In this episode we sit down with Krupa Adusumilli (GSB '25). Krupa studied business and economics at Berkeley Haas, started her career at Goldman Sachs covering healthcare, consumer and industrials in San Francisco, then spent four years at SoFi as it grew from 400 people to 4,000, went public and picked up a bank charter. She was managing a team by 25, which is a big part of why she applied. She now leads a team as a Director at Incode.
Krupa walks through why she applied to Stanford, Harvard, MIT and Wharton, the four months of thinking and two weeks of writing behind her essays, and why she deliberately under-prepared for her interviews. She gets into how different the HBS and GSB interview processes felt, why one day at Admit Weekend made the decision easy, and the two years she spent building a fintech product with a classmate before they decided to stop.
Even if you didn't come into the GSB wanting to do entrepreneurship, you have no choice but to at least have forced exposure to it and what that could mean. One of the most powerful ways I got to see it is that every class you would have three to four speakers, every class session. Inevitably, one if not all would be entrepreneurs. And so a lot of that class session was just them sharing their journey.
I remember walking out of certain classes, probably my second quarter in the first year, and saying, in 15 years, that could be us.
Hello everyone and welcome back to How Did You Get In? Today we are delighted to introduce you to Krupa. Krupa graduated from Stanford GSB in 2025 and she has a fascinating pre-MBA set of experiences that we're excited to dig into. Krupa is a Bay Area native through and through. She graduated from Berkeley and obviously went to Stanford, so she has been a California girl.
Krupa started her career at Goldman Sachs and then spent four years at SoFi in a variety of roles through a variety of promotions that we'll get into. And since graduating, she is now a director at Incode, living in the Bay Area. Krupa, we are so excited to have you.
Thanks for having me guys, I'm excited to be here.
Absolutely. Well, I gave a little bit of your background and we know that you are a Bay Area native, but tell us a little bit about what you were doing right after undergrad and your background pre-MBA.
At Berkeley, I studied business at Haas, economics in the liberal arts departments, and then did a minor in public policy. After a series of internships throughout undergrad, I realized that I wanted to be in a fast paced environment and I really wanted to understand the fundamentals of how businesses are run. That put me at Goldman Sachs, following an internship there the summer before.
I specifically covered healthcare, consumer and industrials in the San Francisco office. After about two years there, working on a variety of deal types, covering a bunch of different industries and looking at companies at different stages of the business lifecycle, I felt like I got what I was looking for. In undergrad I was really scared of finance, to be honest, so I thought Goldman Sachs would help me get over that fear. For the most part it did.
Once I got what I was looking for, I wanted to go into more of an operating role, and that took me to SoFi. My choice to go to SoFi, I could say it was super calculated and really thoughtful. But if I'm being honest, I looked at the fact that I had finance experience and they were talking about bringing finance experience to the masses, and I felt like there was some connection there.
It's funny, everything I did in banking in some ways became relevant at SoFi, but not until later in my journey, so the first couple of months were definitely an adjustment. I also really wanted to work for a mission focused company. Between the finance matching and the impact focus that SoFi had, it felt like the right fit. I did about four years there, and as you mentioned, I was in a variety of roles.
I started off in a biz ops and strategy capacity for one product, jumped around to a couple of different products, and along that journey landed as a business lead covering acquisition, engagement and product strategy for our retail investing business. Then eventually landed at Stanford.
So why an MBA? When did you start thinking about that as your next step?
A couple of reasons. Some very professionally driven and some just family driven. I thought about an MBA back when I was an undergrad. I considered doing the deferred admit program and it didn't feel like the right time. It was not where my thoughts were at. So I put that on pause, but I committed to myself that somewhere before five years out of undergrad, I would apply to an MBA program and leave that door open for myself and see what happens.
If I got in, maybe I'd go, or maybe I'd defer for a little bit longer, or maybe I'd skip it, but I wanted to give myself the option. That's frankly one piece of it. During my time at SoFi, what happened is I was 25, 26. I was managing a team. I was thinking about bonuses. I was thinking about performance reviews. I was fighting for budget. In Indian culture, when you see an Indian person that's older than you, you typically call them auntie or uncle.
There were a lot of folks my parents' age in different departments at SoFi, and on a stressful day, sometimes I'd accidentally call them auntie by natural instinct. It was a really interesting place, managing that level of responsibility with where I was maturity wise and age wise. While I was doing a decent job and it was never a complaint, I felt a lot of that pressure of knowing that people's livelihoods were in part in my hands.
