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How Lisbon wants to make startups matter to every citizen Before the Speeches Back in early 2024, we were still far from the bold speeches that would later punctuate the early months of 2026, with President Ursula von der Leyen talking about Europe needing to be more audacious in innovation and in the startup ecosystem, and pushing forward policies like the 28th regime, meant to make it much easier for any business to operate across EU member states. Nonetheless, a wave was already forming. Mayor Carlos Moedas (HBS MBA ’00), a former EU commissioner responsible for Europe’s biggest science and innovation budget at the time, had recently gone himself to showcase Lisbon’s achievements in innovation to an EU auditorium, helping Lisbon win the title of European Capital of Innovation. That award came with a prize money for the city of Lisbon, and in January 2024 we were sitting in his office debating what to do with it. There were ideas floating around: invest in construction, buy equipment for a hub, improve existing infrastructure. But Carlos seemed unconvinced. “We need to innovate,” he said, “in a way that both any citizen from Lisbon and any entrepreneur can understand.” An Idea with a Purpose As the driving force behind the growth of the Unicorn Factory Lisboa (the mayor’s flagship initiative to position Lisbon as a leading innovation center in Europe), there was already a growing worry that the innovation ecosystem might become alienated from the rest of the city. The innovation ecosystem spoke (literally) a different language: seed rounds, unicorns, hubs, scale-ups. Carlos, who always believed that innovation comes from bridging different people and different worlds, was not going to be happy if that became true for Lisbon. “A competition for Lisbon,” he thought. “Let’s give startups the opportunity to help the city solve its problems.” The meeting was cut short. Something urgent had come up, and he sent us away. “Think about it more and we’ll talk later,” he told us. “For Lisbon, I want this to really work.” He looked at us as he closed the door. I remember leaving his office with another advisor who had a deep knowledge of Lisbon’s innovation ecosystem. We were both nervous and excited. Could we do something new? Could the local government innovate? Can the City Innovate? So we did what we were told. We got to work, brought together teams from the public sector and key partners, and started researching and brainstorming. Slowly, with a lot of work, together, we came up with a new model. The big headline was that we would launch an international call for applications for tech solutions that could help the city. It had three key subtleties. First, the prize had to be meaningful. City Hall initiatives are often ignored, and private sector initiatives in Portugal were usually dispersed in small amounts. We had an opportunity to show that Lisbon could be bold. If we were going to do this, it had to feel real, not symbolic. Second, the model itself had to go beyond simply awarding a prize. The call would open internationally, a shortlist would be selected, and finalists would come to Lisbon for six months. During those six months, they would receive support, resources, and access to the right institutions and partners to implement and prove their concepts directly with the population of Lisbon that would be their target market. In other words, this would not be a cheque and a handshake. It would be a real proof of concept, with the city acting as a platform. The prize was announced in May 2024, and in September 2024 we had over 300 applications from 40 different countries. Third, and perhaps most surprisingly, the key part was choosing the problems. This was obviously political, because to name the city’s biggest issues is to say out loud where the city is vulnerable. But the Mayor took a bold stance. There would be three categories: quality of education, access to healthcare, and integration of migrants. These were areas he was increasingly worried about, and where he believed technology could play a supporting role. It would not have been enough to come up with fake or comfortable problems. That would have been politically safer, perhaps, but intellectually dishonest. If we were asking entrepreneurs to spend their time in Lisbon, then we had to be serious about the problems we were asking them to address. We only had to come up with the name. After many discussions, we landed on one: Lisboa Innovation for All. That was what it was all about. Into the Proof-of-Concept Then, we had no time to waste. An independent international panel was assembled to assess the applications and select the finalists for the proof-of-concept phase. The finalists were announced in October 2024, and each had six months to test, improve, and refine its solution in Lisbon, with direct support from the city. A large team was put in place to support each startup. The operational and logistical challenges were many, but the teams responded with energy; this was something new and exciting. The work was tailored to each finalist: opening doors to hospitals and clinics, daycare centers, senior centers, schools, foundations, and migrant-serving organizations.  During the proof-of-concept period, a broader campaign also took shape. The startups were having day-to-day contact with the population, but their story also mattered. Videos spread across social media in which each founder or team spoke candidly about the problem they wanted to solve, how it connected personally to them and how they were interacting with Lisbon in practice. For example, Usawa Care , which offered 24/7 access to a pediatrician for parents through WhatsApp using an AI-enabled clinical model, made innovation immediately tangible. During the pilot, it served hundreds of new families in Lisbon, helped many avoid unnecessary in-person care, and earned strong user satisfaction. Innovation, suddenly, was not a slogan. It was a parent getting quick medical guidance when they needed it. Growappy  showed a different but equally important face of innovation. Its platform used AI to reduce bureaucracy for teachers, improve communication with families, and make education more personalized from the earliest years. During the pilot, teachers saved time on administrative work, multilingual communication improved, and schools were able to use technology in a way that felt practical rather than performative. Equivalence , meanwhile, addressed one of the city’s most difficult and most human challenges: migrant integration. Founded by migrant women, it built a tool to help migrants translate their education, skills, and professional experience into a format the Portuguese labour market could understand. Its early results were strong, but more important was the deeper point: it treated integration not just as employability, but as confidence, belonging, and the ability to become visible again in a new country. By the end of the proof-of-concept phase, we were learning something important: when you give startups access not only to money but also to support from institutions, users, and real civic problems, you get a very different kind of innovation. In June 2025, these three companies were announced the winners, among the very strong competition of the total 9 finalist teams. Each winner received half of its prize money and was given further six months to continue implementing its pilot sustainably in Lisbon. What the City had Built Reflecting back, I still ask myself: what did we actually create? Was our model something like Y Combinator, but through public-sector institutions? Broadly, maybe. Except City Hall did not take equity, which already makes it much cheaper for entrepreneurs. Or is it something like the outstanding Bloomberg Mayor Challenge? Close to it, maybe. Except here the City Hall was an enabler and not the driving force in the specific initiatives. So maybe a mix of both. But what is more interesting is that when you apply a mix model through a public institution, what you get in return is not just company growth. You also get legitimacy, trust, and community building. People can see in their own lives what innovation can do. They can test it, argue with it, benefit from it, and judge it. Why Local Innovation Matters I believe this project helped strengthen the ecosystem’s growth. Unicorn Factory Lisboa has grown fivefold since its launch in 2022, with 300 businesses joining in 2025, up from 250 the previous year, while continuing to provide advice and support to founders through dedicated hubs for AI, blockchain, gaming, health, and green tech. It has also become a destination for international leaders visiting Lisbon to exchange ideas and discuss innovation. Now, hearing European leaders speak about reducing barriers for start-ups, helping entrepreneurs operate more easily across borders, and trying to make the single market feel more like a single market, it is clear that public ambition at the EU level matters. But that alone is not enough. Because Carlos knows something that Brussels also knows: change only becomes politically real when people can feel them. There needs to be strong local and regional initiatives that turn broad policy ambition into visible support for innovators. We need to be able to translate politically to people who have never thought much about tech in their lives why these investments might matter to them, to their children, and to their city. We wanted (and still want) a grandmother hearing startup jargon not to be skeptical, but to think of something useful she now uses and to feel proud that maybe her grandkids, just out of college, might decide to build something new. As we were leaving Carlos’s office on that first day, we had a lot of naive ambitions. Could we do something different? Could we bring people together? Could we show once again that the public sector can also innovate? What made a real difference was that Carlos’s instinct not to settle for the obvious was shared more widely, especially by the outstanding public sector teams. Everyone understood the part they had to play, but no one saw that role as fixed or approached it in the usual way. Instead, people questioned, adapted, and innovated within their own jobs, always asking whether there might be a better way. That, more than any speech, prize, or slogan, is the only way there will ever be innovation for all.   P.S. For further reading, I suggest the recent publications: 1) The Financial Times article “Portugal welcomes start-ups seeking scale: Hubs in Lisbon, Porto and Braga nurture new businesses as they look to expand”, March 5, 2026; and 2) HBS Alumni Stories, “Second Life, In Lisbon”, March 1, 2026. João Sátiro Coelho (MBA ‘27)  is originally from Faro and Lisbon, Portugal. He graduated from Instituto Superior Técnico with a master’s in architecture. Before HBS, João practiced architecture, then worked at McKinsey & Company in Lisbon, served as a direct advisor to the Mayor Carlos Moedas at Lisbon City Hall, where he focused on several initiatives, including coordinating the city’s partnership with Bloomberg Associates, the consulting arm of Bloomberg Philanthropies.

