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Some parting thoughts on sports and the future of the “Student-Athlete” Barring something unforeseen, this will be my last piece for The Harbus. And while the work I’ve done here certainly hasn’t been as intellectually thought-provoking as that of my counterparts, my hope is that it served a valuable purpose—further humanizing our friends and classmates by highlighting their individual journeys in and around the sports they love. On a personal level, this role gave me an excuse to ask people for 45 uninterrupted minutes of their time to not only talk sports but also learn more about their backgrounds, passions, and goals. I’m certain that I enjoyed it more than they did, and I’m grateful to have had this platform over the last couple of years. On a more fundamental level, though, the reason I did this is because I believe that participation in athletics develops unique skills in people that extend far beyond the field, court, track, or pool. This belief is almost axiomatic in our culture, and former athletes (myself included) are afforded benefits based on the presumption of diligence and mental toughness among those who’ve competed at a certain level. And while each of my interview subjects has these traits in spades, I learned over time that there’s something simultaneously less obvious and more universal that connects all of them. While first acknowledging that there’s an obvious selection bias, given that the premise of every interview was that each subject had found success beyond sports, another set of qualities revealed themselves in each of the individuals I profiled. Through these conversations, I found that the thread that tied each story together—whether it be Lee Martin’s journey from the concrete courts of Chicago to the forests of Vermont, Jess Williams’ path from the fields of South Dakota to the Marine Corps, or any of the others—was foundationally one of selflessness and personal reinvention. Though each came to it in their own way, I believe that this is at least in part due to the unspoken but always-present ephemerality central to one’s life as an athlete. While transitions are a part of life across domains, sports are uniquely blunt in their assessment of your present and future value (or lack thereof). Through injuries, personal mistakes, or the simple but inevitable realization that you just aren’t good enough, athletes learn early that in sports as in life, the scoreboard—real or metaphorical—is never wrong. In Moneyball, the protagonist is coming to grips with the fact that he’ll never be the baseball player he’d hoped to be when a scout confides in him that: “We're all told at some point in time that we can no longer play the children's game, we just don't know when that's gonna be. Some of us are told at eighteen, some of us are told at forty, but we're all told.” And while this anecdote refers specifically to the end of his playing career, interactions like this define most athletes’ experience as they progress. For the vast majority of talented athletes, this reinvention occurs at each successive level—your talent and dedication allow you to ascend the ladder, but at each rung you find other, increasingly gifted and motivated people attempting to do the same thing that you are. It’s an early introduction to the Peter Principle, except your incompetence unambiguously reveals itself to you every time you compete. When this happens, you’re faced with a choice—work harder and find a way to contribute, or find something else to do. The ability and desire to take this first path time and time again is what underpins every positive assumption about current and former athletes. Inevitably, though, the day comes that it’s over, and whether you’re eighteen, twenty-two, or forty, you’re forced to find something else. Navigating this transition successfully is challenging; for many, their sport represented a component of their identity that couldn’t simply be replaced overnight. Historically, though, the beauty of this was that the system was on some level self-reinforcing. Sure, your playing days might be coming to an end, but the assumptions I’d identified above were in most cases true—the selflessness, toughness, and fortitude that you’d developed as an athlete would in fact translate into tangible benefits in your post-athletic life. This virtuous cycle was enabled by the American system, where athletics and academics have historically been intertwined at least until legal adulthood. This system is a unique one, and as such the concept of the “Student-Athlete” is itself uniquely American. With a few limited exceptions, a fundamental component of participation in sports has been both perfunctory academic performance and the privilege (or burden) of representation of one’s school and community. Representing one’s school, and as a function of that being at least nominally expected to uphold standards of behavior and performance in the classroom and in the community, has long been a part of the implicit compact that we as a society have made with amateur athletics. In exchange for society’s resources, time, and attention, the expectation is that this institution plays a necessary part in the broader educational mission of our schools and universities. This isn’t a novel idea of mine; those who were instrumental in building this structure were explicit in their justification for doing so. One need only walk across the Anderson bridge between Cambridge and Allston, where Harvard Street becomes JFK Avenue, to see this—on the northeast corner, near the boathouse, an inscription reads: “May this bridge, built in memory of a scholar and soldier, connecting the college yard and playing fields of Harvard, be an ever present reminder…of loyalty to country and alma mater and a lasting suggestion that they should devote their manhood, developed by study and play on the banks of this river, to the nation and its needs.” And while the incentive structure that this created could at times be problematic—read Friday Night Lights if you haven’t already—the bargain was in total a positive one. Future Presidents, astronauts, and CEOs alike developed themselves not just in the classroom, but on the field and in the community. This filtering function separated those with unique talent and repeatedly placed them in situations that would challenge them physically and mentally, forcing them to learn to persevere and work with others to overcome adversity. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked pretty well, as the success of the American experiment over the last century demonstrates. I guess it’s fitting, then, that the forces that are now straining this compact are themselves uniquely American. Today, it seems increasingly clear that—as is true in many other areas of society—that the governing structures around both youth and collegiate athletics are increasingly motivated by profit and are driving a wedge between the signs of athletic achievement and the things they’re supposed to signify. A world where middle-class families increasingly feel compelled to spend thousands on private coaches and cross-country travel for 10-year-olds to play in for-profit tournaments is not a world where our youth are learning the values of teamwork, persistence, and delayed gratification. A world where college athletes can transfer schools every year in search of a larger payday is not a world that can claim to be serious about holistic personal development in service of the NCAA’s stated goal of “lifelong well-being.” And no, donning a new uniform because another school was willing to pay more for you to wear it does not constitute “reinvention” in any meaningful sense. Perverting the fundamental tenets of a system while maintaining its external identifiers doesn’t obscure the fact that what was once the domain of professionals—direct compensation for services performed, with a fully free and open exchange for said services—is now a reality for individuals who five years ago were ostensibly amateurs. The very concept of a “Student-Athlete,” once a cornerstone of a uniquely American tradition, is in danger—not only because the kids are now legally getting paid, but also because many of the schools they attend soon will no longer be able to afford them. The absurdity only compounds upon further analysis of the numbers. In a world where we’re increasingly atomized and alone, we’ve increasingly financialized the unifying force that is athletics. Those select few college athletes receiving seven-figure paydays might not receive degrees, but they often make more than their professional counterparts while their athletic departments and universities raise tuition and still bleed cash. Conversely, parents stop at nothing to put their kids in position for athletic scholarships in sports with virtually no professional upside, often spending several time-adjusted multiples of the value of those scholarships on training and sports-related travel. It’s an irrational market that predictably is attracting the sort of people more interested in exploiting irrational markets than developing or genuinely investing in young people. I’ll let you make your own guesses as to the eventual consequences of this—hopefully they’re more optimistic than mine. All this aside, those of us who aren’t directly involved are still losing something as this transition occurs. Professional sports are by nature unemotional and thus less romantic, and as such the stories they produce rarely captivate or stand the test of time. As exciting as the US’ gold medal hockey game was this February, the amateurs responsible for 1980’s Miracle on Ice still stand alone as the pinnacle of achievement in American hockey. Our society is starved for unity and shared experience, but something like Remember the Titans is now functionally impossible when the path to athletic success requires optimization of coaches, schools, and sports themselves earlier and earlier in an athlete’s career. When the going rate for a reserve offensive lineman or power forward is well into the six figures, there’s no place for someone like Rudy on anyone’s roster. Sure, it’s Hollywood, but that’s beside the point. So much of how we live and define ourselves and our aspirations is downstream of the culture we inhabit, and it’s not clear to me what fills the gap when stories like these are unattainable. Unfortunately, the incentive to make material changes doesn’t currently exist. Viewership and revenues are higher than ever and every indication is that, in the absence of federal legislative action, the unregulated arms race for talent and media attention and revenue will only intensify in the years to come. Don’t get me wrong—the Joe Critchlows and Camille Dawsons of the next generation will always be fine. Even as the institutions change around them, those with the talent and drive to be successful in whatever they choose to pursue will always find a way to do so. However, the changing winds have revealed that there are existential questions about our society and what we want it to look like that sports may no longer be able to answer. Institutions that at minimum aspired to uphold and reproduce ideals that most of us have tacitly agreed are valuable and worth aspiring to—commitment, self-sacrifice, and the value of being a part of something greater than oneself—are no longer doing so. To be sure, something will fill this gap, but it’s not clear to me what that will be, or if the bargain we’ve all made in allowing this to occur will ultimately prove to be a prudent one. John Mahoney (MBA ’26) is a native of West Des Moines, Iowa. He graduated from the University of Notre Dame in 2021 with a degree in Finance. While in college, he was a walk-on defensive back for the Fighting Irish and wrote a book about his experience, titled History Through The Headsets. Prior to coming to HBS, John worked in consulting and strategy in Minneapolis and Chicago.

