In this episode, we sit down with Simi Shah (WG '25) to hear how she went from private equity to serving as Chief of Staff to former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi before building South Asian Trailblazers, a media company and agency elevating South Asian leaders. Simi opens up about crafting a cohesive application narrative across three very different career chapters, why she believes every experience compounds, and how she launched an agency her first week at Wharton. She also talks about finding her application "theme," navigating Wharton's team-based discussion, managing internship FOMO as a founder, and what it takes to build a company while earning your MBA. Simi is a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and Harvard undergraduate alum. This episode is brought to you by Juno, the collective-bargaining platform that helps MBA students secure lower rates on student loans. Learn more at juno.us/m7a
Sophomore year of college at Harvard, I participated in a program called Girls Who Invest, which really marked my foray into the world of finance. It was a program with 60 other women who were in college and interested in pursuing careers in finance, specifically on the buy side. Our program was hosted on Penn's campus. I actually lived in a dorm right about four minutes walking from the main building at Wharton, which is called Huntsman. I spent half a summer living there and made a ton of friends with people at Penn. The joke even among them for many years was, "Your alter ego school is Penn. If you hadn't gone to Harvard, you would have gone to Penn." So when I got into Wharton, in a lot of ways it felt like this full circle moment - in some ways I feel like this is always where I was meant to be and meant to come and spend some time.
Thank you so much for having me. I'm a huge fan of M7A and excited to be here.
I'm originally from the Peach State - I'm from Atlanta. I grew up in a family of immigrants from India and always had a proclivity towards the world of business because my parents are entrepreneurs and I come from a long line and family of entrepreneurs. I went to college at Harvard to study economics and did a minor in government. For a long time, I thought I was either going to have a career as an international diplomat or a journalist - both of which I spend weird ways of my life now touching, but that is not actually what I am today. I ultimately graduated in 2019 from Harvard, decided to launch myself into the world of finance, and then made a couple of strategic pivots into the world of media and chief of staffing before going on to build my current company.
The idea of going to business school has been percolating in my brain probably since I was a kid. Being the child of immigrants - my parents immigrated here in the late '70s - my dad completed his MBA at Georgia State, and that educational opportunity was pretty transformational for him. It was hallowed and revered in my family in terms of the mobility, information, knowledge, and access it provided for him coming from India. He was highly educated as an engineer, but it just opened so many doors. Business and the education around it was something that was always really valued at a young age. On top of that, I had a sister who's ten years older than me, and she went on to get her JD/MBA. It became this track and marker that a lot of people in my family had pursued, so I consider business school a relative inevitability in my life - I always knew I was going to go. The bigger question was why and when.
Business school is not something you have to do, and I don't think it necessarily has the same value or is regarded the same way it was a decade ago. Answering why now and for what purpose has become more relevant. I had made a couple of strategic pivots: I started my career in private equity, left that a little under a year in - which was a controversial decision by a lot of accounts - then went to work at a media startup, where I joined as their first official employee, and eventually got recruited out to serve as Chief of Staff to the former CEO of PepsiCo. Prior to business school, I'd done three very different things, and I came upon this realization of, okay, I've pursued these three interesting routes - how do I synthesize all of that into what my future career looks like in the near term, five years out, but also decades out? That mark around 2023, about four years out, was when I decided to go to business school, because I'd had those experiences and it felt like the right time.
What was the moment where you said, "This is my time," and how did you start to put the why together?
I had applied for the two-plus-two programs when I was in undergrad - it was a very common and popular thing to do. I had looked at applying again out of school, and I really thought about applying when I became Chief of Staff, but I think it was too soon. I ultimately decided to apply and attend the next year, and reflecting now, that was completely the right decision.
My sister went to law school and business school right out of college. She did not work in a corporate role the way a lot of people do or have any work experience, and to this day she says so much of school was very theoretical for her. While that's a common practice for people going to law school or medical school, it's a lot less common for business school, especially now and especially for the top business programs - they make it very clear that you need to have work experience before you come.
