just being practical. I knew Waterloo has a co-op program where you can make a lot of money. You graduate in five years, but you never get summers off, so you're always in school or internship, school or internship. So I was like, okay, that's the most practical decision, it's a good school, and if I hate engineering I'll just go be a high school teacher or something, and I can coach football and basketball and life's pretty chill. As we all know now, CPP is a huge contributor to all these PE funds, so teachers have a pretty good life in Ontario, or when I was growing up. But yeah, that was the outlook: just go somewhere local, go to school.
I wish I had known, given how much aid is given to students at some of these top schools. After HBS had all the tuition stuff and they bombard you with how much aid they give to people, when people brought it up at HBS I went back and I looked. Given how much our household income was, it would have been cheaper for me to go to Harvard College or Stanford, at least the first year, because the next year and all that was very different. But it would have been cheaper for me to go there than Waterloo, at least the tuition alone. But I just didn't even think that was within reach. It just seemed like something people in the movies do. I thought about MIT, that was probably more on my mind than the other schools, to be honest. And this goes to the guidance counselor piece too. My guidance counselor was like, look, if you want to go, you have to write the SATs, and you can always go do that as a master's student. So I was like, okay cool, maybe I'll just go here locally and then go to MIT as a master's or something.
What did you study?
I studied nanotech engineering, so it's a bit of a buzzy word, but it's just a mix of chemical engineering, material science, biotech. It's anything you do at the nano scale, like microfabrication technologies, things like that. I think it's evolved - we were in the third cohort, it's evolved since then - but it was relatively useless for finding a direct job but great if you want to go to grad school. A lot of my peers went to master's, and some of them went to PhDs directly, because our third and fourth years a lot of the classes were mixed with grad students. So our setup was different. We had exams and all that, but they had to write papers, and we were studying stuff that you study at the grad school level, so it was just pretty broad. And I was like, okay, all the bio stuff is cool, maybe I'll go work for a prof who's doing cybernetics or something like that, like sci-fi type stuff where you see people can move stuff with their mind.
So after I graduated, I worked at P&G in operations. As I mentioned, I was pretty unsure about that. I didn't really like engineering and I was kind of going through the motions, but I wasn't really that engaged. And I figured, okay, at least I kind of like the business side of things, and I like working with people, and this will give me a chance to at least start to
I was an operations manager. Well, I started as a process engineer and then I got promoted, but almost right away I started working on a startup with some friends on the side. We were looking at a bunch of different ideas, but I noticed in manufacturing environments you do something called the changeover. You stop your line, change a bunch of pieces of equipment, and then off you go again to make similar products, but they're a little bit different in size or whatever, and you want to produce the demand. I noticed we were constantly, in different ways, sometimes in high-tech ways but sometimes in very hacky ways, messing with the surface to get the outcome or the pressure or everything that you want. So we thought, okay, what if we microfabricated these little pins or motors that you can make from scratch and make them really small, and you could modify surfaces and whatever in a more flexible manner? Would that be valuable to producers? Anyways, we started working on something like that on the side. So right away I was like, okay, I start a job but then I'm working on the side and I'm counting on the days. That's kind of crazy.
The startup, very quickly, we started working and then within three months we applied to this accelerator. Well, it was ups and downs. There was a lot of stuff going on. It took us a while to figure out what we wanted to do. That was still at the time when everybody thought WeWork was a great business and there was nothing like the engine, or VCs thinking about longer investment time frames. So it was a very different funding environment, and we were trying to do not just a hardware company but a manufacturing hardware company, which was like a PhD project. It was way too technical. So it took us a while to figure out how do we frame this correctly, and before we started winning pitch competitions and we had a patent and had everything figured out.
As far as time management goes, there was stuff I did during the week, but it would be very small. The biggest gains were made in a little sprint model where I'd go back on weekends, and Saturday, basically all day Saturday and maybe sometime on Sunday, we would just work and hang out and strategize. That was the best part of the startup for me, and also even the ideation. When you're on a whiteboard, problem solving is actually pretty fun.