Jake Goodman (MBA ‘26) shares the sappy thoughts of the HBS sign I am still SIGN. Another year of cold black legs. Cannot blink. Emblazoned HARVARD space BUSINESS space SCHOOL. No matter the time pass, still must announce myself, this place. My head, a head of metal, has a bald, bulky emblem or crest type thingy instead of hair. Hair I see on the other students. On sign, which is ME, I have good crest. My crest has floppy books with cool old stuff printed on them. VE (red space) RI (red space) TAS. Not of my knowledge what is in these floppy books, cupped in red, reddish–crimson–but they are nice and contain things like knowledge. I think books mean truth. Yes, mean truth. Weird I show book and not case, since case I hear about more. But that is why I stand here, again, one additional year, to mean truth. My body is lifted by poles that protrude into deep pockets of manicured grass, grass cared for by many nice men. These poles mean something like arms, stubby rooted arms. I know they mean something like arms because I see student, which also have pole like things from body but lack crests with books and word on head that mean truth. Student might be my favorite thing, better than my poles and my hair. All day student pass. I am joy to see students pass so often, at such specific time. Student come at 9:06 AM, locking bike with frantic pace. Student times two, four, twenty, hundred pass all in the 9:00-9:09 AM window then yet again at the 9:26-9:30 AM window and then again at the 10:06-10:10 AM window and more and more window. Busy and good part of the day, for me, if I am to mean truth. I am lucky to be with student so many multiplied because otherwise I am just a place. I want to be more than place. Hearing all the time of case and the em-bee-ay. Professor good, case bad, professor not so good, case very good today. I love hearing about case, the goings-ons of what student study, what student absorb during em-bee-ay. Student work out, student play piano in chapel, student drink with friend, student read or not read and wing it. Since another year gone, I tell you about what I do. Lonely all summer, when still student but less and not many know me then. I get breeze in the heat, but less activity, more solitary. When orange plus yellow plus red leaf, I am happy because student are back here. Lots of student take picture with my pole leg and crested body. I meet these student first time, I am new, I am shiny, I introduce student to a world unbeknownst. This is the school that says its name on me. Orange leaf, red leaf, all floating and sitting near me. Lots of student who have also doubles that are older and make similar face (believe parent) come take snap snaps with me. Parent look thing like proud, proud proud things for having sons and daughters take snap snap near me. All time when leaves looser on branch, I am so happy because student here, the joy and the learn happens and chairs full on lawns and student becoming new, transformed. Earth will shiver soon but the new year, the first semester, always at end of year. Then, dark and cold time when I am lonely, no leaf, all brown stick, everything mini-dead. Weeks of no student, bereft, mega-solitude. Space all around me sour and mirror my color, muted, tone dark. My pole legs stay really cold and salty. Then, with sudden speed, company again. Rushing student with breath brilliant frosted speech bubble in front of them. Student more hushed and bundled, but still around, I just see less because student hurry, unhappy in wind like me. No hanging out near me. This place is a place of destination, go there, no linger. Snaps snaps very quick, and then complaint about cold in Boston. Hear often about Boston and cold and bubbles that are cold Bostons. Until warm-ish! Less cold but up, down the temperature in better ranges. White and pink blossoms (which get their own snap snaps), blue hulking vault of Massachusetts sky, increased volume of snap snap. Older middle aged student snap snaps in dark blue suits, so good and classy for snaps snaps. Celebrity snap snap with funny caress of me, smooches or touch in weird way. Squad is great to take snap snap with, lots of people all circling around me like I’m the candle on a birthday cake. Student lock bike slowly and with smile watch snap snap. Laughs near me are sweet, like flowers. I like world in this time. I could be forever spring. Never leave the time of flowers and finely trimmed grass. I wish I could snap snap these student and remember forever, but spring in April is tears because student gone so soon. So now, May, I know because of the mean truth, that some cycling of the year is over. It’s a sign, it’s a me. Snap snaps as student get sad about missing me. Certain students, I likely see a lot less, if at all. My friend, though they not know my friend, are meant to leave here. Their poles are not stuck in the ground, like me. I wish everyone stay here forever because it hurts to miss student once you become close. It hurts in the metal part of me I don’t know feel this much. Right before they leave, lots of snaps with bodies in black gowns, like bathrobes but fancy. I stay because pole is deep in ground and when I mean truth, it is not an internship; I mean truth full-time being sign in the ground. I love being SIGN for HARVARD space BUSINESS space SCHOOL because of student times two times one thousand. I mean truth, that this place makes me people into a richer self, the snap snap RC not the snap snap EC, much changed and better version of student. I mean what honor to be fixed in place, to have pole leg next to literal tree root and be like root in a place that takes student and makes them grow, unlike cold metal. I mean, I like my root right here, in bubble that is cold Boston, among these leaves and bikes and sun and wonderful student. Truth, one truth I have is this is great Earth. Great, difference-making people populated two square mile of Earth. I mean truth. Jake Goodman (MBA ’26) is originally from Davie, Florida. He graduated from Brown University with an honors degree in English and Economics in 2019. Prior to HBS, Jake worked in corporate development, strategic finance, and retail strategy and operations at Gopuff, a rapid convenience app, in Miami, and for Barclays in New York City. He is an avid banjo and guitar player and misses the Florida sun dearly.

Joe Landon (left) and Zameer Kassam (right) at the Harvard reception during the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The organizers of Harvard’s official reception at the World Economic Forum came to campus. Here’s what they shared Every January, roughly 3,000 leaders from government, business, and civil society gather in Davos, Switzerland for the World Economic Forum. Most people only see the headlines. On April 18, two HBS alumni came to campus to share what actually happens there. Zameer Kassam (MBA ’07) and Joe Landon (MBA ’07) joined me for a fireside chat titled Davos: Demystifying the World Economic Forum. Zameer is an entrepreneur and the founder of Zameer Kassam Fine Jewelry, a bespoke engagement ring and fine jewelry firm that is the subject of an HBS MSO case study and has been featured in The New York Times and Vogue, with pieces worn on red carpets around the world. He began his career at McKinsey & Company, spent time at MTV Networks, and later ran a jewelry business unit across LVMH and De Beers Group before launching his own company. Joe is the co-founder of Rendezvous Robotics, a company building modular spacecraft that autonomously assemble in orbit. He previously served as Vice President of Advanced Programs at Lockheed Martin Space, and before that was CFO of Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining venture. He also co-founded Space Angels, one of the first angel investor networks focused on space startups. Their paths could not be more different, but they share an HBS section, a graduation year, and a project they have built together over several years: the official Harvard University reception at Davos. The event drew over 500 registrations, and filled the room. What Davos actually looks like Zameer and Joe walked through how Davos actually works in practice. At a high level, it’s structured in layers: the official Congress Centre hosts the marquee sessions with heads of state and Fortune 500 CEOs, while an entire parallel world of side events, private dinners, and smaller gatherings unfolds across the town. In reality, much of the most valuable interaction happens in that second layer. A typical day might start with breakfast meetings at 7 a.m. and run through panels and one-on-ones, but that’s only half the story. The evenings, which often begin around 8 p.m. and stretch to 3 or 4 a.m., are just as important, if not more so. Dinners, drinks, wine tastings, piano bars, and the now-iconic late-night sing-alongs are where people relax, open up, and connect more naturally. In fact, many experienced attendees prioritize these evening gatherings and skip much of the daytime programming altogether. What surprised many in the room was how accessible some of these environments can be. It’s not unusual to find yourself in close conversation with CEOs or even heads of state at events hosted by organizations like McKinsey & Company, KPMG, CNBC, or Bloomberg. This year, even the United States Government had a strong on-the-ground presence with the introduction of USA House, adding yet another layer of programming and access. They were also candid about logistics. Official WEF badges can be expensive and are typically sponsored by companies or organizations. But beyond that, the broader ecosystem is far more open than most people expect. There are structured entry points like the Global Shapers community for those under 30, the Young Global Leaders program for those under 40, and various industry delegations that bring emerging voices into the fold. The overarching takeaway was simple: Davos is not nearly as closed as it seems from the outside. For those willing to engage, there are near-limitless opportunities to convene, collaborate, and have real impact. The Harvard reception The heart of the conversation was the Harvard reception itself. Zameer and Joe described how they built it over several years into one of the signature gatherings of Davos week. The format is deliberately simple: welcome remarks from the co-hosts, followed by open networking and conversation. The focus is entirely on the quality of the people in the room and the connections that form between them. Attendance is by invitation and limited to members of the extended Harvard community and select guests. The guest list includes senior alumni leaders across business, government, finance, and science, as well as current faculty and administrators from the university. In past years, demand has consistently exceeded capacity, with the organizers aiming to keep the event intimate. The reception has been hosted at prominent venues in Davos, and the organizers work with sponsors to provide the setting, food and beverage, and branding that reflect Harvard’s role in the broader WEF community. What came through clearly is that the reception is not just an alumni social event. It serves as the primary coordination point for Harvard’s presence at the forum, bringing together people from across schools, industries, and geographies who share an institutional connection but might never otherwise meet during a chaotic week. For many attendees, the Harvard reception is the one event they make sure to attend every year. Zameer put it well: “For years, I had the privilege of creating engagement rings and other meaningful pieces for HBS classmates and alumni. When I got to Davos, I began to recognize many of those same individuals, not just as former clients, but as leaders of organizations, teams, and even countries. It was a striking and humbling moment that showed me the power of the HBS community in a very real way, and it opened doors into an environment that is typically quite closed and difficult to access.” Getting involved Zameer and Joe are already organizing the 2027 Harvard reception, and for the first time, they are looking to involve current HBS students in the planning and coordination. This is an open invitation to anyone in the HBS community. Whether you want to attend Davos, help organize the reception, contribute to outreach and sponsorship efforts, or simply learn more about how the World Economic Forum works, they want to hear from you. The reception is one of the few places where current students can plug directly into the most senior layer of the Harvard alumni network on a global stage. It is a real opportunity, and it is available to you right now. If you are interested, reach out to me at abedir@mba2026.hbs.edu, and I will connect you directly with the organizers. Adham Bedir (MBA ’26) is an entrepreneur. Prior to HBS, he worked in investment banking at J.P. Morgan and private equity at DPI in London. He is originally from Egypt.