At that point I knew I was at this inflection point where I was like, I really need the time and space to figure out what's next, but in a very de-risked way. If I can take the time to go figure that out while I'm earning a professional degree, amazing. I knew I didn't have another role in me - I'd done these three things. It felt like this is the right time to go, about four years out. I have a range of experience now, and at Wharton the average age out was about five years, which I think is common at a lot of schools. So I felt like it was right timing in terms of my peer set, and also just the right stage for me - I'd been building this platform on the side, it was something I'd like to explore and see if I can take it full-time. Why not go do that in business school?
You have to write your truth. A fake story, or a story that you're trying to force, won't make sense.
I go back a lot to even my undergrad applications, where so much of the advice I got there - there was a guy the year above me in high school and he said the number one thing your application needs to have is a theme. What is the motif in your life? They have to understand that there's a through line. We're all multi-dimensional people, we all have a range of interests, but there has to be one north star, one driving factor. For me coming out of undergrad, it was writing - that ended up being the core motif, storytelling. And it wasn't all that dissimilar in my business school application.
Finance was interesting, but at the end of the day I spent my days in spreadsheets and doing financial engineering, and my creative side had completely been cast off to the wayside. I missed that, and that's why I left. Then I went to work at a media startup, which had this orientation around storytelling and media and wanting to be a part of what new-age media looked like, because it was evolving very quickly, especially in 2020. Then going to work as a Chief of Staff - I worked on the launch of Indra Nooyi's memoir. That is, in and of itself, storytelling, and thinking critically about how you take someone else's story and build resonance with a broader audience. That was still the through line. And the overarching theme was: on the side, I've been building this podcast where I tell the stories of South Asian leaders, and I want to build that into my own media company.
There is no natural line to draw from someone who spent her summers in college interning at an asset management firm, an investment banking firm, and then went to work in private equity and is now doing a hard pivot into media - unless the story is that this media thing has been percolating in the back of my mind for years, if not decades. When push came to shove and I had this real-world experience, I decided to ultimately pursue that. In writing that truth, it served me in a lot of conversations through the application process, because I wasn't forcing a story - it was genuinely what was true about me and my life and what I wanted to do.
I am a staunch believer that experiences compound, whether they're linear or not. Every experience you have is knowledge you're cultivating, relationships you're building, something that you are inherently learning that, whether you notice it or not, will contribute to whatever you do next or something you'll do ten years from now. I have found that to be completely true in my career. I don't think I would be building even the agency arm of Trailblazers that I am now if I had not started my career in finance. Linearity is just this weird device that we have all invented to make sense of things. It's useful in certain contexts, but people are far too complicated to slot into exact boxes that people can pattern match easily.
A lot of people when I was applying were like, the first question people are going to ask you is what are you getting an MBA for? What's the point? You have all these things, but you've also spent a couple of years doing these three very distinctive things. What did that all add up to? What I made really clear in my application was the gaps that I saw for myself. One very distinctive one was talking about my leadership style. In building Trailblazers, I started building a team, but I had also spent a lot of time working with really big leadership personalities across every role I'd had - especially in roles like being a Chief of Staff or figuring out a startup. So much of that is you adapting to the founder or the seniormost person in the organization. I was like, what is my leadership style? What are the ways in which I could be better? I should learn to manage people, because this has been such a side project. I need to understand how to operate not just as a founder but as a CEO. That was one big callout.
The second one was: I've been building this platform on the side and I would love to go full-time with it, but media is an ever-changing landscape. It has at points been a dinosaur industry, and we're seeing the ways in which it's being fundamentally changed. I knew there were a lot of directions I could go in. It was so funny because the first week I got to Wharton and I decided to launch an agency, my dad said it - he was like, I literally feel like you being in this environment is already starting to help your brain chemistry and help you muddle through some of these challenges and questions you've been asking yourself for a couple of years. And it was completely true. I have other friends building media companies who are never going to build an agency - they're going to keep doing the content thing, or they're going to build a fund, or whatever it is. For me it was being able to have the time, space, the resources, the academic classes, the professors, the extracurricular opportunities, the professional networks to go and solve that problem and answer that question of what my business could be and whether I could do it full-time in real time. That was what I said to them in my application.