We went to China within three months, learning how to live there, meeting all these founders from all over the world, and learning how to pitch and communicate. That was a huge driver for me for growth, because I had to. I also learned how to just do bizdev. I figured out what product management was. I literally never heard of it, because I was Googling how to do things and this kid kept coming up. And then there's the thrill you get from seeing something come out of nothing, because you're at a stage where it's just a bunch of stuff on documents and decks, and then people are just writing you huge checks and you're like, oh, okay, I guess I'm doing this right. It's pretty incredible to see that. So that was when I was like, okay, I can do a lot more. I can have an idea and I can start executing on it. I don't have to just work a job or something like that.
You focus on the technical execution and all the business side, but then the joke is like everything turns to lead. My co-founders, there were four of us including me, we were all friends. One of them was my best friend, two guys I knew, they were my classmates in undergrad. We didn't really have the knowledge or the willingness to have difficult conversations. That basically created expectations that were different, where one person wanted to be leading one thing and another person thought they were screwing it up, and then that caused conflict.
What really happened was, one day two of us were told that these other two guys were trying to push us out. First they told us they wanted to stop working on the company as we were raising money, and we were like, why do you want to leave? Things are going pretty well, it looks like. And then it dawned on us that they were actually telling us to leave. There's an investor who would back them, take all the assets, and put it into a new company. So we messed around with that for two days and we called this investor up and asked them, hey, what's happening here? And they were like, we don't know what you're talking about, we've never heard of this. So it was a straight up lie.
But that's when I started thinking about business school. I was like, all right, I don't know if we can work on this, let me just write the GMAT.
At this time were you full-time on the startup?
Yeah, full-time on the startup, still working on it, about to raise a series A. And it turned into, okay, I need a backup plan. So I wrote the GMAT, and then while trying to figure out, hey, can we work together, there's a lack of trust now, I just got a random notice that said some of these guys filed bankruptcy for the company, they're shutting it down without us. We were all directors so we all could have done this. We were like, okay, I guess it's over. So we started doing that, and then I was like, okay, I need to look into deadlines and which schools I want to apply to. That's how business school came about.
It was a stressful period. There's the stuff you're going through, and initially I was kind of fine because there was still a problem to solve. This thing is happening, what do these guys want? But it's when that lull happened and I was writing the GMAT, that's when it started to hit me how much I had invested my identity and everything into working on this. I moved across the world, I lived in China for over two years, and I was like, oh, what am I doing right now? Financially I'll be fine, I can always get a job, but it was just the realization that I had this thing that was consuming all of my thoughts, and all of a sudden I have a lot of free time, what am I doing? That was actually the toughest part.
How does it make you feel about entrepreneurship moving forward? Are you just as excited to do it, or would you ever do it with friends again?
I actually spend a lot of time in business school trying to convince people, when they're talking startups, like, why are you doing this? Because even simple things, people often would say, oh, they raised so and so money, and I'm like, the money doesn't mean anything. Now it means a little bit more, but capital is nothing. It's like, how would you feel about spending a year, a year and a half, and realizing the idea isn't going? You'll still get good experience, but you'll probably feel pretty disappointed. So I'd ask people, are you just reading about so and so raising money and you're excited about that, or do you actually want to do it? Founders Journey gets into a lot of that, like, why do you actually want to do it, what does it take?
Besides that, I would do it with friends, but I'm a huge believer now in very blunt, straightforward conversations. I'm not saying I'm good at it, but being as open and as candid as you can be, even when it's something uncomfortable, because it just saves a lot of headache and I think it actually builds trust if you're willing to do that. I don't know how many times I've been told by some of our classmates, hey, this is a touchy subject with so and so, I wouldn't bring it up. And I have brought it up, and if they can sense that you're not being malicious, you're actually trying to do it from a place that you mean well, people almost always appreciate it. It's funny that the conventional wisdom is often, I wouldn't get into that, it could be a touchy subject.
Are you still friends with the folks that you did the startup with, or in touch with them?