I wanted to do not just a good job, I wanted to do an exceptional job. A lot of the way I was going about it was trying things and hoping that they were going well. But I wanted to learn how to do it right the first time, so that I wasn't using the people on my team as guinea pigs for my own learning, especially when it came to people management. That feeling ultimately drove me to make the plunge and go to business school.
It compounded with the fact that I'd spent four years at SoFi. I saw it go from about 400 people to about 4,000 people in a really short amount of time. We were a smaller startup at the time, and then I got to see the company go through multiple acquisitions. I was a part of those acquisitions in terms of driving them forward. We became a public company. We got a bank charter.
So the fundamental nature of the pace at which the company was operating, and the bureaucracy and the regulatory environment, really started to seep through. If I'm being honest, I missed the early days, the 400 person or less days. I thought maybe entrepreneurship was a world I also wanted to pursue, or at least go back to an early stage company.
And I figured business school would let me make that pivot while also learning those management skills I was craving a little.
Did you find in your peer group at SoFi there were other people who were applying and looking, or were you one of the very few who looked into MBA programs?
I know there was one other person that applied, at least in the same circuit I was applying to. We overlapped in these interviews and things, which was funny to see. But there weren't that many people at SoFi in their early to mid 20s, and I'm sure things have changed in the last three years since I've been there. It was a much older crowd, so a lot of them already had their MBAs or were later in their careers.
They were very supportive of me pursuing that, especially the female executives. They were like, look, there's going to come a time where you hit a glass ceiling, even in the Bay Area, even amongst a bunch of naysayers. In that environment, I highly recommend you pursue that if it's interesting to you. That was definitely an influential point in my thinking. But there was only one other person that I personally knew of.
And I will say SoFi specifically, maybe I was lucky, I don't know if lucky is the right word, but everyone was encouraging. No one was really one of the naysayers. People understood, especially in a regulated industry, that having the people skills business school oftentimes teaches you is really valuable. It made sense for me at the time, or it felt natural.
When it came time for you to sit down and start the MBA applications, what did you think about?
The essay and the narrative process was probably the easiest portion for me. The test was the hardest. I hate test taking, so that was brutal. But the essay part came naturally. The story was very truthful and authentic. I didn't have to figure out how to put all the pieces together. A lot of the decisions I was making, especially out of Goldman into SoFi, was natural, like everything that came after it.
I come from an immigrant family background, and immigrant families manage their money a little differently. At least from my experience in the communities I grew up in, they're very cost cutting focused. It's all about managing the cost lines in your family P&L. I observed from a very young age that everybody else seemed to be doing things differently and it was working better, and I always wanted to understand why.
I was always starting small businesses, tutoring businesses, bracelet businesses. Naturally that was me trying to figure out how to drive top line growth and do things differently than my family was thinking about it. Part of my reason for going to Berkeley and studying business and economics was to get to the truth around that answer. How does a non-immigrant family or the Western world think about managing their finances? How do big corporations do it?
And what is there to learn from that at the individual family level? That ultimately took me to Goldman, to answer that truth furthermore. Then I felt like I really learned something and I wanted to take it to people, which took me to SoFi. I realized private sector and large corporations is one way to affect change, but I also wanted to affect change at more of an institutional level.
In undergrad I interned at the Treasury Department, and I eventually sat on the Economic Development Advisory Committee for the city of San Ramon, which is where I grew up. All of these were little ways to try and influence change from a variety of channels. I did nonprofit work specific to women, to help them get more educated on financial services topics. So I saw the world from three channels.
There's the public sector, there's the private sector, and then there's nonprofit. I wanted to see which avenues through which I can affect change. I wasn't necessarily doing all of those things to build a story for my MBA application. But when it came time to sit down and explain that narrative, I had all of the pieces. I was able to very clearly say, look, I've tried all these different versions and I want to give it a go on my own now.
I want to start something on my own, taking the learnings across these three different channels. Business school is going to give me the time, space and the education slash network to set myself up for success and give myself the best shot at trying to build something. That was my thesis. Obviously you mentioned at the upfront that I now work at a company and I'm a director at a company called Incode.
So the entrepreneurial path didn't pan out at this stage of my life, but we'll see. Always exploring.
What was your process in essay writing, or were you someone who was gifted with, I can just put the words on the page?
Definitely not that last one. Honestly, this is silly, but a lot of shower thoughts. I'd hang in the shower, probably kill the environment a little bit for this one, but I took really long showers and just thought about it. At this era of my life I was genuinely driven by the mission. I felt a lot of sense of purpose about trying to democratize access to financial services. Every part of my life was truly consumed by this.
