In this conversation, Ananya Zutshi shares her inspiring journey from her early life in India to becoming a successful entrepreneur in the biotech industry after completing her MBA at Harvard Business School. The discussion covers her educational background, the challenges she faced during her application process, the importance of networking, and the valuable lessons learned about leadership and interpersonal dynamics. Ananya emphasizes the significance of introspection and resilience in navigating her career path, as well as the impact of her MBA experience on her entrepreneurial endeavors.
I was born in India and moved to the US when I was seven - very much a classic immigrant story. My dad got a job opportunity here, and my parents wanted everything in the world for us, so they came over, leaving behind family and the entire lives that they had built. I grew up in Connecticut, which is very different than India.
I ended up getting really intrigued by biomedical engineering when I was in high school. I started falling in love with all the science and applications around biomedical engineering, so when I was looking at colleges that was my number one criteria: a good school for biomedical engineering. I ended up at Duke. Fun fact - I didn't know Duke had a basketball team when I applied. It's just a really phenomenal school for biomedical engineering, but I'm from Connecticut, which is UConn country, so I got a lot of funny comments from my classmates when I ended up at Duke.
Studying biomedical engineering there was a wild experience - a lot of ups and downs - but I love this field so much. There's incredible science and tools and technology around us today, and we have the ability to solve maybe not all of humanity's problems, but a lot of them, which is a pretty incredible time to be alive. I got to do research while I was at Duke, got into a lab, got to work, and got to publish some papers.
My original plan had been to go get a PhD. Actually, way back when I first went to Duke, the original plan was to go to med school. Then I interned at a hospital for a summer and I was like, nope, can't do that, not going to do that. I admire physicians deeply - I just couldn't do it. So I thought, let me just help make tools for physicians to treat their patients. The plan became a PhD, and then somewhere between that and the end of Duke, things shifted.
During my junior and senior year of college, my dad ended up being diagnosed with cancer, so there was this idea of: I want to be able to have a slightly more stable life post-graduation - to be able to visit my dad more, have more money, have more vacation, be geographically closer. At the same time, I also wasn't sure I was ready to commit four to seven years of my life to something just yet. So I went into industry, spent a couple of years on the manufacturing development side of pharma biotech, and learned a lot of really important things about how hard it is to scale and commercialize after an incredible technology has been discovered. I had roles across operations, engineering, BD, and project management.
Even then, my original plan was two years in industry, then go back to a PhD. But when it was time to consider going back, I did a lot of soul-searching, and talking to people I knew in PhD programs, I realized I did not need to be the person calling the scientific shots. I just wanted to be on the team, help make things happen - I didn't need the PhD for that. So I stayed in industry. But I did start to realize that I missed being closer to the science. The manufacturing development side is a step removed from real scientific innovation and patient impact in some ways. When I was a project manager, I wanted to be doing what my clients were doing.
My way of making that pivot within the industry was going back to grad school - I did the MS/MBA, an engineering MBA. I don't think I would have done just the MBA. It was within the MS/MBA that I started to really appreciate entrepreneurship. That had never been on my life's bingo card; it had not been on my radar at all. And then I was surrounded by people who were not just thinking about it but had done it or were going to do it. I realized: if I really love being close to the science and want to fill this kind of business-technical gap, the earliest stages are where that can have some of the biggest impact. I became a Biotech fellow after HBS.
I didn't really know people who had gone to an MBA program. Most of my friends - maybe all of my friends at the time from undergrad - had either gone into industry in various ways, or PhD or MD programs. I did not really know anyone who had done an MBA program until one of the people at work, who was in the leadership development program I was a part of, went to MIT's MS/MBA program. When I heard that, I knew I needed to go to grad school in some capacity to level up in my career. Especially in healthcare and biotech, the vast majority of people have advanced degrees, so I knew I needed to do something - I just didn't quite know what was right for me. When he talked to me about the MS/MBA, I thought that sounds perfect, because I can deepen my technical skills and not lose this really big part of my identity as an engineer, while still building my skill sets on the business side of drug development and discovery. As a project manager, I was starting to really appreciate how important that business and managerial aspect of things was. The more I talked to him, the more I was like, that's something I want to pursue.
Did you apply to both LGO and the HBS dual degree? How many dual degrees like that were you looking at?
