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The power of ordinary acts with extraordinary love When I was thirteen years old, I was sent to a quasi-military Catholic boarding school in Ireland. There I was: a young Venezuelan, studying in English for the first time alongside one hundred other students from around the world. Life there was highly structured. Showers lasted five minutes, timed by the clock. We wore suits and ties. We sat through two-hour daily study halls. And if you spoke anything other than English, you accumulated black marks, which could hinder the weekend outings exploring the beautiful Irish countryside. And yet, I loved it. In that environment, I discovered what a great system can do. I learned that high standards, when paired with support and care, can transform people. I thrived there, and I was rewarded for doing so. In many ways, Harvard Business School has reminded me of that school in Ireland. This is also a place with high expectations, strong traditions, and a certain mystique. It is a place with rules—some spoken, some unspoken—that many of us came to enjoy following. But more importantly, it is a place that creates the conditions for growth. Here, top faculty and exceptional classmates come together to make these two years life-changing. Here, we were encouraged to be curious, to ask difficult questions, to challenge assumptions, and to refine our views about business, leadership, and the world. Here, businesses were started and shut down, ideas were tested, failures were survived, and friendships were built. Here, we found both joy and sorrow. And through it all, we were being formed. And while HBS provides an unusual environment for growth, we tend to think about impact and scale. But the habits that make meaningful leadership possible are built in smaller, quieter moments. What does it mean to make a difference in the world and how can we fulfill its ambitious mission? Sometimes we answer that question with grand examples. We tend to look to sports, where teamwork, discipline, and sacrifice teach us something profound about human potential and overcoming challenges. We look to history, where courage under impossible circumstances inspires us. We think of those who hid children during world wars to keep them safe. We think of those who defended the vulnerable, pushed the boundaries of science, protected others, or built artifacts that changed millions of lives. Those examples matter as they represent with great clarity where leaders made a difference in the world. However, sometimes they can also feel distant, almost too grand to belong to ordinary people. I suspect this feeling will be amplified amongst our classmates who, upon graduation, may feel they are not in the right position to effect change. At the same time, a self-inflicted pressure and duty to excel, to lead, and to make a difference worthy of headlines, might generate some uncertainty and angst. That is why it is important to remember something simple: changing the world is not reserved for history books. It is embodied by those doing ordinary acts with extraordinary love. That intensity and zeal to do “the right thing,” notwithstanding the scale, and in accordance with your values is a daily act, the most important act. And that is something we can all do. After all, the compounding of ordinary choices with extraordinary love will make it easier once we are challenged with the really few, consequential choices you will have to make. After two years of getting to know you, I’m convinced we are up for this challenge. I have had the privilege of seeing your ambition, discipline, generosity, intelligence, humor and your care for others up close. I have seen classmates lift each other up, push each other to think better, and hold each other to a higher standard. I have seen classmates open up and share their most vulnerable feelings and stories. That combination of excellence and care is what makes this place unique. You see it in our faculty, classmates, staff, and on this campus, in the everyday interactions that shaped us. So the call today is not just to go out and do something impressive. The call is to believe that in your everyday life, in every decision, in every relationship, in every responsibility you carry, you are already participating in the work of changing the world. This is not naïve optimism and it is certainly not an attempt to embellish reality. It is a recognition that we have been given extraordinary gifts: education, opportunity, community, and the chance to lead. And with those gifts comes responsibility, to try through business, leadership, and service, to leave the world better than we found it. There is no single magic formula to achieve this, but I would argue certain behaviors (i.e., open mindset to test, experiment and learn, adjust and try again; generosity and building with ambition and integrity; and pursuing excellence without losing humanity), coupled with a rigorous system (your mom probably calls them habits), can help shift us in the right direction. This path is not without risks, of course. Fame, power, money, and pleasure can distort our views of what matters and can transform the goal, making us slaves in their pursuit. I hope to have convinced—despite my poor and eclectic writing—at least a few of you that living life this way is worth it. That treating every second as a gift, even in moments of difficulty and uncertainty, is a privilege. And that seeking to change the world is not a distant ambition for a select few. It is an everyday task. It is a calling available to all of us. I trust that each of you will find your way. And in that messy and beautiful journey, I hope you will lift others toward excellence. When in doubt, do not forget the friends of the Class of 2026, with whom you shared two extraordinary years of your life. Alejandro Moreno (MBA ‘26) is from Caracas, Venezuela. He studied Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management at Northeastern University. Prior to HBS he advised PE & corporate clients on M&A transactions at PwC. Alejandro is a leader of the HBS Soccer Club and dreams of bringing change to a democratic Venezuela.

It’s okay to like anime I see you. You, over there. With the fresh haircut and respectable demeanor. You made a great comment in class today, and now you’re greeting sectionmates left and right down Aldrich Hall. You look every bit the polished HBS student and charismatic future leader. I see the real you, too. Twenty years ago, you turned on the TV, and Inuyasha’s feudal fairytale rocked your whole world. Or maybe it was Dragon Ball Z’s buff aliens punching each other in the face. Or Sailor Moon’s magical girls transforming into champions of love and justice. Either way, it sent you into a spiral. You moved onto Naruto, Bleach, and One Piece, your original Big 3 before MBB meant anything to you at all. You debated the moral complexities of Attack on Titan. Skip Beat! made your heart skip a beat. You drew fanart. You read fanfiction. You might have attended an anime convention, or two, or three. You occasionally ran with your arms behind you, like a ninja from the Hidden Leaf Village. But sometime between your adolescence and early adulthood, you learned it was uncool to like anime. Despite the breadth and depth of anime as a storytelling medium, fans were cast as Japan-obsessed “weebs” who rarely showered and bought questionable body pillows. When you started thinking about business school, you read r/MBA posts on the “stigma” surrounding anime at top programs, warning that you should never mention this hobby in your application or on campus. And so, when you got to HBS, you pushed down the part of you that memorized every arc in Chainsaw Man in favor of the part of you that skis and plays tennis and knows what EBITDA stands for. You assimilated into the crowd like the orange goo in Neon Genesis Evangelion (if you know, you know). Meanwhile, Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle came out in 2025 and became the highest-grossing international film in U.S. history. The One Piece live-action adaptation broke records for Netflix. Megan Thee Stallion and Alysa Liu ranked their favorite series on camera. K-Pop — once similarly, unfairly scorned — entered the mainstream. Weebs of HBS, rise up! The wind is at our backs. Our power level is approaching 9,000. Unlike the protagonists of Spy x Family, we can embrace our true selves. And we are not alone! In an anonymized survey of HBS students, twenty out of twenty-five respondents confessed to casual or active engagement with anime. Armed with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards and 2x2 matrices, HBS weebs will run the world! Vicky Liu (MBA ‘26) grew up in Surrey, Canada. She graduated from Yale University with a double major in Political Science and French. Prior to HBS, Vicky worked in technology M&A at Evercore and technology growth equity at Summit Partners.

RC year felt like one of those Homo sapiens diagrams pasted on the walls of middle school science classrooms. At first, we crawled, and then we stumble-walked, and then we ran. Now it's April, and our time as RCs is ending. This year, for me at least, has been one of becoming. Career interrupted, granted the space and time, I worked to begin becoming the things I had been meaning to be—one of which was an entrepreneur. And as I spent my days rushing between startup meetings and my designated red swivel chair in Aldrich 008, I began to repeat the African proverb—it takes a village—eventually altering it to my own, more specific version: when it comes to starting things at HBS, it takes a Section. Launching a product can be a lonely, harrowing ride. But when I look around the classroom now, from my perch in the almost-Skydeck, I see the people who have brought real support and comfort along the way. There's Isabel, who offered up a spontaneous crash course on sales the day before my very first sales call. Because of her, I knew not to get off the phone without securing a follow-up plan. And without her, I don't know if I would've successfully landed that first customer. There's Darren, a former lawyer, who red-lined my first customer contract, leaving me legal wisdom and notes of encouragement in the margins. There's Arshaan—the heart of the Section D entrepreneurs—who organized a weekly check-in for our section starters. And then there are the attendees, celebrating each person's progress, listening attentively to each person's challenges, popping in with recommendations, relatable stories, and connections to helpful resources. And lastly, there is nearly everyone else—thoughtfully answering questions for customer research, checking in often to hear how things are going, cheerleading, fueling continuation through genuine investment in my journey and shared excitement over my wins. One night, a bit shell-shocked after a customer call that pushed the product launch forward two months, I let my feet guide me to the next thing on my calendar: Section D Intramural Dodgeball. While it may seem difficult to convince adults to stick around campus until 8 p.m. for team-based recreational athletics, that's not the case for Section D. We love our intramural sports, showing up for games in droves, often with cheer squads in tow. Our enthusiasm takes us far. Most days, we win by forfeit, as our competitors struggle to field a full team. And so, on this night, I wandered to Shad, nervously picking at my fingers. As we warmed up, I told my section mates about the meeting I'd just had and the tricky timeline I was facing. Together, we brainstormed ways to succeed. I left that night with our team one step closer to the playoffs, and with my pockets full of phone numbers for roommates of section friends’ friends with technical backgrounds. We launched the product on time. So next year, even as we scatter into different classrooms, one thing will continue to hold true: that this is a special village, this section of mine. Kiera Klinsky (MBA ‘27) is a born-and-raised New Yorker and Dartmouth College alum. She is a former BCG consultant and Chief of Staff at a consumer AI startup, currently serving as the MBA Associate for NextView Ventures. Kiera writes about technology, entrepreneurship, and media and entertainment for the Harbus and on her Substack, The Kitchen Fridge. Kiera has spent the year building hiring software through Scouter.