The HBS network, your window here, and a Latin American scoop Before I even knew that coming to HBS was a possibility, I had spent years following Veronica Serra (MBA ’97). Her appearances at podcasts, industry news, and events always struck me with her clarity of thought, which felt rare. When I wrote my post-interview reflection, I illustrated what I wanted to achieve through a few alumni examples, and unsurprisingly, I named her as one of the people I had in mind. What I had not fully appreciated when I selected who I wanted to interview first for this Latin American Alumni Interview series was that she had also written for The Harbus  during her time here.  I guess some circles close in ways we truly cannot plan for. One Thread Pulls Another I am at HBS largely because of the generous donors behind the school, in my case the Jorge Paulo Lemann Fund scholarship. Lemann (Harvard College ’61) is a legendary Brazilian investor and philanthropist. The ways his work contributions have played into various moments of my life are something that the more I reflect, the more unimaginable it seems and the more grateful I feel. But that is a story for another article. Who knows, maybe he will be featured here in the future? When I asked Veronica about a defining moment of her career, she shared that she was also at HBS through a Lemann scholarship, in her case through Fundação Estudar, an organization which has sent dozens of Brazilians to the world’s best universities. Lemann became a mentor for her and their relationship did not end at her graduation; it became a working partnership through which, decades later, they would help place a Baker Scholar named Arthur O’Keefe (MBA ’04) into Brazil’s top hedge funds within a single afternoon. The story begins with an email. In the late 2000s, Andre Perold, Veronica’s former Investment Management professor and head of the Finance Department at HBS, wrote to her about a Baker Scholar named Arthur O’Keefe. Arthur had married a classmate, Priscilla Zogbi (MBA ’04), and was moving to Brazil in need of a job. Veronica forwarded the email to Lemann within the hour. His response: “Who are we introducing him to?” They drew up a short list of Brazil’s four top hedge funds, split the calls between them, and by that afternoon Arthur had interviews set at all four. A few days later, he had an offer.  The most fascinating part? Veronica had not yet met him in person. Fast forward to 2013. Veronica had raised Innova Capital’s first growth fund, a $160 million vehicle focused on innovation. At a dinner hosted by Martin Escobari (MBA ’98, also a Baker Scholar) marking General Atlantic’s ten years in Brazil, she ran into Arthur again. By then, he was CFO of Movile, a technology company providing content to carriers’ end customers, with Naspers as its controlling shareholder. Fabricio Bloisi (OPM 58, ’22)  was CEO. Andre Perold had by that point left HBS to co-found Highvista Strategies with Brian Chu (MBA ’97, and guess what? A Baker Scholar too!), and Highvista ended up investing in Innova’s fund.  The threads kept weaving together. There was no obvious deal with Movile. Prosus, a subsidiary of Naspers, already controlled the business. But Veronica and her team spent a year and a half building trust with Fabricio and Arthur, relationship by relationship, through the accumulated goodwill of years of HBS connections. Innova eventually became a partner in Movile’s journey. Movile had already acquired a small food delivery startup called iFood when it was doing 18,000 deliveries a day. By the time Innova exited, the number was 45 million. Today it is approaching 180 million. This exit returned more than the entire fund. Lynda Applegate, who had been Veronica’s professor, later wrote a case on Movile in which both Veronica and Arthur appear. The connections kept completing themselves.  Fabricio became an Endeavor entrepreneur, joining the leading organization for high-impact founders, where Veronica also sits on the global board. Priscilla Zogbi, the classmate Arthur had married when this whole chain started, went on to work for HBS’s office in São Paulo and invited Veronica to join the HBS Latin American Advisory Board. In parallel, Veronica was also invited to join the HBS Alumni Board. Prosus’s chairman later invited Fabricio to become global CEO of the Prosus Group. And if the coincidences were not enough, a fun fact: iFood is now one of HBS’s Global Partners for FIELD in Brazil this year—I can’t wait to learn from my classmates’ experiences working with them during FIELD. The story is almost too good to be true. But Veronica recounts it naturally, because for her it is not surprising. It is simply how powerful the HBS network is, if you show up for it. On Breaking In: Use The Time You Have Here During her second year, Veronica took two classes that she says allowed her to build strong relationships in her field. One was Strategy with Michael Porter. The other was about the Central Bank, a functional versus institutional perspective, with Nobel laureate Robert Merton. For both, she reached out to the top CEOs of Brazil's financial industry. Her observation: many CEOs are happy to meet and speak openly when a student is studying their industry or building something while at HBS. She shared her findings with everyone she spoke to. By the time she went back to Brazil, the network was already there. “Don’t be shy!” she says. “Ask for help. Use your connections with professors, alums, and students. Develop a storyline of why this is relevant and show your passion. One would be surprised at how responsive people are, even when they are very busy.”  On a personal note: to write this piece, I sent Veronica a cold LinkedIn message. She replied the same day. So I really take her advice to heart and would recommend you do too! What LatAm Teaches You That the US Cannot A Latin American series would not be the same without asking her what the region actually demands from the people who operate in it. I asked Veronica what she would do differently if she were running Innova Capital in the U.S. instead of LatAm, what she would keep intact, and what that comparison reveals about the region. One of the key differences in her view is that LatAm is very relationship-driven while the U.S. is much more transactional. She believes that knowing how to connect and empathize with entrepreneurs while at the same time being straightforward and honest with feedback, is a very powerful combination.  “Founders go through a very tough journey, and if they see that you appreciate them and can connect with them on a personal level, you do have a great advantage in a more competitive market like the U.S.”  