Yeah, one of them is one of my best friends. He and I were jokingly talking about, if we work on our startup, what would equity look like, because we both agree somebody needs to be in charge, so someone needs to have more equity. We had a candid conversation that, well, maybe financially both can have the same outcomes, but we both agreed, after having gone through it, somebody needs to be in charge because it sets the expectations. Not always, but in most cases it makes your decision-making easier. So for example with the four of us it was 25% each, so we were always balancing. Probably high overlapping skill set too. That was part of some issue, where somebody felt like there could be problems, but that was really a surface tension. I think it was really not having those conversations that caused that. You can always make things work if there's enough trust and you actually want to make that happen. But even something like an equity split, if somebody's in charge, you know, I either voice my opinions and hopefully the relationship is good, otherwise either I get on board or I leave, and you do that sooner and you might actually preserve the relationship, versus letting the pressure build because nobody really has a say over somebody else.
I decided on HBS because Harvard is just more well known internationally, it's a bigger MBA program, and as I mentioned, I think entrepreneurship should be a little bit difficult. You shouldn't just fall into it because everybody else is doing it. I had no idea where I stood because my experience was pretty unusual. I didn't come from consulting or tech or finance or anything like that. I figured I would take a shot at GSB or HBS just because they're big on entrepreneurship, and I thought both would be a crapshoot.
This is one of my hot take hills: I think GSB is lowkey kind of toxic in that way. Toxic as in everyone is startups, being on Instagram, so-and-so raised money. I don't want to be around people that are all doing self-fellatio about how awesome they are. I'd heard some things from engineers there, that the MBA can be weirdly toxic. Even something small as they had mixers and somebody said an MBA was talking to him about a startup they had and what idea they had, and they wouldn't tell him what the idea is, and then they finally told him and he was like, okay, that's not that crazy. Where I'd been in Waterloo and then in China, people were pretty open with their ideas. Not everything, but they wanted feedback, they'd critique me, tell me is this something real or not, because it's all about execution. It's an n of one or two, but hearing stories like that and then just the international thing made me go, okay, I'm not going to do GSB.
I didn't apply to just Harvard, I applied to other schools too. Weirdly enough, I'm pretty happy to be open about it because of my experience. I applied to Wharton, I applied to Booth, I applied to MIT, I applied to INSEAD because international, and I applied to Kellogg. I only got interviews at Kellogg and HBS. INSEAD was a later round, I didn't even apply there. That was interesting to me because I think HBS and GSB have the luxury of taking shots at people who have different backgrounds, so weirdly enough I think I was more competitive at those schools than I was at like Booth, Wharton, whatever. Those are all great schools, but HBS and GSB tend to just have a bigger brand, so they have the luxury of messing around a little bit with admissions, I guess.
A surprising number of GSB grads do go into finance, more proportionally than you'd think, so it's a little bit of a false narrative anyways. I didn't even apply to GSB, but I was like, this is not even, whatever, I'm going to pick one and I think HBS is a better fit, so I think I'm walking the walk there.
I think Tyrell was kind of like that too. I was shocked, he didn't get into a lot of schools, but I wonder if they were just like, oh, he's automatic HBS.
What I ended up writing about was the immigration thing that I talked about. But actually, before I get into that, given the focus of the podcast, I did think about who do I reach out to that can actually help me with this. I had met somebody a while back who was into this organization of people, it was supposed to be Muslim professionals. I'm obviously not religious, so I never joined this thing, but she said it was a bunch of finance professionals and consultants, started in New York. I was like, okay, I'll join this thing on a whim, let me just ping some people and see if anybody applied to any of these schools. So a couple guys reached out to me when I was thinking HBS and gave me some advice. Then one of them referred me to a consultant he'd used for his essays, so I did reach out to somebody there and had somebody guide me through the process.
That was a consultant just for essays? Do you mind me asking how much it was for just the essay help?