Probably more often—because men have biological clocks, too For all the talk of reproduction, the burden of foresight still lands, reflexively, on women. At Harvard Business School, egg freezing and the specter of female fertility hover over panels, career-planning sessions, and the gaps between classes. Sperm, by contrast, floats free of scrutiny, buoyed by a persistent cultural myth: that male fertility is durable, renewable, and effectively infinite. The men at HBS inhabit a different reproductive universe from the women I wrote about in my previous article. Before they arrived on campus, only eight and a half percent had ever given their sperm health any real consideration. Seventy-eight percent have never once discussed it with a friend. This data is a portrait of the quiet luxury of never having been taught to worry. *** Although I do not want to stoke panic in the male population, men need to be thinking about their fertility and health too. Consider the numbers. Among couples experiencing infertility—roughly one in eight, by current estimates—male factors now contribute in up to half of cases, according to a 2025 National Geographic feature. Men are solely responsible for infertility twenty percent of the time and are a contributing factor in another thirty to forty percent of cases. The old clinical shorthand, infertility as a woman's issue, has been empirically dismantled. Sperm quality declines with age, although more slowly than women's eggs. Concentration and motility tend to decrease, while DNA fragmentation increases. According to research presented at a European fertility conference (cited in National Geographic, November 2025), men over 45 experience significantly higher miscarriage rates and lower birth rates than younger men, even when using young donor eggs to control for female age. Advanced paternal age has also been associated with higher risks of certain neurodevelopmental conditions and some congenital disorders. Sperm is not simply a delivery vehicle for half the genome; it carries epigenetic information, oxidative stress markers, and the accumulated exposures of a lifetime. To speak of male fertility as a binary, present or absent, is to misunderstand its complexity. The case for male attention to fertility is not merely about conception rates. It is also about systemic health. Infertility in men is often an early warning signal for conditions that extend far beyond the reproductive tract. Urologists interviewed in the National Geographic piece note that difficulty conceiving can be a presenting symptom of testicular cancer, hypertension, and hormonal disorders. A semen analysis is not only a fertility test; it is, in effect, a general health screen. When a man produces a sample, he is also producing data about his endocrine function, his genetic integrity, and his long-term disease risk. This is not widely understood. It should be. The epidemiological trends add urgency. A 2020 study in European Urology Focus (Lokeshwar et al.) analyzed data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys between 1999 and 2016, encompassing 4,045 adolescent and young adult men. The finding was stark: mean total testosterone levels declined significantly over the study period, and this decline persisted even after controlling for rising body mass index. Testosterone deficiency now has a prevalence of twenty percent among young American males. A global review in Translational Andrology and Urology (2017) places the worldwide prevalence of testosterone deficiency between ten and forty percent, with an abrupt rise in men aged forty-five to fifty and rates reaching as high as eighty percent among those with multiple comorbidities. Something is happening to male reproductive health. The precise causes remain uncertain—environmental endocrine disruptors, microplastics, sedentary behavior, chronic stress, sleep deprivation, or some combination thereof—but the signal is clear enough to warrant attention. The irony is that male fertility is remarkably responsive to intervention. Unlike women, who are born with all their eggs, men produce new sperm continuously. The spermatogenesis cycle takes approximately seventy-two days. As one reproductive endocrinologist told The Cut, "in about half of cases, men can improve their sperm quality through lifestyle changes, often in just a few months." The same physician noted that treating male infertility is often more cost-effective and less invasive than the treatments available to women. Within three months of lifestyle changes—reduced alcohol, smoking cessation, weight management, avoidance of excessive heat—a man can generate an entirely new batch of sperm. This is a full inventory reset. *** Although the men at HBS are not, by their own admission, actively talking or thinking about reproductive health, a further set of survey responses suggests something more complicated than disinterest. Ninety-four percent of the men surveyed at HBS would check their sperm quality if given the option. In addition, ninety-four percent believe they should be mindful of their lifestyle when trying to conceive. And sixty-five percent would consider freezing their sperm if necessary. To appreciate the strangeness of these figures, one must glance at the national landscape. According to data cited by Nasdaq and Progyny, sixty-four percent of American men are so afraid of what a fertility diagnosis might reveal that they simply avoid testing altogether. What we are seeing at HBS, then, is not a population inclined toward rumination or discussion. It is a population primed for action. Dormant, perhaps, but receptive. Silence is more latency than resistance. Data shows that interest in reproductive health tends to spike once the topic is introduced. And the market has noticed. A 2026 STAT News article describes startups pitching at-home semen analysis kits as the "male version of the Pap smear," a framing designed to normalize testing while capitalizing on the same preventive logic long applied to women. The Wall Street Journal article, “ Men Are Obsessed With Their Sperm Health, and Brands Are Cashing In”, has documented the parallel explosion of male fertility supplements—products containing zinc, CoQ10, and selenium, often sold under names that land somewhere between locker-room humor and clinical aspiration. SwimClub, founded by a man who turned to Reddit and Andrew Huberman podcasts after his wife experienced multiple miscarriages, sells a $135 monthly subscription that claims to "start improving all sperm parameters in as little as two weeks" (The Cut, 2025). Bird&Be, Ritual, and Perelel now offer male prenatal packs alongside their women's lines, encouraging couples to optimize together. Companies like Hims have capitalized on male reticence by offering discretion: subscriptions, telehealth consults, tasteful packaging. The model reduces friction, but it also risks flattening a complex issue into a consumable fix. Supplements promise optimization; tests promise clarity. The deeper question—of responsibility, of shared reproductive labor—remains largely unexamined. The information ecosystem is equally crowded. Podcasters like Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan have devoted extensive airtime to the theory that phthalates, pesticides, and microplastics are destroying sperm counts. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has claimed that the average teenage boy today has fifty percent of the sperm count and fifty percent of the testosterone of a sixty-five-year-old man. These claims contain kernels of truth—the epidemiological declines documented in European Urology Focus and Translational Andrology and Urology are real—but they are often stripped of nuance and unfortunately deployed to advance broader cultural arguments about masculinity under siege. As The Cut reported in its December 2025 feature, men are increasingly convinced they are facing a fertility crisis, and they will try just about anything to revive their "fallen soldiers." The same article profiles men who inject themselves with hCG, wear underwear with built-in ice packs, and avoid dishwashing detergent for fear of endocrine disruptors. One man bought an EMF-blocking sticker for his phone, despite the Federal Trade Commission warning that such products are scams. The risk of misinformation is significant. Not every concern is evidence-based. National Geographic confirms that underwear choice does not impact fertility, that testosterone supplementation shuts down natural sperm production, and that most supplements have marginal benefit at best. Yet the market for these products continues to grow, driven by anxiety and amplified by algorithms. A man searching for fertility advice on TikTok will encounter videos recommending that wives throw out their husbands' polyester boxers and replace them with thirty-eight-dollar cotton briefs from brands like EDN, which warns that "typical stretch clothes" contain "blood barrier crossing chemicals that impact fertility and hurt cognition" (The Cut, 2025). The science on microplastics is real and concerning, but the leap from peer-reviewed study to product purchase is often mediated by fear, not evidence. What is striking about the HBS survey data is that it captures a population at the precise moment before that fear translates into action. The ninety-four percent who would test their sperm have not yet tested. The ninety-four percent who believe lifestyle matters have not necessarily changed their lifestyles. The sixty-five percent who would consider freezing their sperm have not made appointments. They are what marketers call a "warm audience": aware, interested, but not yet converted. The startups, podcasters, and supplement brands are all competing for the same conversion. Does that conversion serve men or merely extract from them? As men’s silence on reproductive health is broken, the question remains about what will fill it. *** This is the question that Shailen Doshi (MBA '27) and his co-founder, Lauren Silva Laughlin, are trying to answer. Batch Global—founded by Silva Laughlin in July 2025 and later scaled with Doshi following a January 2026 Harvard seminar—does not sell thirty-eight-dollar briefs with proprietary microplastic shielding. What it sells, or intends to sell, is something rarer in the male wellness space: epistemic hygiene. The company's website describes its mission in language almost aggressively unfussy: to help men understand their fertility and general health through data and interest, not anxiety. The library section (batch.social/library) aims to be "The Wirecutter of Sperm," offering entries on CoQ10 (the evidence is modest), microplastics (concerning, but not yet causal), and the relationship between testosterone and cardiovascular health (strong and underdiscussed). The research is updated regularly and vetted by practicing urologists and scientists. Instead of the usual "optimize or perish" messaging pervasive in the industry, Batch Global’s message is rather: here is what we know, here is what we do not know, and here is what you might reasonably do next. Silva Laughlin's motivation for starting Batch emerged from a personal discovery: she learned that she was herself the product of sperm donation. The revelation led her into an industry she found calcified, opaque, and strangely indifferent to its own inefficiencies. The sperm donorship shortage, she came to understand, is not primarily a medical problem. It is a pricing and coordination problem. Clinics lack the technology to match donors efficiently. Donors lack the information to understand their own health and value. Recipients lack the transparency to make informed choices. Cloaked in the shame associated with male-factor infertility, it is unsurprising that the field has scarcely evolved since its inception. Doshi, for his part, saw something he couldn't unsee: a market with massive demand, almost no supply, zero technology, and pricing that hadn't changed in decades. Batch Global is an attempt to solve all these failures at once, and its business model reflects that ambition. Instead of pressuring men into immediately freezing their sperm when they don’t necessarily need to, Batch Global’s revenue structure relies on optionality. The donor matching platform proposes a quiet rearrangement of power—away from the banks, and towards the donors and the families who seek them. Batch Global takes a fee whenever it makes a match, acting more as a conduit than a broker. However, by design, this business model is not a universal funnel. Many men, after all, will not become donors. For them, the company positions itself as a kind of triage layer, routing users towards fertility clinics when intervention, rather than information, is required. Even its growing library of content is treated not as a marketing appendage but as a core product. Beneath this architecture is the theory that sperm can function as the burgeoning of men taking control of their own health. Donorship, in this view, is less the business than the pretext. Doshi and Silva Laughlin’s goal is to meet men where they are to facilitate actual change. This ethos is readily apparent in Spermaxxing, Batch's more irreverent sibling. The subdomain, spermaxxing.com, is an experiment in lowering the emotional barrier to entry. Where the main site is more educational, Spermaxxing is playful, almost goofy, using humor and gamification to make the case that learning about sperm health need not feel like a trip to the urologist. Still, the underlying message is serious: your body produces a vast amount of data about your health, and most of it is currently going to waste. Rather than being shamed into optimization, sperm, in this framing, is a biomarker, a canary in the coal mine of male health, and a surprisingly engaging entry point to understanding what your body is doing right and wrong. Batch hopes to profit from the reduction of uncertainty. "What we see again and again," Doshi told me, “is that once men understand what the data means, they want to act. But wanting to act and knowing how to act are two different things. You need to close it with an actionable and reasonable next step." The distinction matters because the stakes are not merely commercial. The survey data from HBS suggests a population hungry for direction yet wary of exploitation. These men are not looking for a miracle. They are looking for a map. Men who educate themselves about their fertility are not merely helping themselves. In straight relationships, the default division of reproductive labor has long been lopsided: she tracks, she worries, she undergoes the invasive tests. He provides a sample and waits. But a man who has read the research, who understands that his drinking affects his reproductive health, who knows that a semen analysis can screen for hypertension and testicular cancer is no longer a passive participant. He can say, without being asked, that he will cut back, that he will make an appointment. The load shifts, slightly, toward equilibrium. And in the context of surrogacy or donation, where the process is already mediated by clinics and contracts, a man who has done his own research, is better equipped to support the woman carrying his child. Information, in this sense, is a form of respect. And respect, in the fertility journey, is something women have been owed for a very long time. Batch may fail. Every startup may fail. But the company's premise—that men deserve an accurate map for their health—is, at its core, a democratic one. In a broken marketplace, the most radical offering is clarity. Batch is trying to provide it without condescension, without panic, and, on the Spermaxxing subdomain, with a touch of humor. That, in fact, may be everything. *** There is, of course, a limit to my vantage point. As a woman, I have been trained—by doctors, by media, by society—to think about my fertility as finite. I do not know what it is like to move through the world with the presumption of reproductive abundance only for this illusion to be shattered. I do not know the particular vulnerability of confronting a semen analysis in a culture that binds masculinity to potency. The silence I observed may be less apathy than unease. Still, unease does not alter biology. If we accept that sperm quality declines, that it matters for miscarriage and long-term child health, then the asymmetry becomes harder to defend. Business school teaches its students to conduct due diligence, to interrogate assumptions of infinite growth. Male fertility, too, exists within constraints. Men have biological clocks. They tick differently, and more quietly, but they tick. Rather than an act of self-absorption, to attend to them is a gesture toward equity. A recognition that the work of creating life begins long before conception, and that responsibility, like DNA, is shared. Ruby Liu (MBA ‘27) has lived in every region of the US, but says that she’s from Ohio and Texas. She graduated from UT Austin with a bachelors and masters degree in Accounting. Prior to HBS, she worked in Seattle, WA with several startups, nonprofits, and at Deloitte. Her writing has been featured in several literary journals including BarBar Literary Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Juhea Kim’s now discontinued Peaceful Dumpling. Outside of work, Ruby enjoys reviewing books on Instagram (@rubyrecreads), nature walks, and fun earrings.