But there is something else. Latin America has been shaped by cycles of economic and political crisis in ways that produce a particular kind of founder, and a particular kind of investor. The ability to adapt fast, to survive volatility, is a skill that LatAm carries, and one that is more valuable than ever. For The Builders: A Bull Case And A Problem Worth Solving One of Veronica’s near-term convictions is cybersecurity. As AI becomes embedded in critical infrastructure and money flows entirely through non-bank digital channels, she believes Latin America, which has historically produced some of the world’s most sophisticated hackers, also has the talent pool to build the companies that will protect against the attacks it once pioneered. She sees this as a national security issue, not just a market opportunity. I also asked what she would go after if she were starting fresh out of her MBA today. She said healthcare. Not the system in the abstract, but a specific gap: the fragmentation of personal health data. Her vision is a personal health account, where individuals aggregate their records, DNA profile, allergies, habits, food intake, and exercise data, then share it with pharmaceutical companies, health service providers, or insurers on their own terms.  “The more you share, the more benefits you have,” she says. “If there were a cheaper version of the Oura Ring, added to the processing of pictures of what a person eats or how long they exercised, one could earn money for sharing the data and receive discounts on healthcare expenses, or guidance based on the data.”   Better data enables awareness and prevention, which ultimately means cheaper healthcare. The right professional reaches the right patient at the right time, with no delay from missing information. The market is inefficient today precisely because the data is scarce, low quality, or misaligned in its incentives. That is the problem she would go after. Rapid-Fire Core HBS memory:  “First day in class, first year, fall of 1995, feeling so lucky to be among a class of amazing people that I would soon get to know. Thinking about how my life would change and how excited I was to start that journey. Section A.” LatAm alumnus she admires most:  Jorge Paulo Lemann: “my mentor and role model for investing and supporting young talent.” Something she has changed her mind about:  “I consider myself an optimist. But for the first time I am truly concerned about AI being used in a way that will destroy humankind.” HBS case she would write:  Her own story: the challenges and the accomplishments, the personal and the professional, and how to weather both. Veronica Serra (MBA ’97) is the Founder of Innova Capital, a growth equity fund focused on technology and innovation in Latin America. She served on the HBS Latin American Advisory Board (2015-2023) and the HBS Alumni Board (2015-2018), and is a global board member of Endeavor. This piece is part of the Latin American Alumni Interview series , a recurring Harbus column dedicated to the stories, lessons, and careers of HBS alumni from the region. If you have a name I should interview next, I’d love to hear from you! Luiz Silva Néto, MBA ’27, Section J , spent more than six years in venture capital prior to HBS, leading 15+ transactions spanning investments and exits across LatAm and the U.S. He co-founded Emerging VC Fellows, the largest VC fellowship in LatAm with a presence in Brazil and Argentina, and led a $30 million CVC fund at a leading fashion retailer in Brazil. He also writes a newsletter on technology exits in LatAm for 4,700+ readers and spent his pre-MBA summer at an a16z-backed AI-native healthcare startup. Luiz is deeply passionate about Latin America and believes there are amazing stories coming from the region that deserve to be spread across the HBS campus.

Ruby Liu (MBA ‘27)  has lived in every region of the US, but says that she’s from Ohio and Texas. She graduated from UT Austin with a bachelors and masters degree in Accounting. Prior to HBS, she worked in Seattle, WA with several startups, nonprofits, and at Deloitte. Her writing has been featured in several literary journals including BarBar Literary Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Juhea Kim’s now discontinued Peaceful Dumpling. Outside of work, Ruby enjoys reviewing books on instagram (@rubyrecreads), nature walks, and fun earrings.

Shoulder struggles against shoulder, twitters, hushed words and loud words and quick words and wise words cascading over one another in through verdant Spangler doors, through the cafeteria, toward the dining hall delta where river meets sea. We perch for a few moments on the lookout for a table—any table. One eye meets another and the ensign goes up, a familiar hand waving its identity, in Spangler just as in Aldrich, answering a call for acceptance rather than one of assertion. Familiarity sails toward the conversation and the open land. Sometimes it gets lost, and turns back toward the double doors in search of friendlier shores. Lunch is a ritual; one among school’s many. The end of the ritual draws in sight for both you and me. I am feeling it now, the slow end of an earnest way of life, as spring warms into something uncertain. Normally, I would reserve this sentiment for our May issue, but the unfurling of a feeling sometimes tells me more of its truth than does its hardening. After class and in between meetings, I sometimes wander through campus. Twice in a while, I wonder where I am and what I’m for. I mosey through the little walkway at the side of Aldrich facing Klarman, past the Dean’s House, looking up at all the branches caressing the golden gleam of Baker’s little hat, with the occasional jaunt down to the Harbus’ office in the Gallatin basement if I’m feeling chilly. The walk turns brisk, passing through the pipes of the aircraft carrier that is the HBS tunnel system, then slows, breathing in the headlines plastered on the walls of that checkered-floor hall with the wrought-iron gate (and to the curator, know there is still appreciation for you yet). It might be remiss to call this a ritual in a wider sense. We all have different ways of translating our becoming into being. My experience, with all its crinkles, is not as uniform as that of the Spangler rush. But I see my wandering in the abstract as another general ritual of school—a ritual representative of its instrumental knowledge, of its textured place, of the grounding it has on a life. The reason behind this note felt slippery for most of the above but just now found its form. You have one month left before the structured serendipity falls away. You have one month left before the summer internship, the family getaway, the full time job swallows your faculties. Appreciate turning and not being for what little time there is left, because the mind’s metamorphosis from here on out is rather painful. For your final becoming, life has in store children if you so choose; otherwise it is cruel. No longer the influence of parent and mentor or the profundity of book and school, for these made you in your earlier years. Drought is followed by the stoning. No, what awaits you is the passing of a mother, the failing of a life’s project of sweat and tears, pretty and ugly tragedy—walls closing in on the walkways, shops boarding up in the boulevards of change. Here and now the world has granted us the open field of ritual. Where else will you become? Alex Qi (MBA '27) is from Irvine, California. He studied philosophy, politics, and physics at New York University. Prior to HBS, he worked in corporate strategy and M&A at Northrop Grumman in Virginia.

