The Omakase Career

Conveyor belt sushi was a wonderful invention.

The plates arrive quickly with what you want. Salmon. Tuna. Yellowtail. When you walk into the restaurant, people are happy and bellies are full.

HBS recruiting can feel remarkably similar.

Consulting. Private equity. Banking. Big Tech. The plates are excellent. The career fairs are full. And generations of talented people before you have helpfully established which options are worth tasting.

There is nothing wrong with any of this. In fact, it’s all quite wonderful.

But it’s worth mentioning that the very best sushi is not served on a conveyor belt. Omakase works differently. Each meal is a one-of-a-kind experience curated based on the particular talents of the chef. Where she trained. The fresh catch of the day. What she does unusually well.

Careers can work this way, too.

The conveyor belt works

Large institutions need a way to identify talent at scale.

They cannot spend six months understanding the inner life and latent potential of every applicant. Instead they develop proxies. School. Employer. GPA. Promotion velocity. Interview performance. Previous experience. 

This is all very rational. Goldman Sachs cannot run an omakase recruiting process for thousands of analysts. Nor should it. Imagine the overhead that would be required.

Standardization allows talent markets to scale efficiently. Great firms are good at identifying people who are likely to succeed in well-defined roles. Great schools then become good at selecting and preparing students for those pipelines. The system works remarkably well. 

Once the scoreboard materializes, ambitious people have a tendency to begin optimizing to the score. Get the right internship. Earn the promotion. Attend the right school. Secure the exit opportunity.

We risk confusing what is easy to evaluate with what is truly valuable.

Careers that don’t fit on the menu

So what does an omakase career look like?

Consider Cameron McCord (HBS '22): Co-founder and CEO of Nominal, a data platform for hardware teams.

Cameron served as a submarine officer, worked at Anduril, and then spent his HBS summer investing at Lux Capital. Several attractive post-HBS paths were available to him. Instead, he, Bryce Strauss (MS/MBA '22), and Jason Hoch (MIT ‘13) decided to start Nominal to solve a problem they had repeatedly encountered: sophisticated hardware teams were generating enormous amounts of test data while relying on antiquated tools to understand it.

What pushed him toward the less established path wasn't a general desire to be a founder. “What ultimately ended up making the difference for me was an obsession with the problem and a real interest in the actual day-to-day work it would take to solve it,” Cameron told me.

In retrospect, Cameron reflected, “Business school can make you feel like there's a defined process and clear answer for everything, but the uncomfortable truth is that it's more ambiguous and subjective than that. My take is that if you're willing to accept more risk, the upside is that much sweeter. If I'd trusted that instinct sooner, I probably would have started Nominal several months earlier.”

Cameron’s instincts appear to be quite good, as Nominal is one of the latest in a string of HBS startups minted as unicorns, alongside other companies like Shield AI, Blitzy, and Applied Intuition.

Then there is Nat Sabatt (HBS/HKS ‘24): President, Minuteman Plumbing, Heating & Cooling.

Navy SEAL. HBS. Bain internship. Bain return offer. Plumber?

He and his wife Caroline (HBS/HKS ‘25) started running their plumbing company, Minuteman, while at HBS. Nat still joined Bain full-time because the company did not yet generate enough cash flow to fully replace his consulting income. He ran Minuteman nights and weekends, integrated an add-on acquisition, and completed his first year at Bain before leaving to dedicate all of his energy to Minuteman.

When asked about how he thought about the risky prospect of foregoing a career at Bain, Nat shared, “Most people look at entrepreneurship and say, ‘There's a lot of risk there. Maybe once I've had more experience or built up a nest egg.’ I look at the conventional post-MBA path and see a much greater risk that I spend the limited time I have on earth doing something I really don't want to be doing.”

“Said another way, there is 0% chance that I look back on my life when I’m ninety and say to myself, ‘Gee, I wish I’d taken a more conventional path, taken less risk, spent a few more years in consulting or whatever else.’ But there is a much, much higher chance I look back when I’m ninety and say something to the effect of, ‘I should have just done more of what I wanted to do, rather than play it safe and optimize for optionality.’”

For Nat, the entrepreneurship path was calling him. But Nat is not alone in this regard.

Search funds, independent sponsorship, and entrepreneurship through acquisition have become increasingly popular paths for Harvard MBAs, especially amongst individuals with private equity or military experience. The value proposition is quite compelling. Ownership, control, economics, and a direct linkage between inputs and outcomes.

Yet Nat’s parents were initially less convinced. Their son had attended the Naval Academy, spent nine years in the Navy as a SEAL, graduated from Harvard Business School, and then “left the Mitt Romney company to become a plumber?”

Bringing them to Minuteman's headquarters changed things. Seeing the trucks and talking to the technicians almost immediately changed their perspective.

And then there is Ryan Holte (HBS/HLS ‘27): Co-Founder, QLab.

Ryan had spent roughly five years in Air Force and Space Force acquisitions and R&D. He entered the military assuming the United States generally deployed the world's best technology. “I quickly found out that this assumption was often far from true,” he told me.

After seeing operators enter life-or-death situations with inadequate technology, Ryan then arrived at Harvard where he met some of the world’s strongest technical talent. Yet, there was very little connectivity between the Harvard / MIT builder ecosystem and the government. A unit in the Pentagon and a 22-year-old founder could be working on the same problem, and neither knew the other existed.

Ryan said that he and his co-founder Nick Maynes (HKS ‘26) “started QLab to help founders understand how to view governments as partners instead of a black box to build industry, country, and world changing technologies, like the internet, mRNA vaccines, and GPS. All of which were subsidized and derisked by U.S. government support.” Since starting QLab, two cohorts have emerged from the accelerator as a wave of technical talent has started tackling mission critical problems.

Cameron, Nat, and Ryan are each on very different paths. None of them fully rejected the conveyor belt. Quite the opposite. But they also never viewed the conveyor belt as the boundary of their opportunity set.

The best path may be the omakase career that is curated just for you.

Eric Menser (MBA ‘27) hails from Stafford, Virginia. He graduated with a B.S. from the Air Force Academy, served as an officer in the Marine Corps, and then worked in the Office of the CEO at Palantir Technologies. Along the way, he lived in Japan for three years, developing strong sushi opinions. Eric is an investor at Journey, a technology growth equity firm.