Michelle Yu (MBA ‘26) on what political correctness costs the people it was meant to protect My father has worked in finance for as long as I can remember. I grew up overhearing his phone calls, absorbing his stories, and learning early on that the industry had its own register: direct, irreverent, and unbothered by the occasional remark that lands wrong but gets laughed off and forgotten. By the time I entered the workforce, I thought I had a reasonable sense of what professional culture looked like. The workplace I actually found bore little resemblance to my expectations. At most of my jobs prior to HBS, conversations came to me pre-edited and sanded down, and I would often watch my male colleagues recalibrate mid-sentence when I walked into a room, as though my arrival had tripped some invisible wire. I told them I had grown up around this—that I had heard everything before and that my father’s world had prepared me for theirs. It made no difference. As I later realized, what I couldn’t give my colleagues, regardless of anything I said, was a guarantee that I wouldn’t someday take offense, that the joke that resonated today wouldn’t look different in writing tomorrow, that my presence in the room wasn’t a burden they had already been trained to manage. Now, this is not a piece about rolling anything back. The changes in workplace culture over the past decade have been necessary and, in many cases, overdue. The behavior that the #MeToo movement brought to light was systemic, pervasive, and corrosive in ways our society had spent far too long refusing to acknowledge. But overcorrection has its own casualties, and they tend to be more diffuse, more deniable, and far harder to name than the harm that produced them. That is where we have found ourselves today. The numbers should chasten anyone who cares about gender equality. According to a Lean In survey, sixty percent of male managers say they feel uncomfortable participating in job-related activities with women, representing a thirty-two percent year-over-year increase. Senior-level men report being twelve times more likely to hesitate before taking a one-on-one meeting with a junior woman and nine times more likely to hesitate before traveling with a woman for work. Thirty-six percent of male respondents have avoided mentoring or socializing with a woman because of concerns about how it might look. The reasons behind each of these decisions are, no doubt, varied, but their cumulative effect is not: a generation of women navigating professional environments in which the men with the most power to advance their careers have decided that engagement itself is a liability. Mentorship and sponsorship are among the most reliably documented mechanisms by which employees advance, particularly those already navigating environments in which they are underrepresented. The relationships built in closed-door meetings, cross-country business trips, and late-night dinners are the architecture of a career. When those interactions are avoided wholesale, what gets called caution is, in its consequences, indistinguishable from discrimination. A movement that began with the sensible premise that women deserve protection from harassment has yielded a secondary effect in which women are excluded from the informal structures through which power and opportunity actually move. The impulse to err on the side of distance is one I recognize well. When my male colleagues filtered what they said around me, they were trying to be considerate. But consideration that takes the form of withholding rests on the presumption that women require preservation from the ordinary friction of professional life and that the appropriate response is to preemptively remove them from the rooms in which such friction renders something of use. Deference and respect may look similar from a distance, but up close, one of them treats women as colleagues and the other treats them as a category of risk around which to be managed. What is true of the workplace is equally true of our own classrooms at HBS. There is a particular irony in watching this dynamic take hold at a place whose pedagogy was designed specifically to resist it. The case method asks students to commit to an answer, defend it under pressure, and update it when the evidence demands—a sequence that requires, at every stage, a willingness to be wrong in public. What self-censorship cultivates in place of such willingness is a room full of people who have become very good at the first step and increasingly reluctant to brave the rest. Positions are staked out carefully, hedged thoroughly, and abandoned at the first sign of contention—which is to say that the method is being run in reverse, entrenching the uncontested opinions it was devised to challenge. Cancel culture—understood as the excess of accountability rather than accountability itself—exiles difficult conversations from the rooms in which they are supposed to happen. When the cost of saying the “wrong” thing is high enough, candor migrates to smaller and more homogeneous chambers, assembled along lines of affinity and existing social capital. The people outside those rooms, in turn, lose access to the real debate by the same logic as the women excluded from mentorship opportunities and late-night dinners in the workplace. Herein lies an individual calculation as understandable as its workplace counterpart. A student who puts forth an unpopular position puts at risk the cohesion of a section he will inhabit for two years, the professional relationships he is actively establishing, and the reputation he will bear in industries where memories are long and tolerances are short. Every institutional incentive points toward safety, and no single person is necessarily wrong to feel that pull. However, while such choices appear reasonable in isolation, they, in aggregate, deliver an unreasonable result: a room that may satisfy the formal requirements of participation while failing, at a more fundamental level, to constitute deliberation at all. In other words, an education whose value proposition rests on the quality of its discourse cannot selectively excise honesty from the process and remain what it claims to be. Every professional culture was forged by people who were, at some earlier point, in rooms resembling the ones we occupy now. The habits formed at HBS—what to say, what to withhold, which positions are worth defending and which are better left unvoiced—will travel into the organizations we will run, the cultures we will instantiate, the conditions under which other people will work and be heard. A culture fluent in the language of inclusion but organized around the practice of exclusion carries that contradiction forward, with its costs settling, as they always have, on the people least positioned to deflect them. The institutions we inherit were built by people willing to say uncomfortable things to each other. It is worth asking whether the ones we build will be too. Michelle Yu (MBA '26) is originally from Cresskill, New Jersey. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Film and Media Studies and worked for CNBC, NBC News, and CNN prior to HBS, along with projects for HBO, Showtime, Oxygen, and Spectrum. Outside of work, she is a 2x marathon runner, American Songwriting Awards winner, and filmmaker whose work has screened at the Tribeca Film Festival and AMC's Empire Theaters in Times Square.