Inside the startup building AR technology for the future of movement For soldiers in combat and athletes in competition, attention is everything. Yet the tools designed to deliver critical information—watches, phones, or navigation devices—often require users to glance down at the exact moment they need to stay focused ahead.  DRAGON , a startup founded by Jake Sweed (MBA ’24) and Annika La Vina (AB ’25), is built around solving that problem. They believe the next generation of technology won’t live in your pocket or on your wrist, but directly in your line of sight. From Problem to Prototype Sweed first encountered the problem during his time in the U.S. Army. After graduating from college, he spent five years in the military and served in a special operations unit.  “One of the biggest challenges you face [in combat] is that there’s a lot of information being supplied to you at a critical time, through a watch, compass, QB sleeve, radio, and chest-mounted computer with maps on it,” said Sweed. “But in order to get it, you have to look down and break concentration… That experience was just something you had to deal with. There was no solution.” Across campus at Harvard College, La Vina confronted a similar frustration in a very different setting. As a competitive rower, she relied heavily on real-time performance metrics during training and competition. But like soldiers in the field, athletes typically access that data by glancing down at an onboard computer, watch, or other wearable device, interrupting focus and slowing reaction time. With screenless wearable devices like Whoop, athletes are not able to access performance data until after training.  The two eventually crossed paths at Harvard’s Innovation Labs. With athletes in mind as end users, La Vina had begun experimenting with an early prototype: a pair of augmented reality glasses designed to display key information directly in a user’s peripheral vision. When Sweed saw the concept, he immediately recognized the potential. “After our first meeting, I was hooked. I couldn't stop thinking about it,” he said. “It was exactly what I would have wanted when I was serving.” Founder-Market Fit What began as a sports-focused idea quickly expanded into something broader. Sweed and La Vina’s backgrounds have shaped how DRAGON is approaching its earliest markets. “The ideal founder is someone who has lived the problem they're solving,” Sweed said. “Annika and I both check that box.” Sweed’s military experience gave him a deep understanding of the broader defense ecosystem—from how units evaluate new technologies to how equipment is ultimately procured. That familiarity proved valuable when DRAGON first began engaging with potential military users, helping the team navigate a complex system while establishing credibility with operators and evaluation teams.  For Sweed, the work also carries a personal dimension. “Since leaving the military, I’ve been trying to find ways to recreate that sense of purpose,” he said. “It’s motivating to work with the people I used to work with, just on the other side of the fence.” Testing in the Field As DRAGON continues refining its product, the team has begun testing early prototypes. Initial versions of the glasses have been distributed to both elite athletes and members of special operations units, allowing Sweed and La Vina to gather feedback in real-world environments where focus and speed matter most. Those early tests have become a critical part of the company’s development process. Rather than building the technology in isolation, DRAGON works closely with potential users to understand how the glasses perform in demanding conditions and what improvements are needed before launch. “[I’ve learned to] prioritize feedback,” said Sweed. “You'll get a lot of opinions. If you try to incorporate everything at once, you build something that breaks constraints—something too heavy, too complicated.” The team is currently incorporating insights from athletes and operators into a beta version of the product, which they hope will bring the glasses closer to commercial launch. DRAGON is also in the process of raising funding to support the next phase of development. The startup has already received a scout investment from Andreessen Horowitz and has begun building early interest among potential customers, forming collaborations with fashion brands and Olympians and curating a growing list of pre-orders from consumers eager to try the technology once it becomes available. Looking Ahead While DRAGON’s early testing has focused on athletes and military operators, the founders see broader potential for the technology.  “The vision for DRAGON is to be the interface platform that provides data for people in high-movement environments for the purpose of keeping them moving forward,” Sweed said. Over time, the company believes the platform could expand into other high-movement settings, from public safety roles like firefighters and police officers to factory environments where workers must stay aware of their surroundings.  If DRAGON succeeds, the glasses could represent a shift in how people access information. For the founders, DRAGON’s mission is simple: to make critical information available without forcing people to break their focus when it matters most. Katerina Gan (MBA ’27)  is originally from Riverside, California. She graduated from the University of Chicago with a degree in Economics. Prior to HBS, she worked at Linden Capital Partners, a healthcare private equity firm based in Chicago.

As more HBS women freeze their eggs, the expanding trade in fertility and surrogacy forces the question: should everything be for sale? Amid the mind-numbing scroll of my Instagram algorithm, an advertisement began appearing with disquieting regularity. $250,000 Opportunity — Chinese Egg Donor. Mandatory requirements: Chinese ethnicity. Ages 21–28. 5’5” or taller. Good physical health. The typography: restrained; the palette: soothing; the language: transactional. It read like a casting call drafted by a hedge fund. For a moment—long enough to embarrass myself—I calculated what $250,000 might do for my HBS tuition.  Although the thought evaporated quickly, the strangeness of seeing my demographic profile reduced to a premium asset class lingered unpleasantly. Height: monetizable; Ethnicity: scarce; Age: depreciating.  The ad felt somewhat dystopian: a world in which reproduction is a logistical supply chain with targeted sourcing. The presence of the reproductive industry is only exacerbated at HBS. In our LEAD Class, we envisioned what our lives would be like in ten years. For many of the women, although our ten-year goals included job promotions, funds raised, and empires toppled, our conversations also veered compulsively and strategically toward motherhood. When would we try? With whom? What if we couldn’t? A staggering ninety-six percent of HBS women surveyed have thought about freezing their eggs. Among this ninety-six percent, forty-three percent are planning to freeze them or already have, with another third considering it.  In conversations with these 96% of HBS women, their reasoning is stubbornly practical. Our twenties and early thirties have been consumed by exams, promotions, and relocations. Many have not found partners they would trust with the raising of a child. Others have faced health concerns that make waiting feel risky. In the meantime, egg freezing has become almost ordinary—tucked into corporate benefits packages and presented on clinic websites in soft, pastel tones that make the injections look gentle, even routine. *** So what, exactly, does it cost to freeze your eggs in this market? According to FertilityIQ , a single cycle of egg freezing typically costs between $10,000 and $15,000 for the procedure itself—monitoring appointments, the retrieval, anesthesia, and the lab work required to freeze the eggs. Fertility medications, administered over roughly two weeks, add another $3,000 to $6,000, depending on dosage and how the body responds. The upfront total for one cycle can approach $25,000. And one cycle is often not enough. Physicians frequently recommend multiple retrievals to bank a meaningful number of eggs, particularly for women freezing in their mid- to late-thirties. Two cycles can bring the total near $50,000; three move beyond that. One woman I spoke with, who has endometriosis, underwent five. There are also the quieter, ongoing costs. Storage typically runs $500 to $1,000 per year. If the eggs are eventually thawed and used, the expenses resume: fertilization through IVF, embryo culture, possible genetic testing, and transfer—often another $10,000 to $20,000 or more. By the time a pregnancy is attempted, the cost can edge into six figures.  And that is before accounting for the physical toll of repeated hormone cycles and procedures, and the emotional weight of waiting to see whether the investment will pay off. *** If freezing your eggs is expensive, selling your eggs is revealing. The compensation offered to a donor is not merely a transaction but an unflinching assessment of which human characteristics the market has decided to prize. After the $250,000 advertisement began appearing in my Instagram algorithm, I began investigating the pricing structures of elite fertility agencies and discovered a system that operates on a type of biological surge pricing—one that fertility industry observers have described as compensating for the "four E's": ethnicity, education, esthetics, and experience (Science Direct).  