I applied twice. The first time I applied only to LGO at MIT. I don't think I had done a ton of background research - engineering is my background, and MIT is like the holy grail for engineers. I do remember looking up some different programs. I believe Harvard has an MS/MBA that was also a two-year program. Stanford had one, but I believe theirs was just for electrical engineering and was a three-year program, which I didn't like as much. Out of the dual degrees in the MBA space, there were not a lot of MS/MBAs. LGO was the first one I found. That first year I only applied to LGO, got an interview, and bombed the interview - and we can talk about that, but it was terrible. In the interview they asked me why I wanted an MBA and I didn't have an answer. I had not done a lot of introspection. I walked out thinking, oh my God. Then the second year I applied to LGO again; that time I didn't even get an interview in round one. Originally that was going to be it - and then my mom, and I'll give credit to her, she had been the one saying, what about Harvard's? That would have been the last year that my GRE scores were good, otherwise I would have had to retake the test. So I ended up applying to the MS/MBA at HBS very last minute, and somehow got in. It changed the trajectory of my life.
Maybe it was the focus. I'm not totally sure what the strongest part was. I was trying to look up what my GRE scores were - I know I was happy enough with them that I took the test once and thought, this is good enough for whatever I want to do - but I couldn't find them because it's been over five years and they've been purged from the system. I'll assume they were strong, but I don't think they were necessarily shoe-in strong. I consider myself a pretty good writer, and I feel like I probably had some pretty strong essays. I also had some really great recommenders - my current manager and a past manager that I had great relationships with, who had seen me through a lot of really important moments in my early career and could talk about and draw on those moments. I'm sure that was a big part of it as well.
But maybe it was the focus. I totally appreciate that for a lot of people they don't necessarily enter an MBA knowing exactly what they want to do after, or even exactly what industry they want to be in. In that way an MBA is one of the most interesting degrees, because I'd say every other advanced degree has people coming in from similar fields and going out to do very similar things. An MBA is the only one where you have a hodgepodge of people from different backgrounds, different levels, and different skill sets, who will go out in that same variety of directions. But I knew I wanted to do something in pharma and biotech at the earlier stages. That had been my focus for a very long time, and in my application I was clear: this is what I want to do, this is how I've set myself up for it, this is why I think this will help me continue to set up for it, and this is what I want to do afterward to accomplish my longer-term goals. It read as genuine - I had personal reasons for being in it, I'd been passionate about it for years, and I had a track record showing I was going after this dream.
Looking back at the MIT LGO interview, what should you have done differently going into that one?
When I applied the second time, I had a much better understanding of why I wanted the MS MBA, and I wish I'd done that introspection the first time around.
To prepare for this conversation, I'd gone back and listened to some of the old podcast episodes, and one thing that stood out to me was that the guests - Matt and Jeff - spent a lot of time thinking about why they wanted to do this, a lot of introspection, which is so important. I just hadn't really done that. I just knew I wanted to move to the next stage of my career and it felt like this degree might be the way to do it. But coming from a technical background, going to business school felt like selling out my technical background, and maybe that's part of the reason why initially I didn't do that much introspection - because I didn't fully understand why this degree was important. And when they asked me that question, that probably came across pretty clearly. I was just stumbling over my words trying to come up with something that probably sounded buzzwordy and frankly pretty inauthentic. I walked out just knowing - I didn't get that. That was awful.
Then I spent the next year as a project manager, and that role also really helped me appreciate how important understanding management and leadership and finance and marketing and how all these different things come together - how important that is, and how unique those opportunities can be.
How did you think about your application differently that next cycle, and what did you do to prepare?
It was a lot more thought about what I wanted to do with my life and where that journey to get to that place could look like. I'll be frank - in some ways, some of the things I want to achieve in my career could have been done without the MS MBA, but it was just a way to get there a lot faster. That's the biggest credit I will give it. The fact that I founded a biotech company - there's no way anyone would have let me do that without at least the MBA from HBS. So it was really understanding: where do I want to go, why do I want to go there, what skill sets do I need to develop to help me get there, and what are the most efficient ways to do it? It was also really realizing that I did want to move more into pure biotech versus the contract side of the industry, and recognizing that the MS MBA opportunity would let me make that pivot a little easier than trying to just apply for jobs myself.
It was the second half of RC year - first year of business school - that I really started thinking about it. In my application, I did not talk about entrepreneurship at all. I said my ambition is to be a program or project manager at a small to midsize biotech pharma company and work my way up to some sort of VP or director of engineering operations role. I really did want to take more of the operational route.