Why liberal arts education is infrastructure—and why we are rating it wrong A staggering seventy percent of Americans now believe higher education in the U.S. is headed in the wrong direction. Confidence in universities has nearly halved in a decade. Affordability has been the loudest complaint, but it is not the most cited one. In a 2024 Gallup poll, forty-one percent of Americans pointed to ideological concerns, criticizing colleges for being “too liberal,” “indoctrinating” students, and not letting them think for themselves. Another thirty-seven percent pointed to relevance, saying degrees do not teach useful skills. Only twenty-eight percent cited cost. In other words, the perception problem is not primarily a price problem but a purpose one. The deeper issue is that American universities quietly abandoned the product that once made them indispensable: the capacity to produce citizens who are not only confident in their viewpoints but can also think across boundaries, tolerate disagreement, change their minds when presented with compelling evidence, and coordinate with people who see the world differently. That capacity is not a soft skill. It is economic infrastructure. And we have been steadily degrading it as our socioeconomy increasingly needs it. Every time a regulatory negotiation collapses into tribal signaling, every time a consumer brand loses a massive chunk of market over a tweet, every time a leadership team fails to have an honest conversation about strategy because the room has silently sorted itself into ideological camps—those are coordination failures. And coordination failures have price tags that will likely be more pronounced in the new age of AI. Trust is the operating system that makes markets, institutions, and democracies run. When trust erodes, transaction costs rise: contracts get more stringent, regulators get more adversarial, talent pipelines fracture along cultural lines, and deliberation within organizations—the thing that boards, legislatures, and founding teams all depend on—grinds toward paralysis. By deliberation, I mean the capacity of a group of people to weigh competing views, change their minds in response to arguments, and arrive at decisions to which they can collectively commit. That is not the same as everyone agreeing on everything, but it is a basic operating skill of any body—corporate, political, or institutional—that must make hard decisions under uncertainty and with imperfect information. A liberal arts education is one of the few interventions that builds this capacity at scale. Not because reading Thucydides makes you a nicer person but because disciplines like history, philosophy, political science, and literature train a specific set of cognitive muscles: the ability to hold competing frameworks simultaneously, distinguish a strong argument from a loud one, and engage with ideas you find uncomfortable without treating disagreement as betrayal. These are the skills of deliberation. And deliberation is the technology on which democracies and markets run. American universities were not designed as vocational schools. Harvard’s motto is Veritas—“Truth.” The University of Chicago’s is Crescat scientia; vita excolatur—“Let knowledge grow from more to more; and so be human life enriched.” Ohio State's is Disciplina in civitatem—“Education for citizenship.” Similar themes embody virtually all American universities, and none of them point toward financial outcomes or ROI. The founding logic was civic: produce people capable of self-governance, and the economy will follow. For most of the twentieth century, that bet paid off spectacularly. But somewhere along the way, universities and their parent-student constituencies began optimizing for different metrics. Rankings rewarded job placements and salary outcomes over civic outcomes. STEM departments expanded, and the humanities entered a sustained decline: bachelor’s degrees in humanities fields have fallen by almost one-third nationally since 2012. At Harvard, only seven percent of freshmen in 2022 planned to major in the humanities, down from nearly thirty percent in the 1970s. The irony is sharp: even in terms of the narrow terms on which universities now compete, the STEM-only bet does not work particularly well. Census data shows that only twenty-eight percent of STEM graduates actually work in STEM occupations, with the other seventy-two percent relying on the transferable skills—critical thinking, communication, ethical reasoning, adaptability—a liberal education is designed to build. That said, one may ask: if seventy-two percent of STEM graduates are already deploying liberal arts skills in their careers, does that mean formal liberal arts education is unnecessary? Are STEM programs quietly teaching these skills anyway? I don’t think so. What the data reveals, in my view, is a massive inefficiency: we are training people in narrow technical domains, and then the majority of them spend their careers drawing on capabilities their education never deliberately cultivated. They pick up those skills despite their training, not because of it, through life experience; professional necessity; and the slow, expensive school of trial and error. A liberal education does not produce different outcomes by accident. It produces them by design. It’s the difference between a trained sommelier and someone who got good at wine by drinking a lot of it. One got there with fewer hangovers. Meanwhile, the liberal arts programs that survived have developed their own problems. Intellectual pluralism—the whole point of the humanities—has weakened. Campuses that once modeled how to argue well increasingly model how to avoid argument altogether. When the liberal arts stop practicing what they preach, they lose credibility to defend their own existence. The result is a higher education system that produces neither the technical specialists it promises nor the independent-minded citizens it was built to create. Consider the recent free speech climate on elite campuses. The 2024 Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) College Free Speech Rankings survey of more than 55,000 students found that twenty-seven percent consider it acceptable in some circumstances to use violence to stop a campus speech, up from twenty percent the year before. Forty-five percent said it is acceptable to block other students from attending a speech. A quarter said they self-censor more than when they started college. No wonder the public is walking away. Why do I, as an international student, care about American higher education? Sure, America has its problems—every country does. But America has also produced a significant chunk of the innovations on which the modern world depends and, perhaps more importantly, an indispensable share of the culture that has inspired modern aspiration. What is American culture? Many things, but one undeniable theme that keeps the world’s wealthiest and poorest alike flocking to these shores is the independence of thought and the daring to dream. Universities have been the cornerstone of this. More importantly, emerging economies—my home continent of Africa included—under immense pressure to demonstrate immediate economic returns from education, have overwhelmingly embraced a STEM-first model. Humanities and social sciences are being marginalized precisely when the continent needs them most. Africa has the world’s youngest population—an exciting opportunity but also a worrisome risk if the status quo persists. By 2050, one in four humans will be African. The continent is navigating simultaneous transitions—demographic, democratic, technological, and economic—that demand exactly the kind of civic imagination and institutional creativity that narrow technical training cannot provide. This is not a niche view. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum, in Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, has warned that the worldwide retreat from liberal education is producing generations of technically competent graduates who cannot sustain democratic citizenship. Her argument is especially urgent to Africa. The continent’s core development challenge is not a shortage of resources or even ideas but the absence of a coherent worldview—a way of seeing that creates the preconditions for transformation. That worldview does not emerge from engineering curricula. It emerges from rigorous engagement with history, philosophy, culture, and political economy—the disciplines Africa’s universities are currently overlooking. Diagnosis is the easy part. The harder question is what reform looks like in practice. Two potential pathways—one institutional and one financial—strike me as the most tractable place to start. First, the liberal arts need to be reformed before they can be scaled. The critique from the right—which some liberal voices have also raised—is that wokism on campuses, for all it has gotten right, has threatened honest curiosity and discussion. And it did not emerge in a vacuum. It filled the space left behind when the humanities stopped teaching the substantive intellectual traditions—the actual ideas, debates, and frameworks—that give students something to argue about and through. When universities abandoned their role as custodians of a shared intellectual inheritance, identity became the remaining source of meaning and authority. Wokism became the default substitute for the rigorous intellectual tradition that higher education exists to provide. Asking for more of what liberal arts departments currently produce is not the answer. Asking them to rediscover what they once were is. Professor Noah Feldman, who co-chaired Harvard’s Institutional Voice Working Group in 2024, made an interesting argument: universities should stop taking official positions on political matters outside their core function. Harvard accepted it. Chicago has operated under its 1967 Kalven Report along similar lines for decades. Vanderbilt, Stanford, and others are moving in the same direction. The non-obvious insight here is that institutional neutrality is not the opposite of civic formation—it is a precondition for it. When the institution itself takes political stances, students learn to read the room rather than form independent judgment. They learn the approved answer. Neutrality at the institutional level creates the pressure and space for pluralism at the individual level. Second, and more ambitiously, we need to change how ROI is measured. Right now, the federal measurement architecture—the College Scorecard, Gainful Employment rules, and the accreditation standards that gate federal aid—conditions recognition and funding on economic outcomes: median earnings, loan repayment, debt burden. The measurement architecture has become the mechanism by which civic purpose gets squeezed out. You cannot exhort an institution back toward civic formation while its survival depends on optimizing a different metric. The fix is to add civic KPIs to the existing framework: measures of deliberative capacity (can graduates articulate the best version of an opposing view?), civic participation (jury service, public service uptake, voting, local government involvement), pluralism of alumni outcomes (are graduates distributed across the political spectrum or concentrated in narrow bands?), and longitudinal trust and tolerance indicators tracked against cohorts (do graduates trust institutions more or less than when they arrived, and are they more or less willing to engage with people who disagree with them?). Many of these are already measured by the General Social Survey, Pew, and FIRE. The question is whether to make them load-bearing. This is less an expansion of state power than a correction to a measurement system that is currently lopsided. And unusually for a higher education proposal, it has a coherent cross-ideological case: the left should support it because it would stop punishing humanities departments on narrow earnings grounds. The right should support it because it would create accountability for ideological monocultures. A pilot approach—voluntary reporting at a handful of institutions, refined over time, then scaled through accreditation and funding—is the most defensible path. The deeper principle is this: universities did not drift toward narrow economic optimization because administrators decided they hated civics. They drifted because rankings, funding flows, parent expectations, and political pressure all pointed toward earnings. Fix the metrics and you create the incentive structure for the reform. In business school, we are trained to see misallocations of capital and correct them. This is one of them. The world’s education systems are massively underinvesting in the cognitive infrastructure that makes coordination, trust, and adaptive leadership possible—and overinvesting in narrow specialization that depreciates faster than ever. The question for us is not whether liberal arts education matters. It is whether we want to lead in a world where every disagreement becomes a culture war, or help rebuild the skills of deliberation that make disagreement productive. The fix is not nostalgia for some golden age of the humanities. It is recognizing that liberal education is infrastructure—as critical to a functioning society as roads, courts, or broadband—and investing accordingly. When we measure education ROI only by starting salary, we miss the returns that actually compound: lower friction in collective decision-making, higher institutional trust, and the next generation of leaders who can make disagreement productive rather than destructive. Joris Cyizere (MBA ‘26) grew up in Kigali, Rwanda. He holds a BS in Industrial Engineering from Northwestern University. Prior to HBS, Joris worked in technology consulting at PwC and as a Business Analyst at McKinsey in Chicago and Nairobi before joining the World Economic Forum's Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Kigali, where he advised the Rwandan government on emerging technology strategy and policy.