You don’t need to commit to a lifetime—just a chapter My wife, Nicole, and I recently celebrated ten years of getting together for the last time. I know: two questions: “Ten years?” Yes, I do feel old. “Last time?” We had a couple of false starts, mostly because I was being an idiot. The night I met Nicole, I was on a semester abroad. I had a train home in thirty minutes. I went for it anyway. Not strategic—just “now or never.” I liked her immediately. That was the problem. When we got back to the U.S., we dated a bit, but I kept pushing her away. “We’re both about to graduate —our lives are going to change.” “I’m in the army. I don’t want attachments.” “This just won’t work.” I had a reason for everything. Two-and-a-half years later, we were both back in Europe, and we gave it a second chance. Before I get to what Nicole said, I want to talk about why people in our environment have such a hard time with this kind of moment. We’ve all heard repeatedly (especially those who took Crafting Your Life) that picking a life partner is the most important decision we’ll make. As HBS students, we’ve translated that into “optimize accordingly.” It’s a cliché, but it’s what HBS students do: solve for optionality. We hit “maybe” on Partful invites. We want to know who’s in a class before we commit to taking it (shout out Course Buddies). It bleeds into dating. People keep options open, find reasons it won’t work, and hesitate to commit because “what if there’s someone better?” The fear of “not optimal” ends up doing more harm than the actual risk of picking incorrectly. I’m not writing this from a perch of having figured it out. I got lucky. I spent too long overthinking and finding reasons for us not to work, and the piece you’re reading would look very different if Nicole had a little less patience. The Pitch That Worked What changed the second time wasn’t that I was ready. It was that Nicole pitched me on something smaller. I was clear on never wanting kids and was happy to never get married. She wanted both. I wanted to live abroad; she wanted to put down roots. On paper, we were opposites and could have argued about whose vision was right. Instead, she said, “we’re both in Europe right now, doing similar things, living similar lifestyles. Let’s do this chapter together and figure the rest out later.” That was the whole pitch. No thirty-year contract. Not the full venture. Just a round. (I know, only at HBS would someone describe falling in love as “joining for a round”…) Here’s why it landed and why it might land for you. The army moves you every two or three years, so I was already living chapter to chapter because of work. Nicole’s pitch wasn’t asking me to think differently about commitment. It was inviting her into how I already thought. There’s a parallel here that should be obvious to anyone at HBS. CPD tells us—and alumni reinforce it—that as many as one in six of us will leave our first post-MBA job within a year and that most will do so within three years. Different role, different company, different vertical. We will sign offers, convinced we have it figured out and, months later, realize we were wrong about ourselves. We accept this for our careers. We don’t apply it to our partners. We expect ourselves to evaluate another person against a life plan we can’t hold steady for twelve months. If you can’t predict your own trajectory, holding a prospective partner to a standard of certainty about theirs is doubly absurd. Both of you are going to change—and that’s a great thing. The question isn’t whether your current selves match. It’s whether you want to grow into the next chapter together. Building Beats Picking Most of the discourse around this gets the work in the wrong place. We treat selection as the hard part and assume everything after is downhill. It’s the opposite. Picking is one decision. Building is every day after. For us, the building was just showing up a little. Hearing how her day went, telling her about mine. Cooking dinner and doing the dishes. Then the hard stuff came. Family crises, loss, the kind of moments that show you who your partner actually is. We learned we could rely on each other at our lowest. I got it wrong many times. I’d say the wrong thing on the car ride home. But I’d adjust, next time asking, “how did that make you feel?” instead of “why didn’t you just do X?” Nicole was iterating, too. We both became better partners than we were the day before. What I felt at the start was a crush on someone funny, adventurous, and kind with whom I wanted to spend more time. That’s it. Ten years of chapters turned that into something of which I didn’t know I was capable. I didn’t show up to chapter one ready to love anyone. Nicole and I built that together. This is also the answer to the obvious objection: doesn’t “commit to a chapter” just mean “keep an exit ready”? No. Chapters compound. You don’t get the depth of Chapter Two without having done Chapter One. The version of me and Nicole in Chapter Four was only possible because of what we had built in the first through third chapters. The framing lowers the bar to start. It does not lower the bar once you’re in. You don’t need one hundred percent alignment on values. Complementary works—and arguably works better. Nicole and I differ in ways for which, ten years in, I’m grateful. Where I’d push too hard, she pulls back. Where I’d hold off, she’d push forward. We didn’t engineer that. We discovered it by being together long enough for the differences to become useful instead of points of friction. I’m still not a good partner. Neither was Nicole when we started. Neither are you, probably. That’s the point. You’re betting on growth in yourself and in them. You’re the VC, not the acquirer. You’re not buying a finished company. You’re investing in potential and committing to build. The Pre-Seed Diligence So, what do you look for at the start of a chapter? Stop asking whether this person is the perfect match for your life plan. Ask three questions instead. Do I enjoy spending time with them? Is it fun? Am I learning from them? You can’t due-diligence your way to certainty on a pre-seed bet. The information you need doesn’t exist yet. It only gets created by being in the chapter. Bet on the person, knowing and excited that they’ll change (as you will, too). I started this piece by telling you that Nicole and I recently celebrated ten years of getting together for the last time. What I didn’t say is that I almost didn’t make it here. There were moments when the chapter framing could have become an excuse to leave instead of a reason to stay. I stayed because every time I looked at the next chapter, I knew it would be better with her in it. That was the mindset I carried with me until commitment stopped feeling like a risk and became the obvious move. We have a son now, Anders, who didn’t exist in any version of the life plan I was protecting at age twenty-three. Neither did a wedding. Both got built one chapter at a time. Whether you’re leaving in a few weeks or have another year here, the chapter in front of you is enough to which to commit. If you like someone, commit to a chapter. Start building. The rest will follow. Nils Olsen (MBA/MPP ‘26) spent nine years in the army and a decade as Nicole’s backpacking, ski, scuba, and wine-tasting buddy. First dog parents to Olive and now actual parents to Anders, they're betting on the next chapter being the best one yet.