This was also the start of the pandemic, so you saw so much of society and the world struggling to make ends meet. And then you were seeing these meme stocks surge in the markets and people take their entire COVID checks and dump it into these meme stocks.
There were solutions I was wanting to build at work to combat that, education I was trying to create in my personal life as I was trying to teach women like my mother and her friend circles how to invest, so that they can take advantage of the markets but do it sustainably. These were already thoughts I was having all of the time. That plus, honestly, my dad. I love a long drive with my dad. He's my thought partner in making sense of the world.
So it was him and shower thoughts. I spent probably four or five months genuinely just noodling on it and talking about it with my dad. Then I wrote the essays and submitted in two weeks. The essay was in my head by the time those four months of mental noodling happened, and when it came time to writing, it just came really naturally. That's not to say any other writing process doesn't work, or that mine is replicable.
That's how most essays I've written in life, even for school, go. I'm not good at writing an outline and then filling in the outline. That doesn't work for me, it feels too restrictive. I don't even write on lined paper, that stresses me out. I'm very much a red lines and pictures everywhere and pray to God it all comes together in the end type.
Was it Stanford or bust, or can you talk a little bit about school selection?
When I was sitting down to figure out business school in general, I put together a Google doc, and there were four schools I was very obviously going to apply to. Stanford and MIT, very much for the entrepreneurship focus and the connection to the engineering schools and the proximity. Harvard, because my parents would have killed me if I didn't. It's the brand that globally is well known, even in my parents' village in India somehow.
And Wharton, because my boss at the time at SoFi was a Wharton MBA grad and he was exceptional. I was like, I would be lucky to be half the leader he is. Those were the four schools. I evaluated Berkeley Haas, but I went to undergrad there, so that was truly the only reason I didn't go back for a second time. I felt like I got my fix. I also looked at the Columbia, the LBS program, but I knew I wanted to be in California long term, at least in the US.
I was very sure about that. So I couldn't convince myself of the value of having a more European focused network. I took that one and Haas off the list and stuck with the four. I knew I was interested in entrepreneurship and I knew I cared about the West Coast network, so Stanford was a very obvious choice at that point. From an entrepreneurship focus, it was really Harvard and MIT, a little bit more MIT.
But Harvard and MIT together make a lot of sense, because you can cross the bridge or the river and cross list across schools and classes. Both of them would work. Then when I went to do the interview process, I found that Stanford's culture aligned very obviously with the way I operate. I'm also just not a girl for the cold. The time I went to go do my Harvard interview, I saw a bunch of people's knuckles were bleeding from the cold, and I was like, you know what?
I don't think this is for me. So if I had gotten in and I didn't get into Stanford, obviously I would have gone for it. But with the option for both, Stanford was obvious for me.
When you mentioned you could pick up on the culture from the interviews, can you tell me a little bit more? Is it the kinds of questions that were asked?
I think it was two things. One was process, and one was the actual interview. Process, the HBS interview, I found out the date, it showed up on a system and I had to log in and pick a date. It was the hunger games. It was very intense. I liked it, don't get me wrong, but once I signed up it was T minus 14 days till your interview, T minus 13 days till your interview. Every day you were getting a notification.
At some point I was like, holy cow, I can't remember my own interview, I don't think you should admit me. That was a little bit of a thought I had. On the flip side, Stanford was the complete opposite. It was the wild, wild West. You got an email that genuinely looked like it was spam. Then you get the email and phone number of the person who's going to be your interviewer, and you email the interviewer yourself and schedule a time based on what works best for them.
Culturally, the Stanford version was almost identical to what I experienced at Berkeley, public school, go rogue. The world is your oyster. If you put the work in, you're going to get something out of it. It really reminded me of that, and that is what I'm most comfortable in. I have a tendency to be complacent if things are a little bit too structured, because I believe in the structure and then I let the structure control the way things work.
So I liked the wild, wild West nature of Stanford from a process perspective. That culturally set the tone for me day one. At the actual interview, my Harvard interview was 20 or 30 minutes. It was COVID. They told us not to shake hands with the interviewer. They said the second the timer goes off, even if you're mid thought, stop talking.
The expectation was, we're going to cut you off in the middle if we think you're going down a rabbit hole that we don't really care about. My interview was really focused on my position in leadership, on the org chart. I was specifically asked to point out where I was, which was just interesting. It was so different. My Stanford interview was a lovely alum who they figured would match, that we would both match up on a professional and intellectual level.