Writing your life down, really doing the reflection of why you made the decisions you did, is not an easy endeavor. Someone is asking you to sit down and distill most of the decisions that you have made in your life in about five pages, give or take, and that is a really difficult thing to do. I remember writing one of my essays and hitting this point where I was talking to a friend who was looking at the essays, and I said I don't know how to explain why I didn't go be a journalist if I'm talking about how much I love storytelling. He was like, "Why do you need to explain that?" And I said, "Isn't that the natural logical flow of what someone on the admissions committee is going to think?" And he said, "No, that's just the way your brain is operating." I'd written about two-thirds of the essay and I got stuck at this one part and couldn't write the rest of it because I couldn't figure out that transition. It was a matter of jiggering one sentence to say I didn't pursue this path because I didn't know that it could be financially tenable for where I was at in my life, and that solved the conundrum for me. He even said he didn't know if I needed it, but I think it's a prime example of how that kind of reflection takes time and processing and uncovers things that you have probably never been forced to uncover at any point in your life. Figuring out how to distill that into a narrative that someone else could pick up and read in about 600 words was a big part of the challenge.
The other piece I struggled with at times is that I did have a lot of pivots in my life. I had pursued a pretty non-traditional path, and sometimes they give you a hundred characters to talk about why you took a particular job, and a life-altering decision in a hundred characters is a pretty difficult thing to convey in a way that makes them want to have a conversation with you. I relied a lot on the help of friends, people who had been through the process before, mentors, and so many others to help me navigate that and gut-check it. But at the end of the day, no one knows your story and your reasons and your why better than you do, and so there's also a point at which you have to turn the tap off and just go with your gut.
The agency I'm building now is really focused on helping chief executives, founders, and leaders across industries figure out how to tell their stories, make their expertise accessible, and become storytellers for their organizations. A lot of that is taking really complex information about who they are and their knowledge and their roles and distilling it for public consumption - sometimes for expert audiences like investors or prospective customers, but a lot of times just for a broad consumer audience on a social media platform. That was a lot of what we did with her book. That's a lot of what I do at Trailblazers as a podcast platform - I record a 45-minute episode with someone and I'm like, what's the 90-second bit we can find that makes people want to listen to this episode? That takes time and understanding and skill.
That is inherently what you're trying to do with an application. You're trying to distill a story in a way that's going to resonate with someone and package it in a way that is both authentic, but also neat and crisp enough that people can get it in their review. I have to believe it helps, just in how much we had to think about positioning.
It also presented its own challenges, because a lot of the work I do is tied to being a writer and a storyteller, and it's very easy to get obsessed with a sentence because the language is so beautiful. But you have 600 words or 180 characters to convey something, and the question is: do I really need that sentence? Is there a better word that is going to get the message across? Because that is fundamentally what matters most. I have this line I live by now: married to the message, not the language. Over my many years of working in various capacities in media and as a storyteller and working with a lot of the executives I do today, I've had to learn that we're here for the message, not for one sentence or language we're married to.
I applied to the big four or five schools. It's an overwhelming process and I was like, I need to bite off what I can chew while also working, so I wanted to see where I landed.
In terms of why Wharton, it's really interesting, and I talked about this in my application. Sophomore year of college at Harvard, I participated in a program called Girls Who Invest, which really marked my foray into the world of finance. It was a program with 60 other women who were in college and interested in pursuing careers in finance, specifically on the buy side. Our program was hosted on Penn's campus, so I actually lived in a dorm right about four minutes walking from the main building at Wharton, which is called Huntsman. I spent half the summer living there. I made a ton of friends with people at Penn, and the joke even among them for many years was, "Your alter ego school is Penn - if you hadn't gone to Harvard, you would have gone to Penn." So when I got into Wharton, in a lot of ways it felt like this full-circle moment, like in some ways this is always where I was meant to be and meant to come and spend some time. Even in undergrad, the two colleges I weighed most strongly were Harvard and Penn in terms of applying early, and I ultimately decided to apply to Harvard early just because it wasn't binding.