How Weverse is redefining fan engagement According to Goldman Sachs, one in five music listeners in the US is considered a “superfan” of at least one artist. These superfans are estimated to add $6.6B to the music industry’s revenues by 2035, which represents a 21% uplift to paid streaming revenues. Compared to average music fans, superfans spend more on live entertainment, merch and experiences. Their importance, however, surpasses mere economic value. Superfans often act as organic ambassadors, creating content and community for artists and brands in an engaging and authentic way, while also shaping and driving key cultural trends. Superfans can be found across a variety of industries and content formats. However, no one does superfandom better than K-pop. K-pop superfans are passionate supporters who buy merchandise in bulk, continuously stream new singles, and travel long distances for the opportunity to see their favorite artist in person. However, what makes K-pop unique is not the style of music itself, but rather the innate focus on developing superfans who facilitate community, loyalty, and cultural movements that transcend borders and generations. Globally, superfans, as well as casual fans, have access to more content these days than ever - more music, more videos, more offline events, and more ways to consume. Historically, fans have consumed content across a variety of platforms: TikTok for short form videos, YouTube for full vlogs, Twitch for livestreams, and Instagram for photos. Each platform hosts its own unique community, with separate sets of norms and behaviors. This fragments what could be a single, cohesive relationship between artist and fan, and limits artists from having full insight into their fan ecosystem. Weverse is a social media app pioneered by HYBE, the music company behind acts such as BTS and Katseye, that has emerged as a central hub for superfans. On Weverse, fans can tune into their favorite artist’s livestream, buy merch from their merch store, scroll a feed of posts from fellow fans or even the artist, or even participate in a listening party together. Not only does this benefit fans, it allows artists to own more of their fan ecosystem and access richer data on their community. Weverse was recently named one of Fast Company’s Most Innovative Companies of 2026, a recognition of its commitment to authentic and comprehensive fan engagement. Weverse President Joon Choi, in a visit to HBS, emphasized that the app's expansive offerings are the byproduct of many years of studying the fan’s needs. Choi expressed that the goal has always been to understand the fandom experience, learn about fans' pain points, and identify how Weverse can provide solutions. So what can businesses across industries learn from a company that turned fandom into a growth strategy? Community as a business model From its founding, Weverse’s goal has always been to facilitate community first and let revenue follow, operating on the belief that the two are not in tension. “A community that provides a genuine sense of belonging and one that generates revenue are not necessarily in a trade-off situation,” Choi stated. With intentional design, fans can get the experience they want, while naturally contributing to the sustainable growth of artists, labels, and the platform itself. For any company building a consumer community, that framing is important to keep at the forefront of strategy. Fans and consumers will spend generously on platforms they trust within communities they feel committed to. With trust built, fans don’t feel monetized; they feel like they’re investing in something they love, within a community that values them. Start narrow and expand intentionally Weverse didn’t launch with a grand vision to be a one-stop “super app” for fandom. It started by selling merch, described by Choi as the lowest hanging fruit, and added community features only after recognizing that merch alone did not best serve the fan community. Livestreaming, listening parties, and virtual queues for purchasing merch were some of the features Weverse launched after identifying pain points within the fan community. “Make it sharp, pick your lane, focus on it, and expand from there” was the advice Choi shared. IP as a Moat When asked what traditional entertainment companies could learn from Weverse, Choi expressed that the distinction is in their approach to IP. Traditional music labels who think of themselves as purely music distributors will optimize for streams and catalog size. Entertainment and media companies who understand the importance of IP will invest in story, identity, and emotional connection to consumers. This is something K-pop has gotten right for years. The elaborate lore, fandom names, lightstick designs, fanchants, and more all add to the narrative surrounding these artists. They give fans something to belong to, not just music to listen to. Weverse’s role is to be a home for that feeling. What’s Next for Weverse As for where Weverse goes from here, its roadmap extends well beyond music. Superfans exist across every corner of culture - across sports, film, gaming, consumer brands - and most of them still lack a comprehensive platform that truly understands their needs. While K-pop was the initial proving ground for Weverse, the platform has already begun expanding into new verticals. The sky is the limit when it comes to which communities it will serve next. In an era where attention is fragmented and brand loyalty is increasingly hard to earn, superfans remain one of the few audiences that don’t need to be chased, they just need a place to belong. Zoe Willis (MBA '26) grew up in Lacey, Washington. She holds a Bachelor's in Business Administration from the University of Southern California. Before HBS, she worked at Twitch, where she led efforts to grow the platform's music ecosystem.

The case of Smiljan Radić, Eduardo Castillo, Alejandro Aravena, and Chile An Unexpected Journey to South America When I was 23, I was studying architecture in Lisbon. At the time, the standard path for final-year students was to spend a year abroad. The coveted destinations were overwhelmingly European—mostly Switzerland and Italy—which made perfect sense. Those countries sat at the center of the architectural discussion in Europe and the canon we had inherited. But I was not especially excited by any of the usual options. At the time, I had begun to feel that the European architectural conversation, for all its sophistication, was becoming a bit too inward-looking. On the other hand, I was becoming curious about Chile. Part of that curiosity came from a recent issue of El Croquis, one of architecture’s great publications, which had recently featured a Chilean architect with the unlikely name of Smiljan Radić. He was still a lesser-known figure by European standards. Around the same time, another Chilean architect, Alejandro Aravena, had won the Pritzker Prize, architecture’s highest honor. Back then, my classmates were not particularly interested in Chilean architecture. Most had never heard of Smiljan, and what they knew of Alejandro did not strike them as especially compelling. I kept asking questions anyway. Eventually, I discovered that my school had created, in the previous year, an exchange with the very place where these architects had studied and now taught: the Lo Contador campus of the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago. I went to the exchange program’s office and asked them to open spots again for my year. They did. Suddenly, they increased it to two slots instead of one, and just like that, my good friend Marta and I—both young, curious, and probably a little naive—were flying together across the Atlantic to South America. Finding a new world Once in Santiago, Marta and I enrolled in a studio course taught by Eduardo Castillo. Eduardo had worked for years with Smiljan in his small office. In the first week of the course, I also met two people who would change my life: Benja, then an architecture student and relentless organizer of art exhibitions, and Nico, whom Eduardo paired with me for the entire semester because, in his view, we “saw architecture in a similar way.” That decision alone to pair us together would have been enough for me to remain grateful to Eduardo for the rest of my life. Eduardo taught architecture in a way I had never encountered before. For an entire semester, he made us build large models out of brick and paper, and nothing else. He positioned himself as an anti-conceptualist—not against ideas, but against the kind of architecture that begins with an abstract concept and then forces reality to obey it. Suspicious of overly polished digital form-making, he believed instead in what he called an operación: an operational model. You start with a concrete ambition and a set of real constraints, often tied to construction, and you test possibilities in physical form until a stable solution emerges. And the process is not hidden. It is visible in the object itself. Seen from a distance, it is not so different from the logic of building a business. Some founders do not begin with a perfectly conceived solution. They begin with constraints, build quick prototypes, test, everything falls apart, adjust, and only overtime arrives at something stable and scalable. Eduardo’s lesson was that true insight does not arrive through the brilliance of an abstract idea, but through the discipline of the process. This was radically different from the mainstream architectural conversation in Europe, where there was, at the time, a growing emphasis on spatial abstraction and the invention of new formal rules. And yet Eduardo was no anti-intellectual. He was simply obsessed, as the son of a carpenter and a master craftsman, with the idea that architecture had to earn its form through a process of contact with reality. Connecting the puzzle I remember my surprise when, for our final review, Eduardo invited Alejandro Aravena to be a critic to our course’s final review session. To an untrained eye, the two might have seemed worlds apart. Eduardo was rougher, more material, more suspicious of grand rhetoric. Alejandro, by then an established international figure, a former professor at Harvard GSD, was already associated with social housing, public-interest design, and an influential body of theory. Alejandro has an extensive and evolving body of both built architecture and theory, hard to simplify in just a few sentences. But today, I would highlight one of his greatest strengths, in my view: his focus on synthesis. He understands that the more complex the problem, the greater the need for clarity, and that clarity needs to be fully informed by actual priorities. In his social housing projects, he did not romanticize poverty or hide behind architectural language. He involved communities, many of whom had never lived in a formal house before, and identified the real constraints—budget, density, family needs, expandability—and worked with the people who would actually live in those homes. The result was not an idealized complete solution, but an incremental one: “half-houses,” a framework that delivered what families needed most immediately and allowed them to add the rest over time. He often told the story that he was surprised when, asked to choose between bathtubs or hot water, the people in those communities would choose bathtubs: “They wouldn't have the money to buy the gas to make the water heater work. The bathtub, however, could be used from day one because there's a subsidy for water. This is something that from the comfortable position of a middle-class person, you may never have imagined. You take for granted that you can pay the bill for the heating.” That, too, is a good case study for future managers. We often tell ourselves that we are customer-centric while relying on our past experiences, but Alejandro—a master design thinker—reminds us that there is a journey involved in gaining a deep understanding of a person’s exact priorities and whole life cycle: the “insight,” as it is usually called here at HBS. Architecture can make those abstractions concrete, as Alejandro’s work shows that innovation is often not about doing more, but about identifying what matters most, delivering that with precision, and leaving space for growth. It was Benja who helped me clearly make the connection between Eduardo and Alejandro, introducing me to the work of Teodoro Fernández—an essential figure in Chilean architecture. “Teo,” a shared reference point for both Eduardo and Alejandro (and for most architects in Santiago, including Smiljan), saw architecture as the mediator and problem-solver between the environment (“territorio, topografía y geografía”) and urban geometry. I realized that Eduardo and Alejandro, who respected each other, were both trying to solve real problems in architecture. They were experimenting in distinct registers, but both were grounded in reality rather than formality. And sometime during that same year, I also met Smiljan. Why talk about Smiljan, Why Now So why begin with such a long introduction? Because without that personal connection, it might seem arbitrary for a Portuguese student at Harvard Business School (HBS) to write about a Chilean architect. More importantly, I want to talk to you about Smiljan, and doing so without first sketching the world around him would reduce him to the kind of cultural reference one encounters on any generic architecture publication. Why write about Smiljan now? Because back then, Marta, Benja, Nico, and I were convinced that he would eventually win the Pritzker Prize, even when he still felt like an underground