It was truly just her getting to know me. It was very casual, very intense in its own way, because she would say, say more, say more, say more about the same question. Whereas with the Harvard one it was 30 seconds and the next one, 30 seconds and the next one, 30 seconds and the next one. So I emotionally connected with my interviewer at Stanford and I felt like she really knew me.
At the end of the day, if Stanford admitted me, it's because they know exactly who they're taking and they must like that version of me. If they took me from Harvard, I would hope that they liked me, but I know they would have liked my credentials, which is also important. One of the big goals for me going into business school personally was, I'm a very Type A person.
I found that at work, the people who were most successful were the people who were Type A but were Type B most of the day, and then knew when to turn on their Type A nature. Whereas day to day I was always Type A, and then trying to figure out when to be Type B when I was with my family or friends. I got the sense that I was going to be able to switch and make that transition easier at Stanford, just based on the interview process.
That was a switch, but it was very much tied to an objective I had for myself in making that choice.
I'm curious, as someone who is stellar enough to get the interview invite to both HBS and Stanford, what advice would you give to people for how to prepare for those interviews?
This was another one where I took it a little bit lighter than maybe the average person. I didn't read any of the Reddit forums. I think I talked to two alum. Actually, I didn't even talk to alum of either school. I spoke to my boss who went to Wharton and got his take about business school interviewing, and a little bit of the nature of questions that were asked. Then three, I picked six or seven stories about myself.
I could guess there's going to be some questions about adversity, the adversity that I faced, why business school, why that school, and what do I want to do with my career broadly. Why fintech, because I talk a lot about that in my application, and financial services broadly. And what's some feedback you got. That was roughly what I estimated the questions would be around, and if not exactly those, something like that.
So I picked six or seven stories and wrote down four bullets for each. It was the STAR method, situation, task, I don't even remember what the rest are, action and results or whatever the four are. I literally just wrote S T A R, and wrote a headline for each story and a few words. Then the day before my interview, on the plane over to HBS, and I took a Zoom interview for Stanford, I read those STAR bullets and prayed. It worked out well.
I honestly think you don't want to sound too prepared for these things, and too structured, because if you do, it makes it really hard for it to feel like a discussion, like something natural. If there were questions that came up that I didn't feel prepared for actively during the interview, I said very clearly during the interview, I know you asked me this, my guess is what you're trying to get at is this.
I don't have a perfect story to align with what you asked, but to get at the same sentiment, here's a different story. That worked really well, because I got to speak about what I know, and it was very clear to them that I understood the underlying purpose of the question and was still able to help solve that gap they had, even though it might not have been in perfect alignment to their question. So I recommend that for anyone who gets nervous in interviews.
Make it a little bit about what you need it to be too.
I think by not over preparing, to your point, you were able to listen at a different level. Versus when you're going in armed with every answer and you're just waiting to fire it back, it's less of a conversation.
Yeah, totally.
Were you considering any other schools at the end of the day, or was it pretty clearly Stanford post-interview?
Post-interview, I was probably 70% sure that it was Stanford. Then I went to Admit Weekend at Stanford. Admit Weekend at Stanford and Harvard are both the same days, or the same weekend or something, which is crazy. And that's fine. But I didn't end up going to the Harvard one just to honestly save money. I didn't want to pay for another flight and another hotel. I saw the campus and I thought I got what I needed from the interview weekend.
So I gave Stanford a real shot for the admit weekend. It really came down to two things, one serious, one non-serious. Serious was I really enjoyed the people I met, the other students. I remember getting in the car after day one, and I had met a group of girls, and I was like, I'm going to Stanford. Even if I meet nobody else at this university and these are the three girls I stay friends with post business school, it's totally worth it for me.
My parents were like, okay, chill. Let's evaluate all your options. But that's genuinely how I felt. I say this to those three friends even now, we're still friends, which is funny. And I think all of us felt that way. All three of those other girls also were deciding between HBS and GSB, and we all honestly made that choice because of that shared feeling. Two was the weather.
We just had a perfect spring weather day at Stanford, and I was like, yeah, I know why I'm a California girl. I think I will stay this way forever. So if I'm being honest, it was really just those two things. It was a gut feeling.
What were some of the highlights that stand out to you?
Wow, hard question. GSB was so different from what I thought it was going to be going into it. I had a very clear picture in my mind that by the time I came out, I was going to have this toolkit around my belt of all these skills I learned, whether hard skills or soft skills, that I collected through classes, through books, through my classmates and their own experiences and what I heard in the classroom.