It felt a little bit fated, and I believe in that stuff a lot. A lot of these things are just written in the universe. More tactically, when I came on campus for visit weekend, it was just fun. It was a really lively group of people who are clearly extremely talented, but also genuinely warm and welcoming.
Wharton is a very social environment. Every school has a unique personality, and that's why it's not as blanket an application as it can be in undergrad - you're really tailoring the conversation, the application, and the messaging based on the school and its personality. A lot of Wharton's personality is: we're here to build relationships, we're here to actually enjoy every piece of what we're doing here. It's such a social school, and as a product of that there's a lot of travel and a lot of forging those relationships - whether through the global immersion programs and the academic experiences abroad, or just self-organized trips that students plan. One of my best friends is from Australia and he planned a trip for a bunch of us, and I thought, when else on earth am I going to go to Australia with someone who's from there?
A lot of the extracurricular organizations are like that. Wharton is very known for the hockey league, which is the equivalent of Greek life as some people call it. It's ridiculous because I certainly can't play hockey and I never saw myself doing something like that. But it really speaks to the school's character - it's a group of people who are extremely serious about what they want to do with their lives and extremely talented, but they also just value having and building community and being able to do things they can't necessarily do when you're working five days a week. I really appreciated that aspect of it.
On visit weekend I got lucky - I met some of my best friends. I sat next to one of my best friends at an assigned dinner at welcome weekend and just met some really thoughtful, incredible individuals who were driven by their work and ambitious but also didn't take themselves too seriously. You can tell that's part of the DNA of Wharton.
Did you have any strategies going into the team-based discussion?
For what it's worth, it was in a way the easiest interview because you're not the main character. It's not a one-on-one where most of the air time is dedicated to you. And also, there's so much out of your control. You have no idea who's going to show up in that room. You have no idea what they're going to say. So it's a little bit of live and let live. But that is also what makes it a little bit more of a daunting experience, where you have more agency in some of those other interview situations.
Prep-wise, I spent a solid amount of time prepping. Ours was "where would you launch a global immersion program - pick a country," something like that. So I spent a lot of time digging into a couple of options for countries in case I wanted to pivot in real time, preparing my one-minute pitch, actually reading it out loud to make sure I was under the minute timeline. I also did a couple of mock interviews that some groups had set up, which was amazing - you could do a practice TBD, which I found to be really valuable just to get a feel for it.
They tell you there are people who dedicate themselves to being the timekeeper, someone who's the information synthesizer, someone who takes on a designated role, and some people who take a step back. Wharton is a very group-oriented school - that reflection of its personality comes through in that there are a lot of group projects and team assignments. You work with a lot of different personalities and figure out who's speaking when and doing what, and to thrive at the school you have to be comfortable with that. The TBD is built to reflect that.
I really enjoyed the dynamics of it. I remember there was a point at which I was trying to say something and someone said, "Oh, I think you got cut off - what were you going to say?" which I really appreciated. It's really subtle cues of how you show up in a group setting: are you a good person, do you listen as much as you speak - a lot of basic human cues that you need in your personal and professional life.
At the back end, you have a one-on-one with usually a student interviewer, where they typically ask you why Wharton. I was one of the few who got asked a follow-up question - "What's a specific class that would help you with this?" - and I felt very grateful that I had read my application right before the interview or in the days before, so it was very top of mind. But they just want to know that you care and you've done your research and this isn't a throwaway situation for you, because every school has its unique personality.