I will give HBS a huge amount of credit, because there is a lot of entrepreneurial energy around HBS and around Boston and Cambridge. I remember in my first week - the MS/MBA starts early, we do a class before everyone else gets there and one in the winter, which helps keep the program to two years instead of three with the dual degree - I was talking to one of the guys in my program and I was like, "What is VC? What is PE? What do these letters stand for?" Now I use those words every day, but I knew nothing. The MS Engineering MBA at HBS is very entrepreneurial; the focus is entrepreneurship, and the classes and courses are really meant to help foster an entrepreneurial spirit and an entrepreneurial future. Being around that really let me jump into the deep end of understanding what this means and what it could look like.
Being in Boston and Cambridge, there was a program that is now huge and global - it is now a nonprofit called Nucleate. Back then it was in its second year of conception, just between MIT and Harvard. It was called Activate at the time, and it was about life science entrepreneurship, batching up MBAs and PhDs or postdocs working on research to see if you could commercialize it. I did that program in the second half of first year and I really liked it. We ended up winning the pitch competition, and I was like, I think this is something I want to explore.
That summer between first and second year, I said no to internship offers from classic pharma because I wanted to work on and explore this entrepreneurship thing. I decided that I didn't know if I was going to be good at it or even like it when I was really in it full time, but I wanted to try. That is where I think I can really help make an impact - lay down a good foundation for technology and get it to people who need it that much faster and that much more efficiently. Then I structured my entire second year around the idea that when I graduate, I am going to do a biotech startup.
Looking back, one thing I do wish is that I'd been more social our first year. I come from a slightly more technical background, and when I think about grad school, it's about the studying - it's not necessarily about the social component. But a lot of my learning, especially in an MBA, is as much about really developing relationships with the people around you as it is about the skill sets you're learning. I wish I'd done more of that my first year. I make a lot of financial models in my role, but I didn't need to spend as long trying to figure out how to do that first year - I would have figured it out eventually.
Opportunity-wise, I don't think I left anything on the table. I did push pretty hard on the things that were entrepreneurship-related at HBS and took advantage of quite a few of them.
For people who aren't as aware: with the MS/MBA you start earlier, but what does it actually look like getting two master's degrees in two years, and how is it different from a typical HBS MBA?
The biggest difference between the MS/MBA and the standard HBS experience comes in the second year. In the first year, you are fully entrenched in HBS. Everyone recognizes that the HBS first year experience is so unique and so special they don't want to take you away from that at all. We did have a class that was overarching, but we would do that in the evenings. You start early, you take a class early - it's a very intense crash course - and with the engineering school you do your entire first year normally with HBS, with that one overarching class and a lot of speakers, but that doesn't mess with HBS time.
During the winter break between first and second semester, you do have a class that you have to be present for. So I couldn't go take any fun tracks because I had to be on the HBS or the engineering school campus taking a class at those times too.
So you were taking a class when everyone else was at yacht week?
Yes, it was very sad - none of us could go to yacht week. But it did help our class become very close, and we had friends ready when everyone else walked onto campus.
The real difference comes in the second year. Essentially, we take fewer HBS classes and we have to take a certain number of engineering credits within the Harvard engineering school - the Graduate School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, which is within the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. That's a little bit of a bummer because there are a ton of incredible classes at HBS, and by virtue of the program you have to roll back on those.
I got a little lucky because our second year was COVID and HBS was hybrid, but the engineering school was fully virtual. For me that meant I could take more advantage of stuff at HBS because I didn't have to factor in a 30-minute walk between campuses. I could take classes that were more back-to-back, and I could try to convince people to let me audit a class even if it overlapped by a couple of minutes - and at HBS you are not allowed to be late to class.
So yes, the biggest difference is really in the second year. They don't want to mess with HBS.
One story that still makes me laugh: in one of my engineering school classes, everyone was off camera except me and the professor. At HBS, if you turned your camera off for three minutes, they were messaging you asking what happened and telling you to come back online. That enforcement just wasn't there in engineering school, and I felt so bad for the professor lecturing to black boxes that I kept my camera on.
The grading was a big difference too. At HBS, in most classes, something like 50% of your grade is participation - raising your hand, speaking, contributing to the conversation, responding to others. Not so shockingly, in the engineering classes, grades were 95% actual exams, problem sets, and labs, and maybe 5% participation.
Which classes did you like better?
What I love about HBS is the case method - being able to learn from all the incredible, brilliant people around me alongside our incredible, brilliant professors. I love science so much, and the material in the engineering classes I find fascinating, but in terms of format, HBS by a mile.