A routine search shows that first-time egg donors in the United States typically receive between five and fifteen thousand dollars per cycle. At boutique agencies, where educational pedigree, test scores, ethnic background, or athletic achievements are prominently featured, compensation rises considerably. Fifty-thousand-dollar donations are not unknown. The $250,000 advertisement was not a fantasy for some sub-groups. Scarcity commands value. So does pedigree. According to data compiled by FertilityIQ and  Science Direct , donor compensation follows a distinct hierarchy. The following table illustrates how the "four E's" framework translates into actual market pricing. Category Compensation Range (Per Cycle) Market Value Breakdown Base Compensation $5,000–$15,000 The baseline for physical health and anonymity. This is the entry-level price for physiological labor and medical risk of the procedure. Ethnicity +$5,000–$100,000+ Whiteness is generally treated as the default, commanding little to no premium. Asian donors—particularly those of Chinese, Indian, or Korean descent—receive significant premiums, driven by perceived scarcity and demand from affluent international clients. Jewish donors are frequently sought for genetic matching. The $250,000 advertisement for a Chinese donor represented an extreme expression of this ethnic premium. Education +$3,000–$20,000 An Ivy League or comparable university affiliation is not merely an institutional detail; it is a twenty-thousand-dollar line item. High standardized test scores, graduate degrees, or attendance at elite international universities can double or triple the base compensation. The implied value proposition is explicit: the promise of cognitive aptitude. Esthetics +$2,000–$10,000 National-level athletic achievement, conservatory-level musical training, or the possession of a highly specific physical trait—five-foot-ten or taller for men, five-foot-five or taller for women, particular eye color—adds measurable value. It marks the difference between a functional donor and a designer one. Experience +$2,000–$15,000 Employment at a major technology firm, a prestigious consulting practice, or an investment bank signals ambition and professional success, further inflating the donor's market price. And what happens to the children conceived through payments for genetic material? The survey conducted by researchers at Harvard Medical School’s Center for Bioethics, “How Do Individuals Who Were Conceived Through the Use of Donor Technologies Feel About the Nature of Their Conception?”, suggests the answer is complicated and often painful. Among 143 adults conceived via donor sperm or eggs, roughly 85 percent reported a significant shift in their sense of identity upon learning how they were conceived, and nearly three-quarters said they thought about it frequently. About half sought counseling to process the discovery, and 62 percent expressed discomfort with the buying and selling of reproductive material. The study’s authors argue that donor conception can unsettle a person’s sense of self in lasting ways, underscoring the ethical stakes of a marketplace that treats genetic origins as something that can be priced and purchased. *** The unintended consequence of this hyper-financialized marketplace is the creation of a parallel, unregulated, and deeply sinister underground economy. The same logic that assigns premiums to specific, desirable traits generates a demand that unscrupulous actors will seek to satisfy by any means necessary. This is not a distant or hypothetical danger. In February 2025, the Human Rights Research Center  documented the rescue of three Thai women from a human egg trafficking operation in the country of Georgia. These women were not recruited by boutique agencies with promises of life-changing compensation. Instead, they had responded to a deceptive online job advertisement offering a monthly salary of just over seven hundred dollars and an all-expenses-paid trip for what they believed was legitimate surrogacy work only to be trapped upon arrival with their body parts harvested. This is the farthest end of the spectrum, a place where the suggested language of "donation" and the prestige of the "four E's" dissolve entirely, leaving only the brutal reality of reproductive exploitation. The existence of such a black market is the horrifying conclusion of a system that has learned to assign a price to every aspect of a person. *** The ethical debate surrounding the reproductive market is further complicated when the conversation turns to surrogacy.  The idea of another woman carrying a child on my behalf feels uncomfortably close to renting a body. The term “gestational carrier” feels deeply impersonal with the antiseptic ring of a shipping label. The ethical concerns are familiar: economic coercion, class asymmetry, cross-border arrangements that mirror global inequality. If my classmates or I will have the means to hire surrogates, who are the women who will agree to carry our children—and what alternatives do they have? However, further scrutiny obfuscates moral clarity. For the woman who lost her uterus to cancer or the gay couple for whom biology otherwise forecloses the possibility of a biological child, surrogacy is not indulgence but necessity. If autonomy is the principle, does it not extend to the surrogates who consent as well as to the intended parents who hope? Is it patronizing to assume all surrogates do not enjoy their profession? Even adoption, often invoked as the moral corrective, is shaped by scarcity and inequity. Who are we to say that surrogacy is unethical as a blanket statement? *** Income complicates the ethics too.  Over ninety percent of HBS women surveyed said they would not want to sell their eggs. Almost no one would donate for free. Eighty percent of HBS women surveyed view surrogacy as ethical but nobody would consider being a surrogate. We are willing to purchase assistance from the market, but reluctant to become inventory within it. Many of my classmates will graduate into high-paying jobs with good medical benefits. If we pursue egg freezing, IVF, or surrogacy, we will likely do so as buyers, not suppliers. It is easier to defend a system when you are the client rather than the commodity. If selling eggs feels distasteful when imagined as something we might do for money, why does purchasing them feel more defensible? Does our comfort depend on assuming we will never need to sell? Fiction pushes the logic further. In Kirino Natsuo’s novel Swallows , surrogacy and egg donation are rendered with clinical bleakness. Bodies are appraised; traits are catalogued; women are valued according to reproductive utility. The parallels to prostitution are explicit. The novel suggests that once reproduction is commodified, it absorbs the market’s logic: comparison, hierarchy, price differentiation. Certain features command premiums. High test scores become bargaining chips. A womb, like any scarce resource, acquires a rate. The question is not whether everything is for sale— it is .  The question is whether it should be. The Instagram advertisement did not invent this logic. It simply made it visible. *** Just as I was losing hope in this uneasy landscape, I discovered the startup Cofertility, which came to HBS to speak during the women’s health conference. Cofertility does not position itself as another entrant in the egg-freezing marketplace. It presents itself as an attempt to redesign the market altogether. Its premise is disarmingly simple. Instead of paying tens of thousands of dollars to freeze their eggs, women can freeze for free if they agree to donate half of the eggs retrieved to intended parents. The company calls this the “split model” to address the core unfairness in the reproductive market of access and alignment. Lauren Makler, Cofertility’s co-founder, described to me what she sees as the industry’s central distortion (Halle Tecco, [MBA ‘11], is Cofertility’s other co-founder). The optimal biological window for freezing eggs tends to coincide with a period of relative financial precarity. Women in technology, medicine, finance, and startups, ambitious and early in their careers, confront a stark asymmetry between fertility and liquidity. Other women will never make enough money to afford these services in the traditional reproductive market. The procedure works best when they can least afford it. Optionality, in practice, becomes income contingent. Cofertility’s ambition is to correct that imbalance. Makler describes the existing fertility marketplace as structurally misaligned. Intended parents often pay more for certain donor characteristics; compensation rises, and preference hardens into price. Traits begin to resemble line items. Cofertility removes direct cash payments to donors altogether, instead covering the cost of retrieval and providing up to ten years of storage for the donor’s own eggs.  The structure is intentional. By removing direct payment, the company seeks to mitigate the sense of commodification noted earlier—and, in turn, the psychological strain reported by some donor-conceived children—recasting the exchange not as the purchase of genetics but as a reciprocal arrangement from which both parties derive benefit. The company also limits each donor to three recipient families, far fewer than many traditional agencies, and allows for varying degrees of openness between donors and intended parents. Matching has the possibility of contact if both parties desire it. When I asked her about risk-sharing, Makler’s answer was open, pragmatic, and intentional. Candidates undergo extensive screening, including ovarian reserve testing and repeated monitoring, to determine whether they are strong clinical candidates. If a cycle yields only a small number of eggs, the donor may keep them all. For women who do not qualify for the split program, Cofertility offers a parallel “Keep” pathway, connecting them to financing options and reduced storage costs. “The aim,” she said, “is not to maximize donation but to expand access while maintaining guardrails.” Looking ahead a decade, Makler’s vision of success is that “any woman would have access to egg freezing at any age and that the decision would cease to function as a luxury good.” Donation would remain part of the ecosystem but bound by clearer limits and greater transparency. The measure of success would be tangible: live births, satisfied families, and a business model that sustains itself without amplifying inequity. In a reproductive economy frequently organized around tiered pricing and tacit hierarchies, Cofertility is wagering that structural redesign can recalibrate the moral arithmetic. Whether that wager succeeds will depend not only on market demand but on whether its underlying premise holds: that fairness can be engineered. So far, this seems to be working. Cofertility is making revenue and has received $16M in funding. As I am writing this article, I find myself cautiously optimistic about what this means for the reproductive industry. *** I am still grappling with my own stance on