I wouldn't want Wharton to be like the other schools. I'm so grateful that, amidst all the chaos of applying, I ended up where I did. These processes are really hard and they take a lot out of you. As much as you want to believe that if you're playing round one it's going to end in September, it doesn't - it goes on basically till December if you're lucky. It's funny to me that I spent so many years thinking about this and so many months agonizing over this process, because now being on the other side, I'm like, that was amazing, and I can't believe I stressed about this.
I came to Wharton as a rather unconventional student. A lot of my friends were sponsored, especially coming from some of the big three consulting firms or financial firms, and so had very different reasons for being there and different things that they were trying to solve for. Being a quasi-founder who was trying to figure out if she could go full-time or should do something else left me oftentimes with a conundrum that a lot of my peers weren't facing. But at the same time, I found people that were such amazing champions of that and willing to be intellectual sparring partners and just a friend when you needed one. People that would challenge me and be like, "Have you thought about this?" And if I had a really long week where I was also traveling for work, just be there and be like, "Hey, come over. Let's drink some wine and have a good night and talk about our lives."
I just wrote an article about this for Wharton magazine, and it marked the launch of my own LinkedIn newsletter, because I've really been wanting to spend more time reflecting on the experience. What I wrote about in this essay is that I've often gone through life - as I think many overachievers do - wanting to prove people wrong, because they didn't believe in me or they doubted me, and especially as someone who's made the pivots she has, I faced that at more points than not. But Wharton became a place where I really wanted to succeed to prove people right. I was just around so many people that had so much conviction in what I was doing - conviction on the days that I had no conviction - that it really became a force multiplier for me in terms of believing in myself, both from an emotional founder standpoint and also a tactical standpoint of how do we problem solve these things.
The second thing I really valued was learning that you can apply in real time. I would be in an M&A class and my professor is talking about how in pursuing a JV you might set yourself up to be acquired by the person you pursued a JV with, and I'm thinking, that's something I had never considered and now is top of mind for me. Or my negotiations class with Professor Guskuni, who's become an incredible mentor of mine - first semester, when I decided to launch this agency, I had no idea how to structure a client retainer or a contract. I remember going to him and saying, "This person is pushing me for 10% on something; we typically are doing 20%." And he literally sat with me to write the email and structure the conversation. You learn so much when you're able to take something and apply it in real time like that, with people who are bought in, professors who are expert in these subject areas.
The third thing - which I think is applicable and more broad to everyone - is that we spend 20 years of our lives going to school, and then we graduate from college and we stop. Things that were part of our routine and that we were used to are completely suddenly uprooted from our lives, and as a result it changes who you are as a person. That transition from being a student to a working professional takes away pieces of your personality and your passions that you were used to for two decades. When you go back to school in your late 20s or early 30s for grad school, you reunite with that version of yourself, and this beautiful thing happens where you're like, "I'm in school again, and I forgot that I love classes, and on the side I would come home and do arts and crafts, and these are the sports I would play back in high school." Being back in that environment and that mindset pushed me to reconnect with the most fundamental version of myself - why did I fall in love with media? Why did I want to be a journalist and a diplomat once upon a time? Why did I go pursue that career in finance? It is so important for us to do that the older we get in life, because as life gets in the way, we become disassociated with the things that drive us. I found school, and Wharton specifically, to be really helpful in grounding me in my why and who I wanted to be as a person, based on who I was as a kid growing up.
Wharton doesn't always get the hype or the praise it deserves when it comes to supporting entrepreneurship - could you speak to what resources were available to you as a founder?
I found a lot of value in finding my small cohort of people that were on this journey together. I have a group chat to this day of all the founders that live in New York City - we keep talking about co-working, we'll send each other our pitch decks or ideas, and I've actually co-worked with some of them at coffee shops. It cultivated a really tight-knit community that I really trust and value, despite the fact that we are building in completely different spaces.