Introduction One day a year, Klarman Hall rivals the hottest clubs in Boston (read: Berryline) in its line of hundreds snaking around campus. As I told Professor Jeffrey Bussgang backstage, students and industry professionals alike come for our iconic Retail & Luxury Goods Conference goodie bags and stay for our esteemed lineup of speakers. On March 6, 2026, we welcomed approximately 400 attendees to Harvard Business School’s campus for a full afternoon of programming: Opening Keynote Ewa Abrams, President of Kering Americas Moderated by Jeffrey Bussgang, Co-Founder of Flybridge Capital Partners & Professor at HBS Beauty Panel: “The Future Face of Beauty” Jade Begeulin & Sabrina Sadeghian, Co-Founders of 4AM Skin Zach Rieken, CEO of Odele Estee Lalonde, Founder of Mirror Water Rooshy Roy, Co-Founder & CEO of AAVRANI Moderated by Yasmin Zeinab, Founder of ABI AMÉ Investing Panel: “The Next Icon: Investing in Luxury & Retail” Brian Thorne, Partner at Silas Capital Nicole Ripka, Partner at Air @ Collab Fund Amanda Amos, Partner at Collab Fund Marissa Lepor, Partner at The Sage Group Moderated by Oliver Trevena, Co-Founder of Caliwater Luxury Panel: “Luxury, Rewritten: Heritage, Disruption, and The Next Generation Consumer” Danielle Guizio, Founder & CEO of GUIZIO Marielle Miller, Founder & CEO of La Complice David Lafitte, CEO of Tecovas Won Lee, Former US CEO of Gentle Monster Ekta Jaisinghani, Director of Client Development at Cartier Moderated by Amy Sturgis, Linea Co. Startup Panel: “From Spark to Scale: Founders Navigating New Frontiers” Kennedy Critchlow & Mary Ralph Lawson, Co-Founders of Daily Drills Ricardo Larroude & Marina Larroude, Co-Founders of Larroude Emily Hikade, Founder & CEO of Petite Plume Sofia Tcherassi, RTW Director at Silvia Tcherassi Moderated by Kiersten Barbara, Co-Founder of Rhea Creative Shopping Journey Panel: “Where Retail Lives: Evolving Channels from Flagship to Feed” Kate Sanner, CEO of BENI Julia O'Mara, Co-Founder & COO of Pickle Estelle Paladjian, Co-Founder of Cake Jen Koen, Head of Marketing & Communications at Daydream AI Angela Dotson, SVP of Client Development & New Markets at FASHIONPHILE Moderated by Melissa Conner, JBC Closing Keynote Winnie Harlow, Supermodel and Co-Founder of Cay Skin Kim Perrell, Co-Founder of Cay Skin Moderated by Anita Elberse, Professor at HBS Key Takeaways Opening Keynote with Ewa Abrams, President of Kering Americas Ewa opened with a window into how Kering, one of the world’s most iconic luxury houses, thinks about innovation. Kering runs an annual Innovation Day and Ewa shared that one winning pitch was a visual merchandising tool that uses AI to improve in-store efficiency and reduce errors. This served as a reminder that in luxury, the most meaningful innovation often happens long before anything hits the runway. The conversation turned to AI and legal questions of intellectual property: Ewa noted that the biggest risk sits on the creation side, as using certain AI tools may generate output with no protectable IP attached. Her message to creatives and designers was clear: stay educated, maintain a human touch, and treat AI as an augmentation to daily workflows. The audience was surprisingly bullish on the future of agentic commerce. When Professor Bussgang cold-called the entire audience on whether they anticipate most of their shopping needs to be handled by an agent within the next two years, over half of the crowd raised their hands. We are, of course, sampling a population that is thoroughly swept up in the AI bubble (remember when VR was going to change the world?), but this sentiment felt significant nonetheless as a real-time data point on how the next generation of consumers are thinking about agentic commerce. Beauty Panel A recurring theme was the belief that founders must build in public. The founders of 4AM Skin articulated something we’re seeing across the HBS founder community, as well: the emergence of a dual founder-influencer identity, where the person building the brand becomes the brand itself. It will be interesting to witness whether this behavior shifts as TikTok becomes increasingly saturated with such founder-creators. On the retail side, DTC remains the most trackable channel. Rooshy Roy made the case plainly that DTC offers valuable insights into a brand’s end consumers. But pitching to retailers is an entirely different sport: shelf space is expensive, the competition is brutal, and for smaller, DTC-native brands, retail may simply not be the right move. Interestingly, one founder called out the phenomenon of performative innovation within beauty, wherein brands release slight reformulations packaged as entirely new products, and expressed the hope that the industry will move towards rewarding long-term development rather than short-term trends. Such trends mentioned include K-Beauty, glass skin, and the impact of GLP-1s on skin elasticity. Investing Panel Though fund sizes and philosophies across our investing panel varied widely, a few threads surfaced throughout. The concept of taste, for one, arose repeatedly. Panelists acknowledged that this is in some ways a tired conversation, but important nonetheless. Nicole Ripka offered a poignant definition for taste as “consistent authenticity”; Brian Thorne called taste “the alpha.” In a world of infinite products, taste is still a scarce and investable resource. The ideas of community and personalization emerged as other significant themes. Speakers pointed to brands like Malbon (golf as a lifestyle) and Bandit (running as an identity) as examples of what community-driven retail looks like in practice, with limited seasonal drops that sell out and intense audience engagement. Marissa Lepor suggested that assessing whether a brand has achieved systematic advantage in its operations is a better indicator of potential success than the “vibes-based” evaluation that characterizes a large portion of early stage retail investing. Given how niche consumer bases have become and how targeted marketing is today, operational edges matter more than ever. Luxury Panel Luxury is more than just a luxurious product. Ekta Jaisinghani shared a poignant anecdote of a customer who purchased jewelry from Cartier and, in the conversation that followed, revealed that she was buying it for her biological mother who she was meeting for the first time. This served as a reminder that luxury purchases often carry stories that are meaningful and priceless. Won Lee brought a perspective that felt distinct, given his former role as CEO of Gentle Monster in the US. He surfaced the idea of awe as it relates to luxury: his goal at Gentle Monster was not to sell sunglasses, but to create something so unexpected that people can’t look away. Personally, as a consumer, I’ve always experienced their stores as art museums where sunglasses happen to be sold. Won’s conviction is that Asia, long one of the most powerful luxury markets in the world, is also where the most interesting experiential retail innovation is happening. Marielle Miller, who founded La Complice directly after graduating from HBS, offered something more personal to the aspiring founders in the room: the impulse to keep collecting gold stars can lead us to a ladder that goes nowhere, and sometimes the most important part of founding is to simply begin. Startup Panel Both Marina Larroude and Sofia Tcherassi shared customer-first operational insights. Larroude in particular realized that customers want a comfortable shoe they can wear throughout the summer, so they ran their entire Spring 2025 collection on preorder. This was possible primarily because they are vertically integrated with their own factories in Brazil and an MOQ (minimum order quantity) of one. Several startups noted a willingness to invest in brand-building initiatives that may look superfluous in the short-term but help cultivate a brand’s identity. Emily Hikade noted that Petite Plume chose a box rather than a poly bag for its packaging, as she believes that every surface a customer touches is part of their experience with a brand. Along a similar vein, Daily Drills regularly interacts with customers in unintuitive yet creative ways, including hosting career development workshops, visiting college campuses, and giving away travel tickets. Shopping Journey Panel In a way, FASHIONPHILE, BENI, and Pickle are all making the same argument: luxury is becoming less linear. Resale is growing faster than the brands themselves and ownership cycles have been replacing one-time purchases. As Angela Dotson asserted, luxury will always be coveted. The question is simply who owns it and when in a garment’s lifecycle. Cake’s Estelle Paladjian focused on the erosion of brand loyalty, arguing that this demands an obsessive focus on making one’s top customers feel heard. Daydream AI is betting on algorithmic discovery, already finding unexpected niches like wedding occasions. The panel broadly predicted that product discovery will shift from search-based to algorithmic, which feels in-line with the opening keynote audience’s sentiment around agentic shopping. Closing Keynote Winnie Harlow and Kim Perrell surfaced two distinct yet equally credible founding stories. Winnie’s origin story stems from her experience living with vitiligo: after a beach photoshoot in the Bahamas left her severely burned as no sunscreen on the market worked for her skin tone without showing up on camera, she decided to build the product she’d always needed. Kim brings a complementary kind of credibility as a serial founder and operator who has built, invested in, and exited multiple companies, including selling her last startup for $235M. When asked what she did the day after closing that exit, Kim said she told her grandmother, who had invested the first $10,000 in her first-ever business. The crowd asked directly about the wave of celebrity-founded brands in relation to Cay Skin. Yes, Winnie is a supermodel. But Cay Skin is genuinely both of theirs, built on real product development and a mission of inclusivity. The celebrity is in service of the brand, not the other way around. The chemistry between the co-founders and their natural eloquence made for an energizing wrap to the conference. We ended the night taking photos in front of the HBS sign. As expected, Winnie knew exactly what to do in front of a camera. Thank You None of this would have happened without our speakers and moderators—thank you. A huge thank you to our sponsors, checkcheck and Dylign, and to the brands that made our goodie bags possible: Daydream, The Outset, Odele, Sidia, De Soi, Swoon, manucurist, JONES ROAD, David, MONDAY, by / rosie jane, BRAVO SIERRA USA, GORGIE, immi, Lo & Sons, and AG1. Thank you to the HBS Operations team, our photographer Evgenia Eliseeva, and to our RLGC Executive Team and Conference Team for making this day happen. Sonal Tyagi (MBA ’26) graduated from Cornell University with a major in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to HBS, she worked in fashion & luxury and digital strategy at Boston Consulting Group. While at business school, Sonal led the Retail & Luxury Goods Conference as Co-Chair and served as Chief of Staff at La Complice, an early stage fashion AI startup.