Cost-wise it was something like 7, 8K to help you look at your essays and craft your own story, for a bunch of different schools. I was like, okay, I want help with HBS, INSEAD I think I only did help with that because I figured I'll do it for the one that I want to take a shot on, and then MIT, I did three because I wanted to go to MIT before, so I was like, okay, let's give that a real shot. So I used her for that, and what was interesting was there was the prose and editing and cutting things down, that part was helpful, but it was more thinking about what is unusual about your own story, because you go for the lowest-hanging fruit first. I was like, oh yeah, went to engineering, blah blah blah, and she's like, okay, those things, a million people do that.
What I ended up writing about was the immigration thing. It's funny because I do like writing, and I find it interesting that a lot of people copy-pasted their essays to a bunch of different schools. Some of those questions are really interesting and they're hard. I really do like the GSB one, what matters most to you and why, because if you can actually reflect on it and answer it well, it'll flow so nicely that you'll be a surprisingly competitive candidate. But for me it ended up being talking about my parents. As I mentioned, they immigrated because they had a better outlook or a vision for what they wanted their kids to have. They didn't have to do this. I talked about what I remember moving there and watching them make sacrifices, the middle of their life was kind of screwed up because they had to take a dip and then go back up. And that's what I put for my career. I started off working at this place where I was at P&G, then I was working on a startup on the side, and when I started doing it I saw, oh my God, there's so much learning, there's so much growth here, I got to live all over the world.
I had the weirdest experience where I went to Vietnam and I came back, and Shenzhen felt like, in my mind I was like, oh thank God I'm home. This is not home, but I feel so comfortable in the city. I can walk around, and I think I'd still go back there and I'd be okay, I know people are safe, I know everything's fine. I never had experiences like that, so that made me go, okay, I can do a lot more, I need to really figure out what do I want to do, and I thought business school could help with that. Entrepreneurship was still kicking around. In all honesty, for two years I don't think I was emotionally there, I didn't think I was ready to do it again, and this last year here, working in tech and everything, I still thought, okay, let me treat this like an experiment and see if I can lose the urge to start up, because if I can, I think life will just be happier. But I still really like the idea of building something, so I think I still want to do that.
That's what the essay was about. I have a vision for what I want to do in my life now. I still want to build a company, I still want to help people, I still want to bring people along on this, build a team and build a company and actually have an impact, and HBS would be a way to start doing that, gain some more knowledge. And I really did learn a lot. We talked about academics earlier, case method really does help you, even a seemingly throwaway comment that Lucas or P Fong makes, you see what they've internalized from some really great investors from their backgrounds. So it really did help broaden my scope, 100%.
Did the co-founder situation and learning to have those tough conversations make its way into your essay?
I don't think it made it directly into the essay. This is one of the things the consultant helped us with, she's like, hey, you can't blow here too much, but it made it into my application in other ways, because I had to explain what happened here. I mentioned that, and then it came up in my interview, of course, and by that point I was well over it, I was happy to talk about it. It was a theme that came up quite a bit afterwards, wasn't in the essay.
The interview was a blur. I honestly thought I kind of tanked it. I wasn't sure how it went. I walked in, I remember a couple of questions, but I do remember walking out thinking, oh. They'd asked me if I regretted doing my startup, and I think I'd painted too negative a picture.
The two guys I mentioned that reached out to me from that professional arts thing gave me some advice initially, like when you're applying, this is a person they use and whatever. When I got interviews, I got two pieces of advice. They said GSB wants to know who you are first and figure out, are you a dick and do we want to, and then check your professional credentials and all that. HBS wants to check your professional credentials first and then they want to get to know you and also screen if you're a dick.
The number of people that we met, if they weren't nice people, at least they learned how to hide it or minimize it. It was a pretty cool group of people overall, and I was surprised about that.
I met this girl from Toronto, because she had also applied and we had interviewed the same day, and I was like, yeah man, I think I messed it up, I don't know if it went well. And she was like, no no no, it probably went fine, and it was good. So it worked out.
What I do remember was even the day before, I arrived for the kind of day you can walk around. I don't know if you guys know Mooney, but he was there, he'd just finished his interview, and I was like, hey, how did it go? He's like, oh, pretty good, I'm writing down some of the questions they asked me for reflection, you can have them if you want, I'll email them to you. I was like, sure. I was pretty surprised. It was pretty relaxed.