We had some pretty interesting biotech and pharma-related classes. I have one memory in particular of a gentleman in our section who worked for Uber who tried to convince us we should do surge pricing for pharmaceuticals, like they do with Uber. Our marketing professor was so taken aback.
Do any classes or case method experiences stand out as particularly formative or impactful?
One of the things we learn in an MBA is how to communicate well - effectively, eloquently, persuasively. We were doing a pharma-biotech case, and someone in our section said something that was just so categorically wrong. It was about government subsidizing more research, and it was wrong in so many different ways - but they said it really eloquently and really persuasively. I remember looking around the room and seeing lots of people nodding and saying, "That's a great point." In that moment I was like, this can be a really dangerous skill set.
I raised my hand and said, "Actually, this is how government funding for research works, and this is how the pipeline goes, and why you need to transition eventually to private capital." You don't necessarily want government spending too much money on an extremely risky business at its core - and of course there are ways it can be improved - but I was just trying to provide more nuance.
When I hear someone say something that might be really persuasive, I question it much more than I would have before. I really want to understand who they are, dig in deeper, test their assumptions, and not just buy in because it sounds good - because I learned how easy it can be to be fooled by something that sounds good.
It's a skill that good leaders and managers should learn eventually, but being able to do it in an MBA - when it's a person you know, a section mate you like, you hang out with them, you feel very comfortable pushing back on them and being like, "Hey, you're wrong" - and being able to do those reps and build that muscle in a safer environment is invaluable. And even beyond that, there are going to be people around us who not just have an MBA but might have PhDs, MDs, JDs, all these advanced degrees. Learning that an advanced degree doesn't mean they're right - just because they can say something doesn't mean they're right - means it's okay to still push, seek to understand, and make people explain themselves a little bit more.
You were very involved with women-specific programming at HBS - can you speak to the emphasis on not defaulting to apologetic language?
Stop saying you're sorry. Consider whether there's another word you could use instead, or whether "sorry" was even necessary - and encouraging people not to downplay what they're saying.
I'm in a role where everyone around me has MDs, has PhDs, or some combination of them all, and I feel really comfortable pushing back and asking questions and digging in - and I don't know if I would have had that without the MBA.
How do you feel perceived in your industry given your background?
Because I don't have the deeper technical degree to have real credibility, everyone I surround myself with does have one of those degrees. My co-founder has a PhD in Immunology and spent four years doing a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania. Our co-founder has an MD-PhD. If you look at my team slide, everyone on it has an MD or a PhD or both.
That said, I have been pleasantly surprised - and this is honestly something I was really nervous about and had a lot of imposter syndrome about in the early days of the startup. I was really nervous that I wouldn't be able to get a lot of respect because I don't have those degrees. It turns out, as long as you are passionate and curious and want to learn - and that is one of the biggest things I think MBAs bring to the table: that willingness to learn, the communication, the curiosity, the wanting to help improve efficiencies - if you bring that and are just excited to talk to people and learn about what they're doing and figure out how you can help them, it doesn't matter that I don't have the more advanced degrees. They treat me like a peer. They let me ask those questions. It has been great.
It's funny, though - a potential confounding variable is that in my email signature and things like that, I don't have any letters after my name, and frankly people often assume I just have the PhD. If you have an MBA, do not put that in your tagline - just as a rule.
HBS has an unreal network. Pretty much every - or at least the vast majority of - companies I look at where I might want to speak to someone, there is going to be someone who has gone to HBS, and I can reach out to them. Most of the people we have around us who are really invested in us and what we're doing, I got through some sort of HBS contact or HBS resource. Being a first-time founder in a deeply technical industry without necessarily a long track record in this industry, having those people around you - someone said very early to me in the startup journey: you have to borrow the credibility of the people around you until you build your own credibility. Being able to have such incredible individuals to borrow credibility from has been huge.
The second big aspect is interpersonal dynamics. I'll give an example because I was very aware of it earlier this week. I was at a biotech Leadership Summit and we were doing little caselets with serial CEOs in the biotech world. The caselet I was part of: the CEO was talking about a situation in which the two technical leaders were disagreeing on something, and it was gating them from having a meeting with the FDA. They were disagreeing on a certain set of experiments to run, and it had gone so far that they were questioning each other's competency, sniping at each other. In that room - a lot of people with PhDs, everyone around me with a technical background - they were all offering suggestions about whether the two leaders had tried laying down their arguments in really rational ways, really great rational frameworks. Those frameworks would be extremely helpful in lots of different team settings. But I finally said: the thing that worries me the most in this entire situation is the fact that they're sniping at each other, that the team has seemed to lose respect for each other. All of these rational things do not matter, because it has become an emotional situation, and that needs to be dealt with first before anything else can happen. That ended up being the answer. The CEO had to deal with the interpersonal dynamics before the team could reach a rational conclusion.