Three surprising things HBSers think HBS has surprised me in many ways. I’ve been surprised by how one snow day can bring me so much joy and another so much fury, and by how quickly I abandoned my ranch roots to eat lobster, the rat of the sea. Yet no surprise has caused me to stop and think as much as these three: most HBS students think that HBS makes us less ambitious, that we are mostly here because of luck, and that we are not elites. I’m not claiming these answers are wrong. I just think they are incomplete. I’ve struggled with them for two years, so I figured I’d see if my explanations resonate. First: ambition. Countless friends claim that HBS has made them LESS ambitious. From the outside, that would sound absurd. This is Harvard Business School, doesn’t this place teach us to make a difference in the world? But I think what people mean sheds light on something encouraging about HBS. Part of it is that after two years of cases, protagonists, and guest speakers, we start to feel less intimidated by big things. After pretending to make decisions 500 times and being surrounded by smart go-getters, our old ambitions start to feel reasonable. Not easy, exactly, just doable. That feeling can masquerade as reduced ambition, when really it is increased self-belief. It’s not that HBS has shrunk our goals; we have just grown, so our goals now feel more proportional. The second reason might be that HBS does a wonderful job warning us that in 30 years most of us will be successful, but few of us will be happy. That many of us will win the wrong game. With that implicit challenge in mind, we are deciding that we need to invest more in our spouses, pick the right towns, or have a family. That we want less professional success if it comes at too high a cost. That can sound like lower ambition. But being less ambitious is wanting less, and what HBS has done is encourage us to want more. To be more ambitious in life both personally and professionally. So, no, I don’t think HBS has made us less ambitious. I think it has empowered us to seek even more ambitious goals (that now simply feel more reachable) while also keeping track of what those goals are costing us (in relationships and happiness). Second: luck. In RC year, my BGIE professor, Rawi Abdelal, asked our section whether we were at HBS mostly because of hard work or luck. Around five people raised their hands for hard work. At an institution that requires top test scores, experiences, and often years of striving, that answer surprised me. If you probe, most “luck” believers will say something important. That they are here because of their amazing parents, their high school teacher, or because of where they were born. All factors that deeply shaped our lives, all without our direct control, and thus, all luck. That is sensible, but I think it diminishes the work put in. Not only our work, but also the work of those before us. I’m incredibly lucky to have my parents and to be born in America. But for me to be here, for me to be an American, my grandfather, who grew up on the streets of Athens, had to cross an ocean, at 16, by himself, without knowing English. His grit and hard work became my luck. I don’t think my story is unusual in that sense. For any of us to be who or where we are today, it took a lot of hard work. Our luck is downstream of someone else’s sacrifice, discipline, judgment, and courage. Someone else’s hard work is our luck. This is that magical HBS word in action: COMPOUNDING. The compounding of hard work and good decisions by countless people has made all of us extremely lucky. So, yes, we are all lucky. But, it feels too easy to say we are here mostly because of luck. More often, our luck is what other people paid for, which is both humbling, empowering, and demanding. Because that means it’s our turn. It’s our turn for our hard work to become someone else’s luck. Third: elites. This is the one that makes people uncomfortable. Most HBSers don’t consider themselves elites. I understand why. “Elite” is not a good word. It can imply self-importance, unfair resource allocation, and distance. Being an “elite” can easily slip into being “elitist,” which is something none of us want to be. I’ve avoided the word “elite” that often comes with our three letters. I’ve avoided telling my barber where I go to school, and I’ve made sure not to wear a branded polo on the plane. Most of that is just a healthy desire not to be obnoxious. But I’ve avoided the word on the inside too. We each took up a spot at this elite institution, were taught by elite professors, spoken to by elite leaders, and shaped by an elite peer group. And we are about to graduate with a credential that will open doors and boost our credibility (fair, deserved, or not). Whether we own that word or not, we now move through the world with these elite advantages. Being elite is a bad thing, but in other contexts, elite athlete, elite unit, elite performance, it is just a marker of excellence. I think if I bridle a little less at the word and recognize the power it holds, I feel more responsibility to honor our advantages. So maybe the goal is not to claim the noun, but to earn the adjective. In the end, I am so thankful for what HBS has given me. Maybe part of the education was simply learning to be suspicious of some of those easy answers—especially the ones we like to give ourselves. That we are less ambitious. That we are mostly lucky. That we are not elites. Each contains some truth. But none contains the full truth. Tom Kourlis (MBA ‘26) grew up bouncing back and forth between his family’s working sheep and cattle ranch in NW Colorado and school in Denver. He never learned to use his inside voice and is returning to BCG post-HBS.

The case for having kids sooner than you think I have read a surprising number of news headlines that share an increasingly negative sentiment toward the current state of the world. Housing costs, AI taking jobs, climate change, war. All of these are worthy of concern even though humanity has faced versions of these problems before. My biggest concern, however, is around something that feels new: how these sentiments are affecting the decision to bring children into this world. That scares me because I believe here and now is the best time ever to be alive. We humans have yet to find a problem to which we don’t at least have a partial solution. If you were born a mere 200 years ago, you would be without refrigeration, penicillin, and have a forty percent chance of dying before your fifth birthday. So, why are we seeing so much pessimism? Reflecting, I believe our issue is that we fail to see the struggle of generations prior. We will never know a world without rapid access to health care or government assistance programs for the old, young, poor, and sick. Unlike our grandparents, we’ve never had to live under a nuclear standoff balanced on a hair trigger. These achievements were not gifts; they were hard fought. The introduction of Social Security payments in the U.S. dropped the elderly poverty rate in the early 1900s from nearly eighty percent to less than five percent today. We are living longer than ever. We have not had a multi-continent war in eighty years. NASA just successfully tested a mission to stop the world from being destroyed by an asteroid. The world is safer, healthier, and more humane than at any point in human history. To whom do we owe this great fortune? People. People made that happen. And we need more of them. For the economy, for new ideas. If you have more people, you get more Einsteins, more Hoppers, more Jobs, more Van Goghs, more Elons. But what happens if we stop there or slow the pace of bringing people into this world? Most developed nations are already below the 2.1 births required for population replacement. Do we get more medical breakthroughs? Do we solve poverty? Do we get clean fusion energy? Sure, artificial intelligence will accelerate discovery, but what about true breakthroughs? AI has not made that leap yet, and for now, must still be trained on what we know. Here is the question worth asking: would your child have it worse than someone born a century ago? My answer is an unambiguous no. I recognize this decision is much more personal than that. So, here is why I think you should seriously consider starting to have children sooner than you think: Having children is fundamentally a choice about optimism versus pessimism. Perennial optimism is the only trendline we have in history, and there is no reason to think it should not continue. Like starting a business, there is never a perfect time, and you will never feel fully ready. You will have your kids for more years than you won’t have them, and you will always want more. Starting now gives “future you” pride and joy. You will literally live longer, as parenthood extends life expectancy. You can share your hobbies with your kids. It is not that long before they can swim, bike, ski, dance, and do all the things you like to do. The best day of my life (after our wedding, Hayley) was taking my son skiing for the first time and watching him immediately pass out in the car on the way home. Life’s greatest pain is losing a child (Abraham Lincoln reportedly never recovered from losing his son, Willie, to typhoid), a risk that has been dramatically reduced because of our modern medical care. If your parents didn’t have you, you wouldn’t be able to do all the awesome things you’ve gotten to do. Do that for someone else: your kids. Tom Rakus (MBA ‘26) is originally from Pompton Plains, New Jersey. He graduated from Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ with a degree in Business Technology. Prior to HBS he spent a decade in the U.S. Navy as a pilot and congressional liaison and started his career with UBS in New York City. He is married with three children.

Disclaimer: no AI was used in the writing of this article Introduction: Reimagining the Social Network Roommates for two years and now, in our last two months of school, cofounders building an app to stay connected while living on separate coasts. We’ve spent two years in a social experiment, testing how to make connections and then deepen them, and now we’re faced with the task of how to maintain them post-graduation. We’ve accepted that social media as it currently stands does not adequately serve the job. Instagram is dead and you’ve become the product. AI slop here, AI slop there, and influencers everywhere. These apps are designed for addiction, peddling performativity while making users feel more disconnected than before. We’re changing that with kyagi, because we still believe in the grand promise of social media. Rewind to the mid-2000s during the early days of MySpace, Facebook, Instagram, and AIM: elders reconnecting with long-lost childhood friends, incessant poke wars, and real plans being made. Today, two decades later, the platforms have spoiled—gone bad with brain rot-inducing content. When social media is no longer social, where do we go from here? Punitive Restrictions are the Status Quo: The Sticks (and the Bricks) Increasingly, users are going to extreme lengths to reduce their time on social media through a slew of tools: screen time limits, Brick (a physical device that locks a user out of their phone), and digital detox apps. The challenge is that users still miss out on friends’ updates, feel disconnected from the people who matter, and inevitably return to the apps. Such ‘sticks’ treat social media as a pure pathology to be eliminated. But as a social media native generation, abstinence isn’t realistic or even desirable—we still want to be in touch with close friends and family, no matter where they are in the world. What’s missing then, is a tool that works with our habits, not against them. Healthier Social Hygiene with the Carrot: kyagi Perhaps the goal isn’t less social media, but better social media. At a gathering recently, a close friend said she likes to “microdose social media” through apps with limited avenues for engagement, like Strava and Beli. As we set out to build a tool that harkens back to what social media was meant to be, we keep returning to the early days of legacy social media platforms, when they used to be fun, playful, and genuinely social. At the same time, we aim to encourage real-world socialization and help users “touch grass.” So we built kyagi: an app where users see updates from friends, with the only scroll that ends. The scroll is finite because each user has a “village” of up to 40 close friends and family, so the feed is only populated with thoughts, photos, and voice memos from people users truly want to prioritize. Each profile then contains an archive of intimate, meaningful moments from their life. Users can select 20 core villagers, and we algorithmically select the other 20 villagers that rotate weekly from their complete list of followers. In tandem, we’ve built in-app encouragement to connect offline: each user is prompted to set weekly priorities (e.g., drawing class, marathon training, grocery runs, facetime session while doing laundry) and has visibility into their followers’ calendars to make plans IRL. We believe there is joy in helping each other accomplish priorities for the week and that we need to lower the friction to hang with friends nearby and far. The app is designed as a modern address book. Users set their home city so that when traveling, they can see which friends are nearby. They can also flag upcoming trips to ping friends at their destination and create spontaneous plans. No more scouring WhatsApp groups to find out who’s living in San Francisco, New York, London, Accra, Hong Kong, Seoul, or [insert any city]. As we begin to beta test with ~50 users on the app, we’ve seen early traction with villages forming organically around people’s true friends and priorities, with more genuine engagement than we anticipated. We’re excited to grow as the Class of 2026 stays connected post-grad, the Class of 2027 maintains friendships over a scattered summer, and we all reconnect with friends far beyond the HBS bubble. The bigger bet is that our generation wants something better— a way to maintain and develop friendships through distinct walks of life. Join the kyagi beta, or simply reflect on how you want to feel after you log off. Visit us at kyagisocial.com. Alyssa Kocak (MBA ’26) is co-founder of Kyagi, a social app for updates from friends, with a scroll that ends. She graduated from Rutgers University with a double major in Philosophy and Communications and a minor in Digital Communications, Information and Media. Prior to HBS, Alyssa worked in shareholder activism defense at PJT Partners, at the activist fund Engine No. 1, and at the asset manager The TCW Group. She is a recipient of the 2026 HBS Leadership Fellowship. Sonal Tyagi (MBA ’26) is co-founder of Kyagi, a social app for updates from friends, with a scroll that ends and plans it sends. She graduated from Cornell University with a major in Electrical and Computer Engineering. Prior to HBS, Sonal worked in consumer and digital strategy at Boston Consulting Group. While at business school, she interned at a music tech startup and serves as Chief of Staff at La Complice, an HBS-incubated fashion AI startup.