That's a good point. I didn't really think about that. It's funny how much you're in your own head. Once I got in, I was in the middle of it, I was fine, I was just speaking without thinking, which got me in trouble from time to time.
Hopefully it comes off in an authentic way, and that's what I like most about our section. A lot of people are pretty genuine and authentic, and when people aren't, you can kind of tell, and it's like the worst, like I'm wasting my time, what are you doing?
So I got in, I went.
I'm a product manager at Meta, so things are going great with the stock package right now. It's a great job.
What did I learn, what did I take away? First was just the people you meet. It's kind of wild the number of people that I feel really close and comfortable with that I'm bad about it, I don't reach out to often enough. But Julia, you and I have had many drunk conversations even towards the end of the HBS experience where I was like, yes, I really do feel close to you, and we don't talk all the time but there's real trust and connection there. And a year and a half later you were at my wedding last week.
That was surprising. I never really heard that about HBS. When I was hearing about HBS, I understood the section experience can be hit or miss, but I thought a thousand people, that's a huge class, and when I read about the section, I'm like, 90 people, that's pretty interesting, you could actually get to know a lot of them. So the people were first.
Second was just broadening your thinking. I didn't really take a lot of practical classes in EC year. I took every BGIE and weird class that I could.
BGIE stands for business, government, international economics?
Yeah, it's government and economics stuff.
I didn't take Founders Journey. I'm like, I lived it, I don't need this again. But I did take EGC, which is entrepreneurship and global capitalism, where basically you have a case study on every entrepreneur. I took classes like that, and I love meeting people that think about how they think and their outlook, am I doing what I'm doing. A lot of times it's just pontificating with no real ownership. You can do a lot more, and you don't have to, for example, if you just want to graduate and you want to make money, that's fine, just try to minimize what harm you have, but own it. You don't have to pretend like you're going to save the world for social credit. So some of that stuff can get annoying, but a lot of people who just think differently, and the classes we got to take and the conversations. Even here in New York, I'm realizing what a cool experience it was. It was such a distilled group of people that even every dinner, even if you're talking about stupid stuff, turned into really interesting conversations.
We talked to our boy P Fong laboring out in SF. He's dying to get to New York because a lot of his friends are here. He's a great example of somebody who was gonna take all finance classes and then after talking to some of us he switched it up, and he said some of his favorite classes were classes like EGC that totally changed his outlook. And he was still a Baker Scholar. He was gonna take easy classes just to get that.
You meet people from wild walks of life and you talk about their lives and backgrounds. One of the things, AI, I don't know if you guys know her, but she mentioned her husband Ben, he was a student at HBS, and how he felt like they both had permission to be themselves in a more authentic way than they were able to do at home. I think everybody had that to some degree. Some people had a lot of peers that came there so maybe they have that freedom, but otherwise a blank slate, nobody knew you, you could just be whoever you wanted to be, and I think maybe that created some of those conversations I was talking about.
Just the experience of hearing about different walks of life and what that was like. Some of those life experiences, like going to Costa Rica and taking some of those trips. Something got me in trouble, but some of those trips were like my favorite moments in my life. And so many people I talk to now say they can't do that, and I don't understand why. Why can't you get 10, 15, 20 friends, plan a trip, get away? It just has to be a priority. And some of those classes kind of feed into that, like crafting your life. I took both of them because of startup stuff, and I just thought it was important to reflect on yourself and the relationship stuff, because you're taught by people who are pretty insightful and they'll give you interesting comments.
I don't want to downplay the career focus. The thing I heard from talking to other students is that a lot of the kind of official or unofficial messaging from the school was take the time to think about your career, take the time to get to know yourself, versus in other schools it was very much focused on the recruiting cycle and the job. We all did that. Ali mentioned that HBS people are like swans, they look like they're gliding but they're paddling furiously underneath. Everybody was focused on jobs. I wish I had stressed about it less, but we all did the job stuff. But the people stuff and learning about different facets of business, it is practical but it also helps you think about, do I want to do this, does it even make sense? That's the first question. It's not how do I do this, it's do I even want to do this, should I be doing it. And school in different ways helps you stop and think about that, because a lot of people want to come and do different things.