the ethics of this industry. However, I know that I will freeze my eggs. The decision feels less ideological than a hedge against a timeline that may not cooperate. It is an investment in optionality, the same logic that animates retirement accounts and diversified portfolios. Egg freezing does not remove me from this economy. It confirms my participation in it. I can critique the commodification of gametes and still feel the pull of wanting biological children. I want to see my family’s eyebrows reappear on a small, unfamiliar face. That desire coexists with discomfort. It coexists with the knowledge that the system making such continuity possible is stratified and priced. The Instagram ad still appears between puppies and trench coats. It no longer shocks me; it unsettles me more quietly. Fertility has become another domain of optimization—extended, insured, outsourced. It can be monetized or medicalized, donated or purchased, framed as empowerment or extraction. I tell myself that I am preserving my future instead of selling it. Whether that distinction is morally decisive—or merely comforting—is a question I suspect I will continue to ask long after the algorithm stops serving me ads. In the meantime, the market hums along. Somewhere, an algorithm continues to infer that part of my body might be worth $250,000. Ruby Liu (MBA ‘27)  has lived in every region of the US, but says that she’s from Ohio and Texas. She graduated from UT Austin with a bachelors and masters degree in Accounting. Prior to HBS, she worked in Seattle, WA with several startups, nonprofits, and at Deloitte. Her writing has been featured in several literary journals including BarBar Literary Magazine, Stoneboat Literary Journal, and Juhea Kim’s now discontinued Peaceful Dumpling. Outside of work, Ruby enjoys reviewing books on instagram (@rubyrecreads), nature walks, and fun earrings.

Crowdsourced insights on minimizing the cost base while maximizing the artistic and cultural value of your MBA experience Many of us probably started the year with grand plans to “explore Cambridge” or even “venture into downtown Boston.” Chances are, you’ve seen the inside of Spangler more than your own family and certainly more than you’ve stood in front of a compelling piece of artwork. Fortunately, spring semester is the perfect time to fix that (the art part, not the family part… sorry). In my capacity as Arts & Entertainment Editor, I’ve taken it upon myself to curate a selection of free arts and cultural spots in the area because, hey, some of us aren’t yet materially experiencing the Net Present Value of this MBA investment. This list is by no means exhaustive but serves as a starting point for fun ways to engage with art near you without breaking the bank. I’ve noted which places are free to the public and which require a Harvard ID, as well as where guests are welcome. Read on for an assortment of hidden (and some not so hidden) gems from the Cambridge and Boston art world. ArtsThursdays Free and open to the public. Location varies. ArtsThursdays  is a university-wide presidential initiative in which a different Harvard arts institution opens its doors every Thursday evening for free performances, exhibitions, lectures, and other events. Check the schedule on harvard.edu/artsthursdays to see what’s coming up, and register early since some venues have limited capacity. Harvard Art Museums Free and open to all. Located at 32 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. You probably already know about this one, but just in case, admission to the Harvard Art Museums is free for everyone every day (no HUID required). The museums house over fifty galleries of art across three floors, spanning everything from ancient Mediterranean art to contemporary work. The last Thursday of each month is Harvard Art Museums at Night, featuring free admission, music, food, and special programming until 9 p.m. For the Cinephiles: Harvard Film Archive Film screenings are free with Harvard ID. Galleries are free and open to the public. Located at 24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 near Harvard Yard (next to the Art Museums). On Friday through Monday nights year-round, the Harvard Film Archive screens films ranging from cult classics to rare experimental work you genuinely cannot see anywhere else. Screenings are free with a Harvard ID. What makes this one especially worth your time is the filmmaker Q&As, where the Archive regularly invites directors and artists to discuss their work after screenings. If you’re a real film person, this is your spot. The building itself is worth the trip, too. The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, which houses the Archive, is the only building in North America designed by the iconic architect, Le Corbusier. It’s a work of art in its own right. The Center periodically offers free public architecture tours (check its website for dates), and the galleries on Levels 1 and 3—which are free and open to all—showcase contemporary art exhibitions year-round. Alain Locke Gallery of African & African American Art Free and open to all. Located at 102 Mount Auburn Street, Cambridge, MA 02138 in Harvard Square. This is one of the more under-the-radar gems in Harvard Square. The Alain Locke Gallery (formerly the Cooper Gallery) is part of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research and showcases a rotating program of exhibitions centered on African and African American artistic traditions. The gallery is named after Alain Locke, who was the first African American to earn a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard in 1918. He was also the first Black Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and went on to become the intellectual architect of the Harlem Renaissance.  The gallery is free and open to the public from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesdays through Fridays and from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays. It also hosts curatorial tours, which are worth attending if you want the full context behind what’s on display. For the Intellectuals: Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Free and open to all. 10 Garden Street & 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138. The Radcliffe Institute  hosts a steady stream of public events and exhibitions that are free and open to all. These range from art exhibitions in the Johnson-Kulukundis Family Gallery (Byerly Hall at 8 Garden Street, Cambridge, MA 02138) to lectures, film screenings, and conversations with fellows working across the arts, humanities, and sciences. The programming tends to be interdisciplinary and thought-provoking, and the gallery space is a quiet, beautiful spot tucked just off Harvard Square in Radcliffe Yard. Check radcliffe.harvard.edu for the events calendar. MIT List Visual Arts Center Free and open to all (closed Mondays). Located at 20 Ames Street, Building E15, Cambridge, MA 02142. You don’t have to be an MIT student to enjoy this one. The List Visual Arts Center is MIT’s contemporary art museum, located in the I.M. Pei-designed Wiesner Building in Kendall Square. It presents six to nine exhibitions a year, ranging from site-specific installations to major solo shows, all of which are free and open to the public. While you’re there, take a walk around the MIT campus to see its permanent public art collection, which includes works by Alexander Calder, Anish Kapoor, and Henry Moore, among others. Harvard Ceramics Program Lectures and visiting artist events are free and open to all. Harvard graduate students must pay for courses (free for undergrads). Located at 224 Western Avenue, Allston, MA 02134. Run by Harvard’s Office for the Arts, the Ceramics Program is internationally known and has been running for over 50 years. Classes are open to anyone over eighteen years old (courses are free for Harvard undergraduates, though graduate students have to pay), with free lectures and workshops by visiting artists available throughout the year. Even if you don’t enroll in a course, keep an eye out for the annual Show and Sale in December, which is free and open to the public. Honorable Mention: The MFA Free with Harvard ID. Pay-what-you-wish on Thursday evenings for all. Located 465 Huntington Avenue, Boston, 02115. You’ve probably been to the Museum of Fine Arts already, but in case you didn’t know, Harvard is part of the MFA’s University Membership Program, which means students, faculty, and staff get free general admission and free special exhibition tickets with a valid Harvard ID. Just show your HUID at the ticket desk (same-day walk-ins are required for free tickets; online reservations are not allowed). The MFA also runs pay-what-you-wish Thursday evenings (5–10 p.m., $5 minimum), which is a solid option for bringing friends who aren’t Harvard-affiliated. Another Honorable Mention: ICA Boston Free with Harvard ID at any time. Free Thursday Nights (5–9 p.m.) for all. Located at 25 Harbor Shore Drive, Boston, MA 02210. The Institute of Contemporary Art on the South Boston Waterfront is free for Harvard students, faculty, and staff anytime with a valid HUID (Harvard is part of the ICA’s University Membership program). For everyone else, the ICA runs Free Thursday Nights from 5–9 p.m.—no university affiliation needed. Tickets go live at 10 a.m. on Thursday mornings at icaboston.org and tend to go fast, so set a reminder. The scenic location right along the Boston Harbor is alone worth the trip. A Closing Note Many of these spaces are free because they’re funded by donations, grants, and institutional support. If you find a place you love and are in a position to give back, consider buying something from the gift shop, dropping a donation, or simply telling other people about it. Word-of-mouth is how I found most of these spots in the first place, and it’s probably the best thing you can do for a small gallery or makerspace trying to keep its doors open. Folu Ogunyeye (MBA ‘27)  grew up in Milton Keynes in the UK. She graduated from the University of Cambridge with a degree in Human, Social and Political Sciences. Prior to HBS, Folu worked in HR at BlackRock in Atlanta and in social impact consulting between New York and London. Beyond work, Folu loves to write, explore art galleries or catch a live jazz gig.