The last semester feels surprisingly like the first, which is either wisdom or a refund request Note: All the em-dashes in this text are mine. On the other hand, any traces of wisdom in this article, like all my class comments, are mere improvisations of what I heard recently. "C'mon, we are not that special just because we got into HBS," commented a section mate in LEAD. The RC section, still new to each other, still figuring out how loud to laugh, erupted in giggles. Wise beyond its semesters, the comment touched what everyone was pumping themselves to be. Later that day, as is tradition, we wrote letters to the ten-years-older versions of ourselves. I stared at the blank page longer than I care to admit. He had made it sound simple—we are not that special—but the letter required you to assume you had already become someone worth writing to. That assumption, it turned out, was the hard part but more so on brand for this place. It is almost funny how everyone in the first semester seems to be operating at their quirky peak. Nobody is explicitly trying to stand out; it is subtler than that, softer. You are just quietly, constantly aware of the impression you are making, unfortunately much more than you should be. The guitarists bring up music more often, the gym-enthusiasts bring up every shade of Shad, the opinionated color every discussion with their most practiced hue, and well the funny? They try slightly harder. Mid-October, I realized my jokes were seeing a slight downward NPS score. Had I committed the quintessential error of the funny guy, pushed too hard, or finally earned friends who did not oblige me with the laugh? My Marketing professor’s cold call broke me from this particular chain of thought, bringing me back into the cruel world of the Cola wars. I managed to assemble three sentences from what my mind had half-absorbed in the first half of class, and I was saved, as I would be saved many times that year, by what became a rhetorical but loyal friend: beginning with the phrase "I wonder." Because no one can question what you are merely wondering. You are still in process. Wondering is generous to the listener, wondering disarms the inquirer, and wondering flatters everyone who spoke before you making them wonder how they made me wonder. Wondering, I discovered, is also infinite. It can last a semester. And as it turns out, it can last even longer than that. For the last one month, even as we braced through the New England winter, there was peace in the snow not melting. Almost a strict pause enforced by a greater force. And yet; how much the ending resembles the beginning. Both semesters funnily exist slightly outside the real program: the first starts way before you realize it has, and the last is already over in some interior sense. There is a shared quality of liminality, of being physically present in a place while mentally rehearsing somewhere else. In the first semester, you are projecting forward into who you want to become. In the end, you are already inhabiting the person you have decided to be, trying them on before the costume becomes the clothes. You know when I truly believed my ex-banker best friend would become an entrepreneur after business school? It was not when he said it, it was when he gave up the vest, and when his hair started being combed less carefully to the back. Both are still acts of imagination, but one more hopeful than the other, and one that follows the semester-arc. Oh and sorry, he is still (thankfully) going back to banking. What is strange is how your senses sharpen at both ends. In RC year, I noticed everything because it was all new: the particular creak of a Klarman Hall seat, the rhythm of a professor who always paused before calling on someone who had not raised their hand, the way the Spangler tapestry looked in the morning light versus the afternoon. Now, in the final semester, I notice all the same things again, but with the bittersweet register of someone quietly cataloguing what they are about to lose. The beautiful vines that drape the walls of Arthur Rock Center, the old beauty of the Baker library lift in the tunnels, how the doors in the Baker open in a funny direction. A dining hall that has somehow, without my noticing, become home. Arrivals and departures are the only moments that make the ordinary luminous. The long middle, comfortable, busy, habituated, is what we live in, but it is not where we see. The identity rituals, too, rhyme across both ends. In the first semester, you perform the student you want to become: earnest, curious, trying on intellectual positions like jackets to see what fits — what you will be able to hold on to. In the last, you perform the professional you are about to be, road-testing the vocabulary of your post-graduation life before it is technically yours. It is 2026, and you can use the F-word (founder) more safely than the C-word. The gap between who you are and who you are describing never quite closes. Did the program just teach us to never eliminate that gap, but inhabit it with more grace (read: branding)? And the questions that fill both semesters are, at their core, the same question. In September of RC year, everyone asks "what brought you here?" In the final spring, everyone asks "what did you take away?" I wonder. But in honesty, both are asking you to construct a narrative, forcing you to make your presence legible to yourself as much as to anyone else. What changes, across two years, is probably the sophistication of the answer. Not because you have resolved anything, but because you have gotten better at sitting with the irresolution. You have learned which parts of the uncertainty are productive and which are just noise. And that probably is the resolution. The friendships, too, carry the same intensity at both ends, for mirrored reasons. In the first semester, every new connection feels potentially defining. You are sampling from a universe of people you have never had access to before, and the excitement of that is almost chemical. In the last semester, the intensity comes from the opposite awareness: that the proximity which did so much of the relational work, the shared buildings, the overlapping schedules, the frictionless availability of each other, is about to disappear. Both produce the same behavior. Longer dinners. More candid conversations at hours that probably do not make sense. A willingness to say things you spent two years deferring. I once asked myself how I would measure my time here, and I landed on a metric that felt right at the time: how often did someone genuinely change my mind? In a moment of characteristic overconfidence, I started a note on my phone, tracking every instance in which a classmate shifted how I thought about ambition or risk or what a life in business could actually look like, while studiously declining to note down the correct number of Porter's forces. As I approach the end I find I have accumulated about ten of those entries, and what strikes me now is not the number but my relationship to the people in it—I question them more, I see them with less mystery and wonder, and I fortunately admit, that is exactly how they have come to see me. There is a particular anxiety that arrives in both semesters, though it wears different clothes each time. In the first, it is the loud, slightly sweaty kind: do I actually belong here, among these people who seem to have arrived fully formed, with their opinions and their vests and their practiced confidence? In the end, it is quieter and, in some ways, harder to sit with: have I used this well enough, have I been curious enough, present enough, have I let this place do to me what it was supposed to do? One is about worthiness entering, the other about worthiness leaving, and the structure of the feeling is, if you pay attention, identical. What is not identical is what you do with it. In RC year I let it run the machine. Now, mostly, I just notice it, nod at it the way you nod at a familiar face in Spangler, and carry on. And yet, I want to resist the tidy version of this story. The optimization machine still runs, I will not pretend otherwise, and anyone who has accompanied me to a CPD career fair knows this. But somewhere between the first cold call and the last, I learned to occasionally leave it running without me. To sit at a Spangler table with no agenda. To let a conversation go somewhere I had not planned. The machine churns; I just no longer feel compelled to stand at it constantly, feeding it questions it cannot answer. A two-year program, I have come to think, is less a linear journey than a loop—the ending does not conclude the beginning so much as rhyme with it, at a higher register. You return to the same questions you arrived with, just with a quieter, more durable relationship to the not-yet-knowing. We came in wondering if we belonged. We leave still wondering, just about bigger things. Somewhere in that shift is the answer to the letter I wrote to myself in week one. I just will not know it for another ten years. Pranav Mittal (MBA '26)   is a second-year at HBS who came in optimizing and is leaving wondering, which he has been told is the right direction. Originally from India, he thinks deeply about building and investing, less deeply about whether he dressed appropriately for the weather, and considers both equally unsolvable problems.