Beyond that, there are a lot of classes that actually really cater to this. There are the obvious ones, like the innovation class where it's really a tournament of ideas for you to come up with what you want to build. There's entrepreneurship - but I also found value in a lot of classes that at first glance you wouldn't think of as being for the founder. The M&A class, for example - people associate that with late-stage private equity, but I found so much value in it as a founder. It was one of my favorite classes at the entire school. There was another one around strategy taught by Vice Dean Nikolai Sigaw. He taught the interdependencies between companies and how they stay competitive, and it completely changed my mindset as someone approaching the media industry. Some of this is about how you take it and how you approach it, and thinking critically about what your needs are.
Wharton obviously has the Venture Lab. I actually used the Venture Lab to record a couple of my podcasts with Wharton alumni who were willing to come on. There are a lot of different touch points, and if you talked to any founder at Wharton they would tell you about the different things they used - some got grants, some did the VIP-X program at the Venture Lab, some got a search fund grant, and so on. There are a lot of resources, even if entrepreneurship isn't necessarily the personality the school is known for. What's beautiful about that is Wharton is trending toward it, and they're willing to put more toward it, willing to have those conversations and hear you out - because they understand it's important, and because the school has been an incubator for businesses like Warby Parker and so many others.
I oscillated a lot, and my friends can attest to that, because I would be like, should I just go apply for a job or do this thing? Point number one was after my first year, where I decided not to pursue an internship. I received a couple of opportunities, and I just had this moment - and my friends were a big part of this at school. They were like, why would you go spend time doing that other thing when you have this thing right in front of you? That was inflection point number one.
I tell a lot of founders who are thinking about going to business school this, and I think it's an important conversation to have with yourself. You can be a founder that goes to business school and is like, school is my side project and I'm here to build my company and get a degree at the same time - and candidly do a little bit of the bare minimum to get it, but it's a de-risk way to explore this idea for two years. You can do the 50/50 thing, which is what I did. I said I was spending a lot of money to be here. I don't want to just only do Trailblazers the entire time I'm here. I would like to invest in the Wharton experience. So I was on a ton of club boards. I choreographed for dance studio. I was involved with Wharton Storytellers. I was a leadership fellow - a lot of which were pretty high-commitment endeavors. But I knew the trade-off I was making, and I was like, I don't want to leave Wharton and be like, well, what did I do with my time here besides just spend time on this idea? There's no shame to the people that do that - everyone has to choose their path. And I have had friends who dropped out of school because they were like, I want to give my business my all and I can't do both at the same time. They leave to go work on their businesses full-time. That's why I tell a lot of founders: think really critically about whether this is the right path for you, because it's not for everyone.
Approaching the end of second year, because I had taken that 50/50 approach, I knew that Trailblazers hadn't received 110% of my time for two years. That was a conscious decision I made. But as a result, I was like, "Oh my god" - my friends keep saying, "If this is how things are going with 60 to 70% of your attention on it in a given week, imagine what will happen at 100." That was an unlock in my brain: of course, why wouldn't I spend that time on this thing that I've spent time iterating and thinking about for the better part of three to four years, let alone the last two years.
Any additional advice on how to manage the pull of recruiting?
Once you have an offer in hand, it is a lot more difficult to say no than it is to say no at the start of the process. That is something we don't think about enough, because everyone - and especially someone going to business school - loves the pursuit of optionality. Business school is an exercise in optionality in a lot of ways. So I always tell people to be very cognizant of that reality before you make the decision to spend the time, effort, and brain space on going through these processes, because once you get there it's a lot harder to pull back.
This is something called the endowment effect, which I actually learned in my managerial decision-making class with Katie Milkman, who's an incredible professor. Once you have something, it is very hard to let go of it. So if you're going to recruit for the heck of it, be very mindful of that.
The other piece of advice I give people is to do something at the outset of the experience. I had a mentor over the summer before I started business school. He was at the venture studio that backed the startup I worked at, and he said, "I want you to write on a piece of paper that you are not going to go back and work in finance or take a gig in consulting. Write it down and put it on a mirror." And I was like, "Josh, I think it's fine, whatever." And I remember having a moment at the beginning of orientation where they were talking about consulting and I thought, "Should I work at a consulting firm?" It was a fleeting thought - fortunately - but it kind of freaked me out.