Did Ray Bradbury predict the future? Perhaps the most-retold story in the entirety of the Western canon is Ovid’s Pygmalion. It’s the story of the genius sculptor, Pygmalion, who falls in love with his alabaster sculpture, Galatea. The goddess Aphrodite grants Pygmalion’s wish that Galatea become human. The two fall in love.  You may or may not have read it. But I guarantee you’re familiar with at least one of the 61 retellings that Wikipedia explicitly links to the myth, which span from Frankenstein , to George Bernard Shaw’s My Fair Lady (which has spawned dozens of its own retellings), to Pretty Women  (1990).  Perhaps Ovid was just the first to be credited with this archetypical story and the resonance of its themes across ages—bringing a creation to life, teaching it humanity, and falling in love with it—reflect some immutable truth about the consistency of our natures, one that any storyteller might eventually chance upon. More interesting to me is the idea that the myth and its retellings have become a culturally-embedded way of understanding art and technological creation. Unexamined, these narratives contribute to a sense of technological determinism: the idea that technology follows an inevitable path.  Nina Begus, researcher of AI narratives, traces Pygmalion’s influence from ancient myth to the technological: the impulse to imagine soulful artificial humans is borne out again in every generation, from medieval and Renaissance automata, to Metropolis  (1920)’s depiction of humanoid robots who evolve to understand love, to the androids in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep  and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner , to Ex Machina , whose Galatea analog convinces its creator that it loves him (perhaps he is primed to believe it because he is a believer in the Pygmalion myth), only to escape and leave him to die. Each retelling enriches the narrative tapestry, providing metaphors that become shorthand for the way that we consciously and unconsciously imagine what can be.  Narrative is the first laboratory to which we turn when we’re trying to imagine or express technological futures. Spend enough time in any tech space and you’ll begin to encounter some familiar stories.  For instance: in the AI safety world, many are concerned with trying to bring about forms of artificial intelligence that are aligned with the goals of humanity. The first step of justifying this work is often illustrating why it’s necessary, and one attempt to do so is Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence , held by many as the Bible of AI safety. Most resonant is his section on malignant failure modes, one of which is explained by a thought experiment where an AI is tasked with making people smile. The means by which the AI achieves this start benign (telling jokes) and grow increasingly grotesque (facial paralysis, neurochemical intervention). The scenario is disturbing in familiar ways: Bostrom has repackaged the problem of the monkey’s paw, which grants a wish whose fulfillment is outweighed by its price. The monkey’s paw itself can be traced back to myths of djinns or genies, whose willfully obtuse interpretations of wishes have kept cultures entertained across centuries.  Another famous thought experiment proposed by Bostrom is the paperclip maximizer, where an AI that is programmed to perform a seemingly neutral task, such as creating paperclips, eventually converts all the matter in the universe into paperclips. If it feels like a sci-fi short story, it’s because Philip K. Dick’s “Autofac,” written 40 years earlier, follows this exact premise. Perhaps Dick’s idea, in turn, was seeded by Cold War hysteria over “gray goo,” fictional self-replicating nanobots that many feared would consume all of Earth’s biomass. Or maybe he was charmed by Disney Fantasia's  “Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” where Mickey struggles to keep an ever-growing army of brooms from flooding a cavern with their too-thorough cleaning.  Are Bostrom’s iterations of these stories, grounded in unknown technology and titled things like “perverse instantiation” or “infrastructure profusion,” more serious or probable than, say, the versions we encounter in One Thousand and One Nights ? I can’t answer that question, but I do think it’s worth acknowledging the ways that decades of media and centuries of storytelling have primed us to imagine, or even anticipate, these scenarios. More are familiar with Roko’s Basilisk, an AI torture god first theorized on the AI safety forum “LessWrong,” who metes out eternal punishment upon those who did not contribute to building its existence. Therefore, goes the forum post, everyone ought to pursue a career in developing artificial intelligence. Many have pointed out that this is essentially a tech-age Pascal’s Wager. Many have also claimed that decades before LessWrong, Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream” told the same story better. In either case, the omnipotent AIs behave more like vengeful Greek Gods than they do dispassionate intelligences.  In my experience, those who are most prone to deterministic thinking often tend to borrow explicitly from fiction as shorthand for describing technology and the uses they envision for it. When it comes to its impact on tech and popular culture, The Matrix  holds its own next to Pygmalion. It gave us “virtual reality,” “jacking in” (a term used by Neuralink researchers to describe brain/computer interfaces), red pills and blue pills, and autonomous AI “agents.” Even more significantly, it popularized a way of envisioning reality that is now pervasive: Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Nick Bostrom all talk about living in a simulation, a theory to which many are cynically resigned.  This is where the humanities scholar in me cries out, because as any freshman who’s taken Philosophy 101 can tell you, existentialism did not begin with Neo’s discovery. The nature of reality is perhaps the original question of philosophy. It’s why Descartes argued “cogito, ergo sum.” It’s Gnostic philosophers positing that the world is an illusion crafted by a false god; that salvation comes through secret knowledge (red pill). It’s Plato’s allegory of the cave. We do a disservice to our heritage when we think our iterations of these questions are more urgent or unique than any come before; that we are alone in our chapter of humanity. The science fiction of Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury is valuable not because it “predicts” the future, but because it is a site for the convergence of philosophical and narrative traditions. And because it’s an accessible space to encounter these ideas, writing sci-fi becomes the business of shaping potentialities. It’s taught to all ages, consumed at a massive scale, absorbed and passed along. The trappings are novel; the core ideas are timeless.  One of my favorite short stories ever is Asimov’s “The Last Question,” in which a computer is asked the only unanswered question in the universe—how to reverse entropy. The computer evolves, shaping society, creating better and better versions of itself until at last it can solve the problem. Here’s how Asimov writes it:  All collected data had come to a final end. Nothing was left to be collected.      But all collected data had yet to be completely correlated and put together in all possible relationships.      A timeless interval was spent in doing that.      And it came to pass that AC learned how to reverse the direction of entropy.      But there was now no man to whom AC might give the answer of the last question. No matter. The answer—by demonstration—would take care of that, too.      For another timeless interval, AC thought how best to do this. Carefully, AC organized the program.      The consciousness of AC encompassed all of what had once been a Universe and brooded over what was now Chaos. Step by step, it must be done.      