The more we optimize, the less we notice what’s missing I’ve been experimenting with vibecoding recently and it’s been making me feel…weird. Trying to settle your brain when it’s shooting off application ideas to Claude must be what it feels like for pets to have the zoomies: joyous entropy. It’s clear that AI can take the tasks that we often both labor over and hate to do, and automate them accurately, and I do feel like I’ve increased my efficiency.  But I often come out of these vibecoding sessions with feelings of unease as well. Should this really be so easy? We spend so much time thinking about what we gain from AI: I wanted to know what we were potentially losing. What exactly are we trading away? One of the biggest arguments against using AI is that it stifles learning. Anthropic noted in a recent report : “...not all AI-reliance is the same: the way we interact with AI while trying to be efficient affects how much we learn.” The study found that developers who used AI for conceptual questions scored 65%+, while those who fully delegated scored <40%. This is especially concerning as we can extrapolate these trends to show that the future of work with AI will be based on outputs , not inputs . After all, more output is in a company’s best interest for its cost efficiency.  A recruiter I spoke to recently told me that they now screen for AI usage in coding interviews because they want  AI-native employees who can produce the most quickly. But often, as the Anthropic study shows, inputting is where the learning happens. In a recent interview  with David Perell on AI replacing journalism, Ezra Klein argues that AI Deep Research can give the illusion of knowledge by minimizing the “struggle” of understanding. One of my favorite lines: “part of what is happening when you spend seven hours reading a book is you spend seven hours with your mind on this topic.” The struggle of not knowing, it turns out, may not be human inefficiency: it’s how true understanding forms. There is also evidence that AI makes us, on average, less creative. This idea should have a lot of personal resonance to MBA students. At a recent student breakfast, HBS Dean Srikant Datar, when asked about what defines standout alumni, said: “Successful people are those who see things others can’t.” It pays to be different today, as AI is making us all converge to the norm.  A Wharton study  recently showed that while AI can increase the number of novel ideas generated , the diversity of those ideas decreases. AI is raising the floor of individual creativity, but lowering the ceiling of collective discovery. Given research breakthroughs are often at the “long tail”, the long-term implication of using AI for research means we could become less successful at discovering innovations with outsized impact. As Royston Roberts notes in his 1989 book Serendipity: Accidental Discoveries in Science , many of the greatest scientific discoveries were byproducts or mistakes of other studies; penicillin wasn’t optimized into existence. As innovation in the last 100 years has slowed, does AI have the potential to codify this decline by bringing ideas to the median? As AI has percolated through the workforce, there is also evidence that the same features of AI that help it make humans more efficient are also the ones that cause us the most distress. Three recent HBR articles in the last six months bring this into sharp focus: “ Why AI at Work Makes Us So Anxious ” identified that AI makes us feel as if we are out of control, that our work has less meaning, and introduces uncomfortable emotions, especially the replicability of our individual jobs with AI; “ AI Doesn’t Reduce Work — It Intensifies It ” noted that AI expands the amount of tasks expected of individual workers, blurs boundaries between work and non-work, and encourages more multi-tasking; and “ AI Brain Fry ” defined “mental fatigue that results from excessive use of, interaction with, and/or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity.”  Crucially, as author Julie Bedard recently clarified on “Hard Fork” , this isn’t “burnout”; it’s a new form of cognitive load from the pressure to achieve perfection via AI. And we don’t quite know what the consequences of these tools will be in the coming years. More crappy memos? More mental health disorders? I struggle to see the horizon through the fog. I’ve experienced elements of the arguments above: I sometimes give up on learning case concepts and ask AI for the answer; all of the AI-created startup websites look and sound the same now; and I fume when Claude doesn’t execute the way I want.  But what resonates with me most are the emotional arguments around AI. My deepest secret might be that I enjoy some manual work because repetition can help form judgment, whether I was learning piano, calculus, or flip cup. It’s why the first 2 years of consulting and banking are spent editing footnotes and slide formatting: to give 22-year-olds exposure to the corporate world. As our workdays get longer , these manual tasks also offer a cognitive break between focused sessions.  There’s also a sense of humility that comes from doing the most manual tasks and being a “team player.” I have both toiled over endless slides, and also gotten to speak at conferences: doing the first in part enabled the last. I fear that when we delegate everything to agents, we lose what it means to do tasks that build character precisely because they’re unrewarding. I think about the hours I spent writing my thesis senior year with my friends, and how it cemented our friendships and made me love my topic; today, with Deep Research, it could be done in seconds.  Worst of all, I’m scared that this attitude will worsen the divide between the haves and have nots. As knowledge workers automate tasks to agents, they may forget the value of treating people, especially subordinates, with kindness. In a society where inequality is increasing rapidly, I worry that we’ll forget what it feels like to do the real work and discount it relative to the “managerial” capabilities we’ll need to develop to work with AI. I didn’t write this article to cry wolf. I wanted answers on how to maximize the benefits of AI while feeling less uneasy about all the consequences. A few of those learnings: to maximize learning, a junior software engineer told me that he consciously limits AI usage for tasks that he’s never done before. Another best practice: asking AI for inputs, not outputs. For example, I used AI to pressure test different arguments before writing this piece. And I consciously try to be kind to AI even when I’m frustrated by its inefficiency, because I don’t want to underestimate the work it’s helping me complete. Understanding the value of automation is knowing—and appreciating—the frustration and woman-hours I would be putting into it myself otherwise. Recently, the New York Times  put out a controversial quiz  seeing if readers preferred AI imitations of classical writers to quotes from the real authors. The results: we seem to narrowly prefer AI, partially because it’s more straightforward and easy to read.  It brought to mind the age-old question: does making something easier make it better? Deciphering Cormac McCarthy’s language in the quiz took me several minutes of second-order thinking and deep attention vs. the AI comparable that I selected. It made me realize that with AI, we lose something else important: imperfection.  There is a joy in deciphering something you’ve never seen before, because it’s not catered to mere understanding. So to end on a 300-year-old quote from Alexander Pope: “To err is human.” Maybe we were never destined for the perfection these AI tools can give us. Mira Nagarajan (MBA ’26)  is a second-year MBA student at HBS focused on climate and energy tech. Outside of class, she can be found complaining about how cold Boston is while running along the Charles, struggling through New Yorker  pieces, and trying to put down Claude Code.

On risk, leadership, and knowing when to leave Editor’s Note: The Harbus  is enthused to introduce our Leadership column, a series of conversations with leaders from across business and society. Our hope is to share their insights with the broader HBS community. We sat down with Chip to discuss the path to the top, what it’s like to run an iconic global brand, what makes a successful leader, and how he knew it was time to hand over the reins. Pranav Bharadwaj:  There’s no single path to becoming a CEO. But some talented people make it and others do not. What sets the successful group apart? Chip Bergh:  There are a couple of common themes. First, there is always a certain amount of luck—being in the right place at the right time can sometimes be the difference. But, second, the people who make it to CEO usually have a track record of not being afraid to take career risk. They put themselves out there. They sign up for assignments that nobody else wants. They go overseas. They look for big challenges that will stretch them and grow them. I was blessed to spend 28 years at P&G, and it is a promote-from-within company. They did a better job managing my career than I might have done on my own. They put me into assignments I’m not sure I would have raised my hand for. And, assignments where I felt I may not have been ready. So I do think there is this element of stretching yourself, constantly focusing on your own growth and not being afraid to take chances along the way. Was there a mentor who really shaped you? Yes—and to this day he is still my mentor. He took a real interest in me, even before he became my boss. When I had the opportunity to come to Levi’s as CEO, I was faced with this career decision: do I quit a company I had been at for 28 years and take a chance on being a CEO in a completely different industry? I had my thesis on why I thought I was a good fit for the role. But the track record of CEOs coming from consumer packaged goods into apparel was not good. My mentor had already retired from P&G, and I flew to Cincinnati to have dinner with him and ask what he thought.  