I remember in that moment thinking: that's the MBA training. We have this joke at HBS that everything turns into leadership. Any good leader and any good manager will learn this lesson in their career, but I got to shortcut that learning. I didn't have to learn it from my own mistakes - I got to learn it from the learnings of others and skip to the part where I get to apply it.
My co-founder - one of the reasons he said he wanted to work with me was that when we were going through a trial period, figuring out whether we wanted to found together, one aspect of that trial period was technical, working together on little projects. But the other aspect was us having a lot of hard conversations: what does it mean to found together, how does this line up against your other life priorities - all that squishy, soft stuff that my old engineering life would have hated and not understood why it's useful. That's the stuff an MBA is really about, and that's the stuff that really convinced him to say: this is someone I want to do this with.
The biggest one would be to do things with a much better pacing than I did. I applied very quickly - the HBS application I put together in two weeks. It was intense, and I didn't have time to do the introspection. I didn't have time to really do things as properly as it should be done. As a result, I had my slight existential crisis while in the MBA rather than before, and I wish I'd taken more time to do that self-reflection, to better understand what are all the options out there, what do they mean, how are they different. All the business schools are quite different in a lot of ways. I would recommend people who are thinking about doing this to do more of that. It doesn't need to be perfect, but even if it's finding people that you admire that you'd want to be like - do that introspection, know the general direction where you want to go. Otherwise, in the MBA, I remember in that first week so many people told us it's like drinking from a fire hose. I was so sick of hearing the phrase, and then everyone else showed up on campus, the actual MBA started, and I was like, yes, 100%, that's what it is. If you don't have some amount of focus in who you are and what you want to do, it's very easy to start getting lost in that. Because I had this guiding light of pharma, biotech, cancer, it was easier for me to muddle through it - but maybe it would have been a little different if I'd thought about entrepreneurship as a life option before starting HBS too.
How do you stay connected to the HBS network?
I'm lucky because I'm in the Boston-Cambridge area, so I can go back to events pretty easily. Within the healthcare and life sciences world, we have WhatsApp groups, we have these chats, we have meetups. I have professors that I'm so close with in those silos at HBS. I help with some cases for the Entrepreneurship and Life Sciences program - we were actually featured in one a couple of weeks ago, which was really cool. If I go to any major conferences, like JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, HBS will always have something there and I make it a priority to hit those. Beyond that, when there's something I'm trying to deal with and I don't necessarily have someone I can already go to, the HBS network is the first thing I look at. If I see someone at a company that I want to talk to who went to HBS, I'll go through the alumni portal and say, "Hey, this is what I'm doing, I see that you're doing this - can I get 15 minutes of your time to ask for advice?" I really use that portal and those networks as much as I can. When you're an entrepreneur there's not a ton of resources, so the ones that you have, you have to use as thoroughly as possible.
The value of the MBA is it opens your eyes to what is possible, because you wouldn't have necessarily crossed paths with people in other industries from other schools otherwise. It opens your mind to what's possible, and it also frankly opens doors. Having that HBS stamp alongside a technical co-founder made the difference in being able to raise money.
One of the other takeaways that can't be emphasized enough is the benefit of speaking and feeling really confident going into rooms where you are a founder and might not have those scientific credentials, but you can speak with a ton of confidence and authority and bring that energy - and at the same time, applying a really critical lens to others when they do that, making sure there's substance underneath the style. That's a really interesting nuance: not only learning confidence, but also learning how to sniff out and be more discerning about when people are bringing that confidence, to make sure there's something underneath it.
You're not going to get that in non-case-method classes. In an engineering class, 95% of the grade is going to be how you do on exams and problem sets. At HBS, 50% is participation. That's where you get that practice, that's where you build that muscle. If you want to be an entrepreneur, that can be super powerful, because you're going to get a lot of pushback from VCs on the product you're trying to get them to invest in. The more confidence you have in being able to convince someone, that's a really awesome skill set that you're not going to get in all types of degrees.