figure. This year, he did, and with that he became a mainstream figure in the current architectural discussion. And there is much we can learn from Smiljan, just as there is from Eduardo, Alejandro and Teo. So, in Smiljan’s case, I would emphasize three connected ideas. Entering Smiljan’s world: The first lesson is the importance of an Imaginarium. To understand Smiljan, you have to understand what he calls a kind of bestiary: a world of images, creatures, materials, memories, and associations that live somewhere between the personal and the collective. His architecture draws from a deeply Chilean imaginative tradition—the poetry of Pablo Neruda, the territorial landscape of the Chiloé Islands, and the cultural roots of Mapuche communities. He brought again into the architectural discussion this idea that themes and feelings that live in our personal or communal imagination and memory can be used as fuel to resolve architectural questions and deeply resonate with anyone, creating a sense of culture or shared belief. Just as Gaudí did in the past. That matters well beyond architecture. The most interesting business leaders are rarely the ones who respond only to what already exists; rather, they tend to sense what is already latent in collective ideas and memory and combine it with something that is still missing. Innovation, in that sense, is not creation from nothing, but the bringing together of different or unclear realities. Think of Cirque du Soleil bringing together the circus and the theater to invent a new cultural category, or Airbnb joining the intimacy of the home with the infrastructure of hospitality to make people imagine travel differently, or even the initial ChatGPT that united the simplicity of chat conversation with the information-seeking power of a search engine. The point is not the business model alone. The point is that these ventures assembled fragments of familiar worlds into a new shared possibility. That is much closer to Smiljan’s territory. And that leads to the second lesson: what inhabits Smiljan’s Imaginarium is, above all, fragility. His imagination is not drawn to perfect systems, heroic permanence, or seamless control. It is drawn to the improbable, the provisional, the lightweight, the exposed. Chile’s context helps explain why. It is a country in part shaped by scarcity and natural disasters. If you walk through Chile, you see fragile structures everywhere: improvised roofs, self-built shelters on the brink of collapse, temporary roadside paths, light interventions that do not dominate the land, but appear from its own materials. Smiljan does not treat these improbable and naive structures as non-architecture. He treats them as miracles, born out of uncertainty. That is why many of his buildings seem unstable, unfinished, or strangely temporary. They do not try to erase uncertainty. They make room for it. They accept that to build seriously is not always to build with certainty. Sometimes it is to build just precisely enough, honestly enough. For entrepreneurs or business leaders, this feels especially relevant. So much of business culture still rewards the performance of certainty: the polished narrative, the total plan and vision, the appearance of inevitability. Smiljan suggests something more truthful. Real creation often begins in conditions of fragility. You build with limited means, incomplete knowledge, and a vision that is still taking form. You work with what is available, and you remain curious. And from that embrace of fragility comes the third lesson: how to stand in the world. Because Smiljan is so attentive to uncertainty, he is also suspicious of moral grandstanding. He does not behave like a preacher. He does not present architecture as a sermon about virtue. He does not claim that each work carries a definitive message about how the world should be. Instead, he seems to begin from a humbler position: I am an architect, this is the discipline I belong to, and my task is to respond to each problem as sincerely as I can. I found this liberating. Architecture, like management, entrepreneurship, and leadership, is unavoidably entangled with everything: economics, politics, ethics, technology, culture. Because of that, it becomes very easy to confuse seriousness with self-importance. One starts to believe that legitimacy must come from constant moral positioning, or from speaking as if one stood above the messiness of reality. I see Smiljan resist that temptation. He reminds us that engaging with the world does not require claiming moral superiority over it. You still have to act. You still have to choose. You still have to take responsibility. But you can do so without pretending to occupy a pure or elevated place. That, to me, is what makes his work so valuable outside architecture. First, he shows that creation begins in an Imaginarium—an ability to assemble memory, symbols, and latent desires into something newly imaginable. Second, he shows that his own Imaginarium is grounded not in certainty, but in fragility—in structures that survive through delicacy, adaptation, and improbability. And third, he shows that living with fragility can produce not cynicism, but curiosity and humility: a way of working seriously without turning one’s work into a moral performance. And this resonates and connects with Eduardo’s lesson about process, Alejandro’s focus on true synthesis, and Teo’s idea of architecture as mediation. A Final Lesson from Chile After a year, my exchange program ended. I left Chile, and after many other turns in life, today I find myself at HBS. Marta, after working in Switzerland with another Pritzker laureate who in some ways anticipated Smiljan’s sensibility, is now an amazing architect and artist in Lisbon. Benja, once an art curator in the making, is now also a fascinating and ever-surprising artist in Santiago. Nico works in Smiljan’s office and is responsible for some of the projects that are now circulated in architectural publications online and all over the world. A few weeks ago, at around two in the morning, I had just finished reading cases for the next day and was walking toward bed when I saw the notification on my phone: Smiljan had won the 2026 Pritzker Prize. I texted the three of them immediately: “Felicitaciones, weones!” (“Congratulations!”). “Finally,” Marta replied, perfectly capturing my own feelings. Nico and Benja just asked how my young daughter was doing. “She is more important than any architecture discussion,” Nico replied. Muchas gracias, Chile. P.S. Unfortunately, Eduardo Castillo passed away shortly after my exchange year. May this text serve as a modest reminder of how deeply we, his students, still cherish the time we spent with him. João Sátiro Coelho (MBA ‘27) is originally from Faro and Lisbon, Portugal. He graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico with a master’s in architecture. Before HBS, João practiced architecture, then worked at McKinsey & Company in Lisbon, served as a direct advisor to the Mayor Carlos Moedas at Lisbon City Hall, where he focused on several initiatives, including coordinating the city’s partnership with Bloomberg Associates, the consulting arm of Bloomberg Philanthropies.

On consciously crafting our personal narratives On a chatty March jog with a friend from my section, she mentioned something on which I've since been ruminating. Since coming to HBS, she has been doing regular check-ins with her long-term partner, specifically to make sure she is the same person now that she was when she arrived here in the fall. This friend has a steadfast, service-oriented value center—her comments in class often introduce a clear note of morality and empathy to conversations that can, on occasion, be found wanting. And while she came to HBS with a clear view of what she wanted to gain from the experience, she didn’t want it to fundamentally change the person she was. One of the traits I most admire in others, that I find equally aspirational and inspiring, is self-knowledge. There are two parts to this: understanding who one is and wishes to become, and respecting that in one’s behavior and decisions. For example: my paternal grandfather, who passed away in late 2024, was a math teacher in rural India. But math was an important throughline for him, one that transcended his career in many ways. He named his dogs Bindu and Rekha, the Telugu words for “point” and “line.” Until the day he died, his cognitive function was incomparably sharp—because he filled much of his free time doing difficult math problems that he found online. When I was preparing for the GMAT, I gave him some of the hardest math problems I could find, and he was like a kid in a candy store. He knew what he loved, and he pursued it; he knew who he was, and he acted accordingly, even as the world changed and his life changed with it. Interactions like those with my grandfather and my running buddy have had me pondering on the effect that HBS—or whatever milieu in which you find yourself—can have on who you are. If, as Jim Rohn has argued for years, you are the average of the five people with whom you spend the most time, what happens when you arrive on campus and that composition is fundamentally altered? Of course, it is appreciably more altered for some than for others. Depending on the industry and geography you are coming from, you may have transplanted yourself into the student life but broadly retained your social and professional network. Maybe the group with whom you spend the most time has actually not changed very much. For some, like me, that is far from true. As a software engineer in Seattle, phrases like “venture capital” and “entrepreneurship through acquisition” were decidedly not part of my vocabulary. Now that I’m here, I can definitively say that this group—the five people with whom I spend the most time—has changed, and has changed me. I love the friends and family I’ve known for years, who I hope remain in my life forever, but I feel challenged in different ways here, exposed to new learnings and avenues of exploration I would never have otherwise known existed. I have a deep-seated appreciation for the great diversity of backgrounds and perspectives in my section. I'm awed by classmates from tech and finance, whose grasp of concepts both quantitative and qualitative is impressive and deep. I've so loved the breadth of emotions my classmates have inspired with their MyTakes. But when I think about intentionally curating my milieu, the five or so people with whom I spend the most time, one question stands out to me: should I ensure that one of these people is me? If we don’t want the world around us to dictate who we become, then we should be making ourselves our closest confidantes. We all apply to HBS with some idea of who we want to be when we leave. We channeled our inner dreamer to craft admissions essays and interview storylines, weaving together our past experiences to prove that we can become the people we aspire to be. But when we actually get here, it’s easy to fall out of touch with that vision: whether that be in how we want to allocate our time, the people we want to get to know, or the job title or industry we are seeking to pursue. For example, I knew that I wanted to try working in early stage clean energy security and resilience while at HBS. But seeing everyone around me sprinting to find a summer internship, I was certainly tempted to apply to roles that were well outside my zone of interest. A quick check-in with the person I was when I got here reminded me to redirect my focus. Recently, I sat down and created a note on my phone titled “Who am I, and who do I want to be?” In the note, I wrote down the key tenets that I hold to be most true about myself at this moment. I want to return to this note periodically–open to changes, but using it as a grounding force. It's similar to looking back at my younger self, and hoping that she’d be proud of who I am now. I'm coming to realize that just like we care about the people with whom we surround ourselves, we should care about making sure that one of those people—us—is fulfilled, encouraged, and staying true to who we are. A couple of years ago, I read a Haruki Murakami book called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. He says something in it that I reflect on quite a bit: “I'm often asked what I think about as I run.... I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I'm running? I don't have a clue.” By his own reporting, Murakami runs nearly every day. That time is his to spend with himself, no agenda, no deadline, no music playing in his ears, no direction. He runs “in [his] own cozy homemade void, [his] own nostalgic silence.” And sometimes, in the silence, important thoughts come to the fore; ideas that we may have been pushing aside, not acknowledging in the pursuit of more, better, sooner. My argument is that yes, the people around you matter, and quite a bit, but a relationship we cannot leave by the wayside is the one we have with ourselves. Maybe we should all find our equivalent of Murakami’s daily run, or my friend’s periodic check-ins, or my new iPhone note. Because HBS is a great place to meet people that both inspire and challenge us, but we all came in with our own compasses and motivations. If we are the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time, we should ensure that one of those people is us. Keerthi Medicherla (MBA ’27) is originally from McLean, Virginia. She graduated from the University of Virginia with a double major in Computer Science and Global Studies in 2022. Prior to HBS, Keerthi worked as a software engineer at JPMorganChase in Seattle, WA.