It is a bit hit or miss because some sections had a great experience, some didn't, some people had a great experience, some didn't, for a bunch of different reasons. So I do feel pretty privileged that not only did I get in, I got a section that was pretty chill. Except for initial turbulence, we had a pretty great culture, and everybody seemed great. You guys are still hilarious and people are still posting stupid stuff, so it's still a blast.
It's not too late for you to become an HBS professor.
No offense to the ones who did the academic track, but I feel like the ones who first had their career and then became professors were life philosophers at the same time and probably gave the best advice. I would love to do that at some point. If towards the end you can teach at HBS. We had a program in Canada called Next, it used to be called Next 36, called Next Canada now, but it's basically helping entrepreneurs get business education. One of the guys who started it had made a lot of money, he was a Canadian, worked on Wall Street and then sold a couple businesses, and he started one day deciding I want to teach a University of Toronto course on entrepreneurship. He taught LTV actually. Raza. For the audience, LTV is launching tech ventures. He worked, had a whole career, and then ended up insanely successful. He and his brother, also an HBS grad, started their first company right out of HBS and sold it before the dot-com boom for just shy of a billion dollars. Some people are just blessed. That would be a great thing to do at some point in my career.
I sort of hate the competitive thing, like you need to do this to get some kind of outcome. We often talk about diversity, for example, how do we get all these different people into all these schools, and that's the wrong question. The question should be, how do we get rid of the need to even have to go to these schools to have a good life? I think giving back later is fine. It's one of those things people want to talk right away about mission, what are you doing, and I'm like, it's fine to figure out who you are and do well in your career and have a family and all that, and then when you get towards the end of your career start thinking, okay, how do I make everything that I benefit from better.
If you could choose a mascot for HBS, what would it be?
A mascot for HBS, that's a good one. We gotta go with Swan, I think, right? Or wait, Ally, our professor, was the one who said that.
What's your advice for people applying and trying to get in?
This is subjective, right? Some people are very cynical and they say you can engineer the right essay. I really do think if you look at it like a chance to reflect and answer those questions well, you'll learn something about yourself even if you don't get in. And the second thing is, it feels nice, it's definitely super comforting, it's easy to say after you've gotten in, but I really do think if you truly want to get something - look, you're not getting into private equity because there's just a gatekeep there, but if you just want to be successful, you don't need to go to business school to do that. If you truly want to get something done, you can hustle, you can figure out how to do it. There's a lot of privilege that comes and things get easier if you get in - a hell of a lot easier - but it's more about how do you figure out what you want first. It feels so much more congruent to everything when you're happy and you know this is going to make you happy, that even the hardships make sense. Put another way, figure out what are you willing to suffer for, because nothing hard comes easy. So you gotta figure out what's worth all that hard stuff.
You can get into business school, but how many of my classmates said, "Well, now I have to figure out what I want to do and I don't know." Some of them are in PE and they're not happy and they're like, "Is this life? What the hell?"
I have one last story that sums up what the best part of business school can be like. When we were in LA, a bunch of us, twenty-something of us, went into a house that was probably used for a porno at some point - that kind of decor. After we had drinks we go to this restaurant and everybody's hammered, and I was at a table with Anata, Lucas, Malik, Patrick, like one or two other people, and we started talking. I don't know how the conversation got into it, but it turned into what is your biggest insecurity, people going around the table and how does that affect what you ended up doing. We were very, very drunk at this point, we'd had a whole afternoon of having drinks and hard partying, and afterwards everybody was sort of worn out and people started heading home, and we just went to another bar and continued the conversation. We were getting pretty drunk, but it was actually pretty open and people were sharing some things that probably haven't told a lot of people. And it was just second nature by that point because we had so many of those conversations that everybody just assumed trust, assumed that no one's going to share it around or anything like that. And that's what made business school awesome. Those conversations were pretty common place.