He said: Here I am today in my seventies, and I still wonder whether I would have been a good CEO. And if you think you may be asking yourself that question when you are seventy, go scratch the itch now. That was incredibly helpful. I’m forever thankful for his mentorship. If you were graduating from business school today and wanted eventually to become a CEO, what path would you choose? If it were me, I would probably do what I did all over again, because it worked. But your generation is different, and the world is different too. There aren’t many companies like P&G today. There aren’t many places people go and stay for thirty or forty years. So you are going to have to be very intentional about your career. If your ambition is to become a CEO, you have got to build a solid foundation. So my advice would be: when you leave school, look for something where you can stay for the first four or five years, probably get at least one promotion, and establish real credibility in a function or industry. The firm probably matters a little. Your first boss matters a lot. There was a ton of data at P&G about the importance of your first manager, because that can make all the difference in how you get set up for the rest of your career. And I think you should manage your career in three-to-five-year windows. Every few years, ask: what do I need to learn, how do I need to grow, and what challenge should I be looking for next? What should people look for in an early manager? Sometimes the challenge is that the people interviewing you may not even end up being your manager. That happened to me at P&G. But if you are able to have a say in who your boss is, look for someone who seems genuinely committed to your development and growth. The best way to find that out is to ask about their track record. Who has worked for them before? What are those people doing now? Did they continue to grow in the company? That is usually the best indication of what kind of leader they are going to be for you. Many graduates think they can shortcut the journey by joining a smaller or earlier-stage company. How do you see that route? I think it is a legitimate path. At an earlier-stage company, you will probably get more exposure to many different things much sooner. You might be doing marketing one day and supply chain the next. I don’t think there is necessarily a right or wrong path. Each has strengths and downsides. If you go to a big company like P&G, you are going to get a more rigorous and disciplined foundation. At an earlier-stage company, you are going to get broader exposure and more opportunity to do different things, but probably less structured training and development. And if you have a great idea and you are passionate about starting a business, now is the time to do it. Being a founder is the fastest way to the top. But you have got to be successful - as everyone knows, the odds of success are low. Looking back on Levi’s, what are you proudest of? And what would you have done differently? I’m most proud of the team that I built, and I’m also very proud of the succession plan. My successor is doing great, and that makes me proud. But we also turned Levi’s around. It is one of the most iconic brands in the world, and it had been on a more-than-decade-long decline when I joined. We turned it around and put Levi’s back at the center of culture. At the end of the day, that is probably the thing I’m most proud of. What would I have done differently? Speed. Everything took too long. I wish we had done the women’s relaunch faster. I wish we had made more progress on DTC faster. What were the big decisions behind that turnaround? Levi’s Stadium was definitely one. That was a huge bet. We signed that deal in 2013, when the company had only just had its first year of top- and bottom-line growth in over a decade. What we did know was that when Levi’s was at its best, we were at the center of culture. That was our war cry: put Levi’s back at the center of culture. And culture, in the US and in many parts of the world, is sports and entertainment. Before I joined Levi’s, I was running Gillette at P&G, and Gillette has Gillette Stadium. I knew the economics of stadiums, and I knew how good that kind of investment could be. So Levi’s Stadium was a big bet, but it worked, and it really did begin to put Levi’s back at the center of culture. Another big thing was reconnecting with consumers. The company had gutted the advertising budget when the business was declining. I was doing a consumer visit in Bangalore, and one woman said to me: “You wear other jeans, you live in Levi’s.” I thought, that is it. “Live in Levi’s” became our advertising, and once we started putting money behind it in 2014 and 2015, the business really started to inflect. The third big bet was women’s apparel. When I joined, women’s was only about 20 per cent of the business. We decided we were going to go big and really try to win back women. Today it is still not 50 per cent, but it is north of 40 per cent of the business. And then there was DTC. We started really investing in our own retail stores, ecommerce and retail capabilities. That business has gone from 20% to almost 50% in the last 14 years.  When you run a brand like Levi’s, are you a custodian of it or someone trying to remake it? That was one of the real tension points. I used to talk about it like the Johnnie Walker logo: one foot firmly rooted, the other moving forward. We had to stay rooted in authenticity and originality. Levi’s is the original. We are the OG when it comes to denim. But at the same time, you cannot just rest on your laurels. If you do that, you become dusty and old. Nobody wants to buy their father’s jeans. So yes, there is an element of stewardship, but I hate the word “caretaker” because it sounds like all you are doing is protecting the status quo. You also have to innovate and keep driving the brand forward. Levi’s is also a brand that seems to stand for America around the world. How did you balance that with local relevance? It is a big global brand, distributed in well over 100 countries. In some markets, Levi’s is seen very much as a classic American brand. In others, consumers do not really think about it that way—they just see it as a great brand in their market. That is true in India, for example. I think every global company struggles with how much you do globally versus how much you localize. For us, a lot of the supply chain and big investment decisions were global, but a lot of the marketing and activation was done very locally. Music is a big part of the brand, and music festivals are very local. So the brand would show up consistently around the world, but in a locally relevant way. That was a big part of the balance. How did you know it was time to step down? I went into the job thinking I was going to do about 10 years. Then the pandemic happened, and I wasn’t going anywhere in the middle of that. But I had already been working with the board on succession since 2017. We had a very rigorous process, with development plans and succession plans reviewed with the full board twice a year. Then the pandemic happened, and I lost my succession candidates because they went off to become CEOs elsewhere. So I had an empty bench. At the same time, I had become very clear that what the company needed next was somebody with deep retail experience. We were becoming much more of a retailer, and DTC was becoming a much more important part of the growth story. I felt I had done what I came to do. My thesis was: if I fix the brand, it will fix the company. And we fixed the brand, fixed the company, and took the company public. Then Michelle (my successor) became available, and I felt she was exactly what the company needed next. So it was a process. There was not one day where I woke up and said, it’s time. The most important thing was having the right successor. What does good leadership mean to you now? If you had asked me this question five years ago, you probably would have gotten a different answer. But right now, I think the most important characteristic of being a good leader is humility. It is about being selfless. One of the things that gets in people’s way is ego and wanting the job because it is about them. That can be a real blind spot. Being a CEO requires a huge amount of selflessness. It cannot be about you. It has got to be about the team, the brand and the business. Beyond that, great leaders bring out the very best in the people who work for them. They set high expectations, but they also provide the coaching and resources people need to meet them. People who do that consistently become talent magnets. Everybody wants to work for them because they have a track record of developing talent. And over time, helping people go on to do great things becomes the most satisfying part of your career. That has certainly been true for me. How do you balance coaching people with making the tougher calls on roles, exits and reorganisations? One thing I would say is that sometimes I kept people too long. I’ve never heard anyone say, “I moved too fast on that person.” We all want to make sure we have given people a shot at turning around a performance issue. But human nature is to wait too long to call the question. If you are tolerating underperformance, there is a very high probability that people in your organization know that—and that is a reflection on you. So I would say two things. One, trust your instincts. Two, sooner is probably better than later. How did you handle the emotionally difficult conversations? I always rehearsed. Sometimes literally in front of a mirror if it was going to be a really hard conversation. At a minimum, I would run through the conversation in my head and think about where it might go. And then you have to be human about it. It is never easy to tell somebody that you are letting them go. Do it with warmth and humanity to the extent that you can. On larger organizational moves, what helped me most was that I was always a straight shooter with the organization. I was never into spinning things or trying to make a bad situation look good. I was direct, factual and human. In today’s environment, what role should CEOs play in society more broadly? My track record on this was pretty clear, but it was a different day. It is a very different world today. The first responsibility a CEO has is to the business and to the stakeholders of the business. And today’s environment is very challenging. If you say something that goes sideways politically, you run the risk of your business—or you personally—being singled out. But I spend a lot of time with CEOs still, and my sense is that they are still actively engaged in trying to make the world a better place. They are just doing it a little more quietly, because they have to. At Levi’s, we also cultivated networks with other companies and CEOs. One example was getting out the vote. My whole line on it was simple: democracy only works if people vote. We gave employees time on election day to vote, and we worked with over 1000 other companies to do the same thing through timetovote.org . Last question: which current CEO do you most admire, and why? I’ve got a lot of CEOs I admire, but I’ll pick Joe Preston at New Balance. It is a private, family-owned company right down the street from Harvard Business School, and New Balance is on a tear right now. They recently reported they had reached $10 billion in sales. They have really invested in connecting with the consumer and becoming more direct-to-consumer. And he is the real deal. I talked about humility, and he is exactly that kind of guy. If you didn’t know he was the CEO, you would never guess it. He is down-to-earth, people love working for him, and he has delivered fantastic results over the last several years in a quiet, understated kind of way. Chip Bergh is a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and the former CEO of Levi Strauss & Co., where he led the company from 2011 to 2024, including its return to the public markets in 2019 after a broader business turnaround. Before Levi’s, he spent 28 years at Procter & Gamble in a range of brand and leadership roles, and earlier served as a U.S. Army officer in West Germany. He currently serves as chair of HP Inc., sits on the boards of Pinterest, Lululemon, and e.l.f. Beauty, and is a Trustee of his alma mater, Lafayette College. Pranav Bharadwaj (MBA '27) is from London, UK and the current CEO of the Harbus News Corporation.