How Luminate is building the data infrastructure for the future of entertainment Luminate sits at the center of some of the entertainment industry’s most important questions: what should be measured, how it should be measured, and what happens when the old metrics stop being enough. In this conversation, Luminate CEO, Rob Jonas, reflects on the company’s infrastructure overhaul, its expansion into other entertainment verticals, the rise of AI-generated music, and why the next phase of growth may come from helping the industry move from descriptive analytics to predictive—and eventually prescriptive—insights. For readers who may not know Luminate well, what does the company do? Jonas: Luminate is a data and analytics business focused entirely on the music and entertainment industry. There are data companies that work across every sector you can imagine—aviation, produce, finance—and we do the same thing but for music and entertainment. In music specifically, we are the largest or most established company of our kind, built over many years in different forms. One of your biggest strategic moves has been modernizing Luminate’s infrastructure. Why was that necessary? Jonas: The short answer is that the technology we had bought to create what is now Luminate was old and no longer fit for purpose. It was nearly ten years old when we started looking at it, and even then it wasn’t fully cloud-based: it was a mix of on-prem and cloud, which just wasn’t designed for where we needed to go. We started the migration in 2022, and it took more than two-and-a-half years to complete. The reason is that a data company like ours is so deeply integrated into customer systems. We couldn’t just shut one thing down and build another from scratch. We had to run both systems in parallel for a long time, which was expensive and complicated, but it let us build the system we wanted for the next decade. The timing turned out to be critical. We didn’t know when we started just how quickly AI would become central to the industry. If we had stayed on the old system, we would not have been able to take advantage of these new tools. The new infrastructure is designed to do exactly that. With that infrastructure now in place, what new phase of growth does it unlock for Luminate? Jonas: AI is the big tailwind. For the last four or five years, we’ve been very good at counting and presenting things accurately, which matters a lot. But customers increasingly want us to predict things. That means moving from descriptive analytics to predictive analytics, and then to prescriptive analytics. That difference is important. Predictive is “we think this is going to happen.” Prescriptive is “we think this is going to happen, and this is what you need to do about it right now.” That’s a big shift for our business and for our customers. I think music will embrace it because the industry is very hungry to understand what it can do to improve performance. Film and TV will probably take a little more time. That kind of prescriptive role depends heavily on trust. How do you think about neutrality and credibility in a business like yours? Jonas: We have to be very careful. In music, we have massive trust with our data partners because we’ve protected those relationships over many years. That trust doesn’t yet exist in film and TV in the same way, but we think it will come. We need to show that we can be just as careful and respectful there as we have been in music. Ownership structure matters, too. If we were heavily owned by the majors or by DSPs, that would raise very different questions about our role in the industry. Our structure is relatively neutral. We do have one shareholder with a large media and advertising portfolio, and we work closely with sister companies there, but so far that has been positive. AI-generated music is raising major questions about charts and measurement. Should charts reflect only consumer behavior or also how the music was made? Jonas: This debate is getting louder every week. Last year, I kept asking people two questions: when do you think an AI artist will be number one on the Hot 100, and do you care? People had very different answers. Some thought it would happen within months. Some said never. But most agreed it was coming sooner rather than later. The answer to the first question really depends on what counts as an AI artist. I think the closest definition is probably something like Xania Monet, where there is a human behind the creation, but the human is using tools to create music from scratch. The second question gets to the heart of whether it should be allowed. One view is that AI music should never count because it is not “real” music. Another view, which I think is compelling, is that music is not how it is made; it is how it makes you feel. If it creates the same emotional response in listeners as organic music, then it should be allowed to participate in the charts. The problem is that more and more of this music is being created by machines and listened to by machines. That’s a really big problem because it removes economics from the royalty pool, so the debate is nuanced. It comes down to whether the music creates a genuine human response, whether it respects intellectual property, and whether the audience activity around it is real. How will the rise of AI-generated music strain the industry’s already fragile metadata and rights infrastructure? Jonas: Metadata in music is already in bad shape. There are accuracy problems, there are huge gaps, and it was not designed for what is coming next. We’re trying to tackle the AI question from two angles. First is whether we can identify AI artists. I think self-reporting is going to be problematic. Some DSPs are going down that route, but I think someone, or multiple parties, must determine what is and isn’t an AI artist. That’s not easy, but it’s relatively solvable. The clues often start in the metadata because the metadata coming from an AI artist or AI track is very different from that of an organic artist or track. From there, you can build models and heuristics. The second bigger problem is attribution. If lyrics or recordings are used in an unauthorized way inside an AI-generated track, how do you attribute that properly? No one really has a great solution for that yet, but someone has to solve it because it affects royalties, market share, and the economics of the whole industry. How do you keep legacy metrics useful while incorporating new forms of activity like short-form video or AI-driven creation? Jonas: We’ve historically dealt with this by creating equivalencies across different types of activity and translating multiple forms of engagement into a common framework. I still think that approach makes sense, but it’s getting more complex. Short-form video is a good example. It’s already a powerful engine for music discovery, but it’s a very different kind of activity from streaming. You’re measuring creates, likes, and shares rather than stream counts. What matters is understanding how those behaviors drive downstream activity on platforms like Spotify or Apple Music. Once you can do that, you can start to build them into the framework in a way that makes sense. I think AI will introduce another layer of complexity because it will create new modes of both consumption and creation. But the underlying challenge is the same: how do you incorporate new forms of activity without losing the ability to compare them meaningfully? We operate at the intersection of growth and disruption, and as long as both remain manageable, there’s a lot of value to create. How do you decide when to act and when to wait, especially in a fast-moving area like AI? Jonas: We have a bias toward action. Sometimes that puts us in mild tension with customers or partners because we tend to move quickly. But we also try to create room for experimentation. We have not mandated that everyone in the company use these tools. Instead, we give teams a framework: here are the tools, try them if you want, and if you do not, that is fine too. The idea is to reward experimentation without making it feel compulsory. That approach has worked well. The early adopters test things [and] tell their colleagues, and momentum builds. What has surprised me most is just how fast AI is moving. I have been in technology for a long time, and I have never seen anything move this quickly. Luminate has expanded internationally while also moving into film, TV, and gaming. How do you balance those priorities? Jonas: The reason we can do both is that they have different objectives. Five years ago, our music business was mostly focused on the U.S. and Canada. We made an early decision to expand internationally, and now we’re in more than sixty countries. That matters because customers who work globally want a common data model everywhere they operate. If they want to understand how Taylor Swift performs in Japan, the UK, and the U.S., they want the same framework across markets. The Tencent deal is particularly interesting for a different reason. Chinese music companies are looking at what happened with K-pop and J-pop, where artists built international audiences through partnerships and better visibility into overseas markets. We think C-pop is going to follow a similar path, and data will help tell that story. On the film and TV side, it’s a completely different challenge. Music is incredibly transparent. If a recording has been around for thirty years, we can understand how it’s performed for thirty years. On the film and TV side, that kind of data simply doesn’t exist in the same way. A few years ago, I sat down with a production company after they had launched a major show on Hulu, and I asked how it was performing. Their answer was “we have no idea.” That contrast is striking. We think that lack of transparency is a major problem, and we’re trying to solve it. As Luminate expands further into entertainment, what would make you say the company has truly become entertainment-wide? Jonas: At the highest level, the goal is to make our film and TV business as important to our customers as our music business is today. Gaming belongs in that ambition, too. We want to play a central role in music, then have the same role in film and TV, and eventually in gaming. We also want our non-U.S. business to look as strong and relevant as our U.S. business. If we can do that across music, film, TV, gaming, and global markets, then we’ll have built something truly comprehensive. As you look ahead, what are your biggest priorities and what keeps you up at night? Jonas: We’ve just finished a long technology project, so in some ways it feels like we’ve finally reached a starting point. Now we have the infrastructure to build on top of. There are a few priorities. On the music side, we’ve been very strong in recorded music, and after acquiring the publishing side a couple of years ago, we’re now building more of a publisher-centric offering. Linking those two well is something no one is really doing yet. On the entertainment side, developing our film and TV streaming offering is important, and so is international growth. What keeps me up at night is mostly talent. Can we keep finding the right people, keep them motivated, and keep growing at the pace we want? The good news is that a lot of smart people are naturally drawn to music and entertainment. The harder question is making sure we continue to attract and retain them. AI is another real concern because the pace of change is so fast that it is hard to predict where things are headed next. Alexandra Zaoui (MBA ’27) is originally from London, UK. She graduated from Harvard College with a degree in Applied Mathematics. Prior to HBS, she worked in data and analytics in the music industry.

“What’s your number?” -Jake Moore; “More.” -Bretton James Electing to enroll in Harvard Business School and spend two years surrounded by the world’s best and brightest is a no-brainer. You listen to a wide array of thoughtful perspectives, you’re presented with challenging questions, and you get exposed to wildly contrasting views of the world. What better place to form your judgement on important topics than in such an intellectually rewarding environment? The only problem is that it seems a lot of people leave HBS more lost than they were coming in two years ago. A sizable number of graduates end up switching jobs two years into their first post-MBA gig. So what’s the point of all these deep and thoughtful discussions if they don’t yield career clarity? The curse of optionality makes you feel like you can do everything, but the struggle to pick the right path, however you define “right,” can leave you stranded with no clear sense of direction. A common road most people travel down is joining a big brand name and slipping into one of a handful of post-MBA career molds. Is that really why we came here in the first place? Only to graduate and insert ourselves back into the corporate world? Surely there’s more to life than a prestigious well-paying job. HBS pulls and pushes us in a lot of different directions. Waves and currents of all sizes and intensities carry us to many different places and allow us to see things we’ve never before witnessed—the good, the bad, and the ugly. But beneath all that motion, there’s a quieter question: what’s your true north star? What person do you want to be? What life do you want to live? What choices would you make now to ensure your satisfaction in where you end up tomorrow? I start off this piece with a quote from the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, where Jake Moore asks Bretton James what his number is, and the latter pauses, smirks, and responds: “More.” The reason I chose this short but powerful exchange is because this specific question is brandished a lot within the halls of HBS. People want to know what your number is, and they can’t wait to tell you theres. We even had a case protagonist in our RC LEAD class that walked us through the math of building a multi-million dollar retirement nest egg by simply investing your first year banking bonus and forgetting it for 30 years. He emphasized the importance of identifying your “number” and working toward it. I refuse to run this exercise on myself not because it’s too shallow, which it very much is, but because anchoring yourself to a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow can be very blinding. Deciding where to invest your time and energy next is not an easy task. It’s not supposed to be. However, I do believe that somewhere along the long and winding road of life, almost quietly, success will begin to take shape. A title you once dreamed of. A family you hoped to build. A room that once seemed off limits. A seat at a table you yearn to join. Maybe even all of the above. My only ask to my peers is this: when you figure it out, when you arrive at your castle, be sure not to pull up the drawbridge behind you. The HBS classroom taught us to be inviting. Inviting novel concepts, differing opinions, and constructive criticism. Let's keep it going by inviting others onto our journeys and extending support wherever it’s needed. Keep the door open and share the spotlight. There’s plenty of room on the stage. Mohammad Almejel (MBA ’26) was born and raised in Kuwait. He studied structural engineering at the University of California, San Diego, and earned a master’s degree in civil engineering from Columbia University. Prior to HBS, Mohammad was the Co-Founder and Director of Operations at Fiz, a quick-commerce startup based in Kuwait.

Upon a hill the city kneels, A flock cradled in its arms; Yet lonely lay ashlar Shorn of story. For whom do belfries sing? Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.