All of that is true, but that is frankly the smaller portion of what business school was for me. People talk about the people and the network, and all of that is true. As a first generation immigrant, my dad is an engineer. He's the first person in his family and his generation to get a higher education degree, and my sister and I are the next batch. We don't have a network here.
I wanted to go down this path of working in business, whatever that means, and we don't have friends in business, or this person to call for this advice, none of it. So opening myself up to having 400 people I can call now is a game changer. That in itself was a huge part. Two, I'm very introverted and I feel a lot of social anxiety. Pre-DSB, it was a raging sensation of anxiety anytime I was in social situations. The pandemic probably didn't help that.
I knew also that if I wanted to be in business, a lot of it was connecting with people. While I could do it superficially and come off as very extroverted and confident, it would be so exhausting and draining, and I wanted to not feel that way. So business school, again maybe just by exposure therapy, helped me with that. Three, people were amazing. I made amazing friends along the way, I've learned so much.
The fourth and real thing is that business school forces you to reconcile with a variety of insecurities you might have and don't even realize you have. Something about hanging out for two years and not being on the rat race for a minute, and actually forcing yourself to pause and think about what you're saying and doing and not worrying so constantly about the immediate outcome, puts a lot of things on blast.
Your classmates are also brilliant and they ask the hard hitting questions from day one. They'll poke and poke and poke to get to know you. Dealing with those and overcoming those insecurities, and having the space to actually address them at this stage of my career, was super valuable, both personally and professionally. So very magical time.
If you ask me what was the highlight, it's probably being surrounded by really smart people that forced me to break myself down to my component pieces and rebuild myself stronger than I was before.
Did you experiment with entrepreneurship? What did that look like?
Stanford's great at this. They have so many different avenues through which you can explore entrepreneurship, whether it's the classes, whether it's institutions they have set up across schools within Stanford and even at the GSB, and the integration they have across all of those systems. All of the professors integrate at least the tone of entrepreneurship in every class.
So even if you didn't come into the GSB wanting to do entrepreneurship, you have no choice but to at least have forced exposure to it and what that could mean. One of the most powerful ways I got to see it is that every class you would have three to four speakers, every class session. Inevitably, one if not all would be entrepreneurs, so a lot of that class session was just them sharing their journey.
At some point, when you hear so many entrepreneurs talking about it, and obviously they're going to pick a lot of the ones that did it and were successful at it. I remember walking out of certain classes, probably my second quarter in the first year, and saying, in 15 years, that could be us. Then I had to check myself for a second and be like, hold on. That's crazy that I'm saying that could be me, because these are one in a million people who have just made it.
But by sheer exposure effect, and the consistency of that exposure effect, Stanford lowers the threshold around fear or risk that you think you're taking. Because you see so many people doing it and doing it well, you start to think it's possible for you too. By virtue of feeling that way, I met a really great friend at the GSB and we explored entrepreneurship. We spent about two years trying to build something in the fintech space.
We spent our summer in San Francisco trying to build and exploring different options. We worked with an engineer. We got to that stage of signing NDAs, and we had a functioning product that we were playing with. It was really awesome, but a variety of factors. The way the politics, my co-founder was international, so there's all these dynamics around what happens with visas.
I had a medical accident right at the end of the GSB, so immediately at the end I frankly needed really good health insurance for about a year post. And then, if I'm being honest, the way the world and AI was evolving, anything we were building was existentially at risk. Because a product is no longer, in my opinion, your moat. There's almost no such thing as a first mover advantage with a product that somebody can replicate on Claude code in 15 minutes.
So both my co-founder and I at the time sat down and had an honest conversation with each other and said, hey, there's some things we need to go understand about where the world is going. We've been out of the workforce for two years, so we don't know how people are actually using this at a company and how corporate America is using this.
Without that knowledge, I don't know what we're selling or who we're selling to or what their needs are or what their use cases are. Let's go learn a little bit for a second, and then take another stab at it down the line. I think it was the right call, at least for me.
Now, being at a company and playing around with very specific use cases of things that need to be automated, and seeing how quickly things are moving, I'm not sure I had the wherewithal to do entrepreneurship well here.
So curious, when you went about deciding, yep, I am going to recruit, how did you end up where you're at, and how did you approach that recruiting process?
While I was building a product and doing entrepreneurial things at Stanford, a lot of the early stages is brainstorming and thinking and brainstorming and thinking and having conversations and interviewing people. I'm an executor by nature. That's what I did at SoFi. I owned a piece of a P&L, so I needed something with a number and a target to hit. It was hard for me to not have that.