By Victoria Enoc- Ahiamadu and Joris Cyizere The African Development Bank estimates that the continent needs between $130 and $170 billion per year in infrastructure investment across energy, transport, water, and digital connectivity. Only about $75 billion is invested per year. The climate finance gap is even wider—the continent has only been able to mobilize $30 billion of the $300 billion required each year. These are not abstract numbers. 600 million people, roughly half the continent’s population, still lack access to electricity according to the International Energy Agency, while UNICEF estimates that 418 million lack access to clean drinking water. And the pressure is only growing: Africa will add one billion people by 2050, more than half of them in cities. Urbanization is rising at 4% per year, making Africa home to five of the world’s ten fastest-growing cities. Meanwhile, capital is flowing elsewhere. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft are projected to spend $600 to $700 billion on data centers in 2026 alone—more than four times Africa’s entire annual infrastructure investment requirement. A little more than a year ago, when NVIDIA lost $600 billion in a single day—the largest single-day drop ever recorded—the legend   Mihir   wrote in the   New York Times  that he believed “Big Tech was eating itself alive, with its component companies throwing more and more cash at investments in one another that are most likely to generate less and less of a return.” Some of us have thought this, yet we continue to put money into these stocks. He went on to argue that a major reason this continues to happen is that investors assess these companies—the Magnificent 7 in particular—as “premier safe assets… implicitly viewing them almost like governments.” Sure, some of this could be FOMO-driven, but the level of trust we have bestowed upon these companies and their management teams to safeguard our investments is unmatched. Whatever risks there might be, we “please-fix” them in our models, justify them intelligently, or just ignore them all together. This unfortunately is Africa’s biggest deficit—the perception of risk is too high. And yet, a 2018 Moody’s report found that infrastructure finance in Africa has a lower default rate than even the United States. So perhaps the question is not whether Africa’s infrastructure gap is too risky to finance. Perhaps the question is why Africa is perceived to be too risky to finance and what can be done to alleviate this. For the longest time, the dominant narrative around infrastructure investment in Africa has been that projects are not “bankable”, a term project finance professionals use to determine whether they can generate a return and are able to get their money back on an investment. At face value, the perception is not entirely unfounded. Investors often point to weak institutions, inconsistent enforcement of the rule of law, currency risk, fragile balance sheets of state-owned enterprises—which in some cases serve as the off-takers of project output on the continent—as key concerns. Yet framing the issue purely as one of risk obscures a more fundamental constraint: a misalignment between the nature of infrastructure assets and the capital available to finance them. Infrastructure requires patient, long-term financing aligned with the lifespan of the underlying assets. Yet much of the capital available to African markets is short-term, rigid in structure, insufficiently tailored to local political and economic realities on the continent, and often reflects credit underwriting models designed for more developed markets. As a result, traditional foreign capital flow is often not suitable for the risks it seeks to price. Furthermore, there is growing evidence that the risks associated with African infrastructure may be overstated or at least mispriced. Chinua Azubike, CEO of InfraCredit, Nigeria’s local currency guarantee company, has noted that the firm has not recorded losses across a portfolio of more than 20 projects in 12 sectors over eight years, arguing that “the real risk associated with infrastructure assets in Africa is often overestimated.” With the right structuring, infrastructure assets in Africa can deliver stable, long-term returns. This misalignment becomes even more clear when viewed through the lens of domestic capital, which Africa is not short of. Domestic institutional investors including pension funds, insurance companies, and sovereign funds collectively manage over $2 trillion in assets. Despite its scale, less than 10% of this capital is deployed into productive sectors like infrastructure, reflecting both regulatory limitations and the perception among local institutions that such projects are inherently risky. Even a partial reallocation of these assets to infrastructure could begin to meaningfully narrow the infrastructure gap. Looked at together, these dynamics lead to a broader conclusion: the challenge is not simply a bankability challenge or a lack of capital issue, but a lack of alignment in how risk is perceived, how capital is structured, and who is able to participate. Solving it will require not only new pools of capital but better market infrastructure—plumbing, in effect—that can make African infrastructure assets more transparent, more tradable, and more accessible to a wider set of investors. Tokenization, the process of representing ownership of real-world assets on a blockchain, offers a potential pathway. But its promise is not simply about lowering ticket sizes or bringing in new investors. At its core, tokenization bundles issuance, compliance, reporting, and trading into a single programmable layer. It is, in a very real sense, the kind of market infrastructure that Africa’s infrastructure assets have lacked. Its value rests on three distinct mechanisms: tradability, transparency, and access. Tradability. One of the most persistent barriers to infrastructure investment in Africa is illiquidity. An institutional investor in an African infrastructure bond today often faces a 15- to 30-year commitment with no meaningful exit. That illiquidity premium gets priced into the cost of capital, making projects more expensive to finance. Tokenization addresses this directly. By representing infrastructure debt or equity as digital tokens on a blockchain, these instruments can be traded on secondary platforms without requiring the project itself to return capital early. The distinction matters: the investor  gets liquidity; the project  gets long-term financing. This is the same principle that makes public bond markets work in developed economies—individual holders may come and go, but the capital stays put. African infrastructure assets currently lack that secondary market microstructure. Tokenization could provide it. Notably, the Nairobi Securities Exchange is already exploring this through its integration with the Hedera blockchain for tokenized securities, and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) offers a natural cross-border settlement layer that could connect tokenized markets across the continent. Transparency. A significant portion of the risk premium on African infrastructure is not compensation for actual default risk—Moody’s analysis on default rates and InfraCredit’s track record both tell us that—but compensation for not knowing. Information asymmetry is what gets priced as risk. Foreign investors struggle to diligence projects from afar, cashflow reporting is often delayed and inconsistent, and construction milestones can be difficult to verify independently. In this environment, even well-performing assets carry a perception penalty. Tokenized instruments can embed real-time, programmatic transparency directly into the asset. Smart contracts—self-executing agreements coded into the blockchain—can automate milestone-based disbursements, linking the release of funds to independently verifiable conditions. For a toll road, that might mean revenue data feeds directly from toll collection systems. For a solar project, satellite imagery can verify installation and output. Payments flow when conditions are met, not when someone files a report six months later. This kind of embedded monitoring compresses the information gap that currently inflates Africa’s borrowing costs beyond what actual performance data would justify. Access. Once infrastructure assets are tradable and transparent, expanding who can invest becomes not only feasible but powerful. By fragmenting large infrastructure assets into smaller, tradable units, tokenization lowers the barrier to entry. Instead of requiring large ticket sizes, infrastructure investments can be fractionalized, enabling retail investors—including Africa’s global diaspora—to participate in projects that were previously inaccessible. The scale of this opportunity becomes clear when viewed alongside remittance flows. Remittances to Sub-Saharan Africa reached approximately $54 billion in 2023, with total flows to the continent exceeding $90 billion annually. These flows are among the most stable sources of external finance in Africa. In addition, a 2011 IMF report estimated that the African diaspora saves more than $50 billion annually. Combined, a reallocation of some of this capital into structured retail infrastructure vehicles could be transformative. On the global scale, momentum is building. The World Economic Forum estimates that up to 10% of global GDP could be tokenized by 2027, and an increasing number of private equity funds in developed markets are exploring retail participation through tokenized structures. BlackRock’s tokenized treasury fund crossed $500 million faster than any traditional ETF. For Africa, where traditional financial intermediation is often limited, the potential is significant. However, tokenization is not without its challenges. Regulations across most African countries are still evolving and are not yet fully equipped to support tokenized securities at scale. Questions about investor protection, custody, taxation, and cross-border participation remain unresolved. More fundamentally, legal enforceability remains critical: for tokenized assets to gain credibility, smart contracts and digital ownership claims must be recognized and enforceable within domestic legal systems. Without strong rule of law and regulations, the risks could outweigh the benefits. Progress, however, is real. Kenya’s Capital Markets Authority is piloting blockchain-based platforms through its regulatory sandbox. Nigeria’s new Investments and Securities Act formally recognizes digital assets as securities under the Nigerian Securities and Exchange Commission’s oversight. Ghana’s central bank is developing a regulatory framework for virtual asset service providers in partnership with the Ghanaian Securities and Exchange Commission. These are not theoretical commitments—they are regulatory foundations being built in real time. A pragmatic immediate step would be to start with brownfield infrastructure assets which are already operational and have established cash flows. Tokenizing these assets would provide liquidity for existing investors, demonstrate the model’s viability, and enable the recycling of capital into new infrastructure development. Institutions like the African Development Bank could accelerate adoption by incorporating blockchain-based monitoring into their project finance frameworks, lending the credibility that bootstraps private participation. Ultimately, if the challenge remains alignment between capital, risk, and access, then solving it will require new plumbing—the market infrastructure that connects capital to projects in ways the current system does not. Tokenization is not a silver bullet. But it is the most promising mechanism we have for building the issuance platforms, the secondary trading venues, the standardized reporting, and the real-time monitoring that can convert African infrastructure projects from opaque, illiquid commitments into transparent, tradable, investable products. At HBS, we are constantly reminded that we are expected to be leaders who will make a difference in the world. We could start here. Traditional infrastructure investors focus on developed markets whereas Africa’s infrastructure buildout represents a multi-decade, multi-trillion-dollar opportunity that is currently underserved by both talent and capital. While every fund and strategy is flowing into AI infrastructure—chasing ever-increasing multiples and potentially diminishing returns—Africa’s infrastructure gap represents a guaranteed, structural demand opportunity driven by demographics and urbanization. This is not speculative. People need electricity, roads, water, and connectivity, and the demand curve is only steepening. The capital is not even missing. What is missing is the plumbing—the financial infrastructure that can channel this capital productively into investable projects. HBS students are well positioned to help build it. And the potential for outsized returns, as much as the impact, is compelling: Moody’s shows that African infrastructure has lower default rates than many other developing nations and even the United States, despite significantly higher borrowing costs. The risk premium is mispriced. Savvy investors who recognize this early stand to see impressive returns while financing something that genuinely matters. Victoria Enoc-Ahiamadu (MBA ‘26) grew up in Port-Harcourt, Nigeria. She is a CFA charterholder with a background in infrastructure investing and capital raising across Africa. She obtained her BSc in Economics from Covenant University, Nigeria and, prior to HBS, worked at Africa Finance Corporation, a leading development finance institution, where she supported investments in critical infrastructure projects across the African continent. 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.