I sat down one of those first weeks of school and asked myself: what are my five reasons for being here? What are the five things I want to get out of this? I always tell people those can evolve - you are going to change over these next few years, and ideally you're going to learn things that make you change. So it's okay if it's a fluid list, but just have something to anchor you when you are feeling indecisive or unsure about getting pulled into these paths. I went into finance and did a summer in banking in college because I got totally sucked into that. The only reason I avoided it this time is because I had already done it once. If you have never experienced that before, you're obviously more susceptible.
Graduate school - especially at this stage in our lives - is not the time to do something because everyone else is doing it, because the decision is a lot more costly. Forget your tuition: there are years of your life that you will spend if you make a decision because other people are telling you to. So write down those few things and stay anchored in your purpose. Fortunately, I became allergic to a lot of that stuff a long time ago, so it wasn't too much of a question for me - though sometimes I wish it was.
No day looks the same, and that is just the life of an early-stage founder. Trailblazers started as a podcast and media platform, evolved into a community and events platform, and more recently we've been building an agency - but the agency also went through a pivot in business school, and so now I'm focused on strategy and advising for executives. I'm spending a lot of my time really focused across those three dimensions, and right now building a team, because if there's anything I've learned, it's the art of delegating and learning that you can't do it all, especially as a solo founder.
I feel very lucky that I get to spend my day doing three things that I love. I love storytelling. I love bringing people together. And I really love working with the brightest and most brilliant people in the world to help them figure out how they can tell their stories. Those map directly to the three parts of our business. My friends always joke - they were like, "You were never going to do one thing" - and it makes so much sense that Trailblazers has evolved into what it has. No day looks the same, but it's usually one third, one third, one third focus on those pieces, and just thinking critically about where we're going next.
What advice do you have for people interested in the media space specifically?
Media is a really challenging landscape broadly right now, but industries that are often going through a lot of change and challenges are also ripe for disruption and opportunity. Don't count yourself out. That just means there's something to be done here - it's figuring out where and what. That's where the challenge is, compared to other industries where maybe there's a little more of a clear opportunity, but everyone's chasing after it because it feels so obvious.
The other thing is I believe in something I call the Pareto rule. I was an econ major in college, and I call it the Pareto rule in life: 20% of what you do will contribute to 80% of your success, and 80% of what you do will contribute to 20% of your success. I spend every single day trying to figure out what's the 20% that's going to contribute to the 80%. That is one of the hardest exercises we do as people, as professionals, certainly as entrepreneurs. So my advice to everyone is: how do you go and figure out what that 20% is, and optimize your life and your time and the work that you're doing?
Having the opportunity to pursue higher education is a privilege not everyone has, so I encourage people to think really critically about why they're doing it and spend time telling that actual story. Don't worry so much about telling the story that you think people want to hear, because if you tell that story it will not make sense and it will not land.
The second piece of that is: you will tell your story, you will put the application in, you will do an interview, and at the end of the day it is out of your hands. You will never know the conversations that were had behind closed doors or what they wrote. What I say is that you will end up where you're meant to be, and every single one of these experiences is what you make of it. I have friends at HBS, I have friends at GSB, and there are so many kindred experiences and questions and challenges we're facing across these schools, but also unique instances because of the unique personalities of these schools. It is laughable to me that I spent so much time agonizing over the experience, because I feel like I genuinely ended up exactly where I was meant to be.
This weekend I was at a wedding of a Wharton friend in Costa Rica with twenty of our friends from school, and I had this moment where I was like, it's crazy to me that if I hadn't gone to this school at this time, I wouldn't be here right now with all these people that I love, celebrating this incredible milestone in a friend's life. That's what it's all about at the end of the day. No matter where you end up, all of these experiences are what you make of them, and that's what you have to stay tethered to.