So I started running a small jewelry business for this woman who was an investor at Sequoia. She didn't have time to run it. It was actually an HBS project she started while she was at HBS. Then she was an investor, and she has a family and kids, and she didn't have time to run this business anymore. She was like, somebody take it. I got the opportunity to run that business, and I still do it even now as a fun side project for myself.
But when time came and I needed to recruit, I reached out to her and I was like, hey, here's the situation. I'm looking at these job portals and I haven't looked at them in God knows how long, probably five or six years frankly, because I wasn't recruiting while I was at SoFi. And everything is go to market, or an agentic PM. What does that mean? And how does my skill set translate to one of these roles?
As an investor, I'm sure you're helping entrepreneurs find talent. I don't even need you to make an introduction at this point. I just need you to tell me, what are these entrepreneurs looking for? How can I make sense of the roles that are open, and how do I translate the skills I have to match up with what they're looking for? In that process she introduced me to my current boss, at this company called Incode.
The purpose of that introduction was to say, hey, this person just got hired into this company, she just went through the recruiting process, transitioning from investing. She also had a lot of the same questions you do, she might be better at answering these.
When I had a conversation with my current boss, it became really obvious that there was a lot of intersection with the work I had done in the past as a consumer of Incode's product, where I could add a lot of value. She wanted to open a role at some point for someone with my skill set, and she was like, you know what? Why don't I just do it now? So it worked out.
I talked to a bunch of other companies, but ultimately I trusted her instinct and her desire to make a quick move, even though it wasn't an immediate need. So I took the plunge and we'll see where it goes. I've been there for about seven months now and it's been great.
As we wrap up our conversation, which we both so enjoyed, you've given the audience many nuggets, but are there any other pieces of advice or things that you wish you had known before you started the MBA application process, or started the MBA, that you want to pass on to listeners?
An MBA is a program that should be done very intentionally. People talk about it jokingly all the time, it's a vacation, people are partying, yada, yada, yada. Some of that is true. But I wish I went into the GSB making a little pie chart of how I wanted to spend my time. I mentioned upfront that I wanted to transition from a Type A to a Type B person. I wanted to explore entrepreneurship.
I didn't even mention the fact that I loved fintech, but I was also wondering, did I just love fintech because that's the only thing I knew, or are there other things I wanted to explore? I wanted to play around with that. And I had social anxiety that I wanted to fix. There were a million things I wanted to do with my time, and I don't think that's wrong.
I just wish I made a pie chart of how much time I was willing to invest across each of these, and then every quarter checked in with myself and said, okay, here's the pie chart I defined for myself, and here's how I've actually been spending my time. Is it aligned with my pie chart or is it not? If it isn't aligned, have my objectives changed? That's totally okay too, but be honest with yourself and create a new pie chart.
And if the objectives haven't changed and I've now been spending my time completely differently than how I intended to, then how do you course correct? Because you can get swept away so quickly. The days move so fast and it's so fun, and you're meeting so many people, that everything you're doing is worthwhile.
But the question is, how do you drive enough worthwhile things that compound on top of themselves, so that when you come out of it you're like, wow, I really went from zero to 75 on this vertical, and I went zero to 150 on this vertical, versus doing zero to 10, zero to five, zero to seven, zero to 20, zero to 35. And then it doesn't feel quite as fulfilling maybe. So I tell people, know what you're going for, and it's expensive. It's an expensive endeavor.
Frankly, if you're going in to learn accounting or finance or any other hard skill, I don't think that's the right place anymore at all, especially with what I can see technology already capable of doing. The soft skills are incredible. They are just as valuable in your personal life as they are in your professional life.
You can probably learn those soft skills in other forums as well, but having two years to put that stuff to practice day in and day out, whether it's through your entrepreneurship endeavors like in my case, with friends, in your group projects.
There's just never a chance in life, I think, where you get to constantly put things into practice over and over again, and test a variety of different styles and see what sticks, and come out the other end knowing a little bit better who you are and what your style is. So those would be my two pieces of advice.
And I think those are two excellent pieces of advice to end this on. We so much appreciate you joining us today for this awesome conversation. I think people will get a lot of great value out of it, and wish you the best. And like Julia said, can't wait to see what you end up doing, and that getting you to be that guest speaker at the GSB in not too many years.
I appreciate it. Thank you guys. It was really great to be here, and I really enjoyed the questions and a chance to reflect back on my experience. So I appreciate it.