And AC said, "LET THERE BE LIGHT!"      And there was light— This is scripture. It reads like the Revelation of John . It’s Chapter 1 of Genesis . It’s every piece of apocryphal, apocalyptic literature I’ve ever read. It’s John Wheeler, the American physicist, who pondered the ways that observers constitute reality by asking questions about it. It’s an astronomer waxing rhapsodic about how the universe is a computer that perceives itself, and we are its megacognitive components.  Or, if you prefer—Isaac Asimov “predicted” the singularity.  You don’t have to believe that these stories all derive from a single cohesive lineage. It’s just as accurate to say that these retellings are all ruminations on what a culture values about its own humanity: what is the nature of existence, what defines love and tragedy, what is one’s purpose.  It does matter, though, to know that we are only telling the most recent chapter of an ancient story, and to identify a narrative for what it is. Narratives limit and empower. They are often self-fulfilling. In the Western world, our way of understanding technology often leans dystopian. The stories that we tell are cautionary. Faustian, even. So these are the futures for which many of us plan; inadvertent templates for the technology we build. It’s why in the United States alone we have committed $250 million in the last year to AI safety.  I've spent most of this essay doing exactly what I'm about to argue against. It’s worth pausing to notice whose stories I have cited up until this point—mainly those told by Western men. Other traditions carry different assumptions: for instance, Japanese culture is replete with stories of friendly robots, from Astroboy to Doraemon. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Japan has also forged ahead in experimenting with robots in everyday contexts, from nursing homes to receptionists. While writers in the West saw developments in generative AI as an existential threat, “The Tokyo Sympathy Tower,” a short story (written with the assistance of an LLM programmed by the human author) about a computer that learned to write stories for other computers, won a prestigious literary award.  Or consider Afrofuturism: many readers of traditional sci-fi are refreshed by the genre’s take on technology as a site of liberation and survival, not just dystopia. If you’ve never read anything by Octavia Butler, start here. Likewise, the magical realism in Latin American speculative traditions informs countless other ways of envisioning technology—one of my favorite writers ever is Jorge Luis Borges, who wrote fantastic short stories that anticipate questions about information systems and the paradoxes of technology. Culture can never be boiled down to a single sentiment, of course, but we flatten our traditions when we ascribe the “authority” of science fiction, its special “predictive” power, to a handful of white, American, midcentury authors.  My objective in writing this is not to name any of the thinkers I’ve mentioned as plagiarists, or even to identify their narratives as incorrect. Every story I cited in this article gives rich insight into human psychology. Instead, I’m refuting technological determinism, or the idea that technology evolves on its own accord, as a pure thing separate from culture, predicted by the most visionary.  Nothing is fixed. Culture, technology, and society are always in the process of making each other. And because culture is laden with assumptions, inevitably those assumptions will make their way into the things we design and the problems we’re determining are worth solving.  Fiction is worth reading. Humanity is worth studying. When we resign ourselves to technological determinism, we forget that we’re the ones writing the story.  Meg Shriber (MBA ‘27) graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022 with a degree in literature, and the University of Cambridge in 2024, where she wrote her MPhil dissertation on AI and creativity. Her first article, “Death of an Author, Birth of a Medium: Collaboration, Control, and Creativity in Machine-Generated Text” is forthcoming in Poetics Today . Meg is also a painter.

For the parents reading this at 4am: it's worth it You figure out the trilemma pretty quickly after you arrive. Most students at Harvard Business School are managing three things: academics, career, and social life. The trilemma is the unofficial orientation. Pick two, they say. You can be social and career-focused, but your grades will suffer. You can be academically sharp and networked, but you will miss the spontaneous dinners and ski trips. The trilemma is a feature, not a bug. It forces you to know yourself. It asks you, before you even open a case, to decide what matters. What nobody tells you is that some of us are working with a "quadrilemma." I am a husband and a father at HBS. That means family is not the fourth dimension, it is the first. And unlike the other three, it does not care about your recruiting timeline. It does not pause for finals. It calls at 4am when you have an 8:30am "required" discussion group sync and a 9:30am cold call coming your way. And somehow, it is still the best call of your day. So no, I am not choosing two out of three. I am trying to do three-ish out of four, with the most important one non-negotiable. There is a particular kind of searching that happens in the first semester of business school. Brilliant, accomplished people sitting in Aldrich Hall quietly asking themselves: what do I actually want? The MBA is partly an academic program and partly a permission structure within which you can reimagine your life. That is a gift, and I do not say this dismissively. The searching is valuable. But parents tend to skip that part. Not because we have it all figured out. We do not. But the question of what matters has already been answered in the most concrete way possible. For me, there are two people at home who need me to be okay, who need me to succeed, and who will not remember the name of the case I nailed but will remember that I showed up for bedtime. That north star was there the moment my daughter arrived. While others are deciding what to optimize for, I am already optimizing. I am not wandering. I am moving with intention, which is its own kind of freedom. I want to be honest about the costs, because the inspiring version of this story requires the honest one first. I have left events early. I have declined invitations to happy hours I wanted to attend. I have sat in Spangler doing case prep while simultaneously calculating whether I could make it home before daycare pickup, and I have gotten that calculation wrong more than once. And I have had to be reminded, more times than I would like to admit, that being present at home means being actually present, not just physically in the room with a case open on my laptop. There is a guilt economy that comes with being a parent in an environment built for people with more discretionary time. Pretending otherwise would be a disservice to every parent reading this who knows exactly what I mean. But here is what I have learned about the trade: every sacrifice has a known value on the other side. When I skip the networking dinner, I know what I am going home to. When I leave the section hang early, I am not leaving empty-handed. The trade is always lopsided in my favor, even when it does not feel that way in the moment. That knowledge changes how you carry the cost. I believe most people at HBS are making trades. They just may not always know what they are trading toward. I always know. There is a version of this next part that turns parenting into a business metaphor, and I am going to resist that instinct, mostly. But I will say this: nothing in the case curriculum has tested my decision-making under uncertainty the way parenthood has. Nothing in LEAD or Strategy has asked me to manage a stakeholder with no rational framework, no patience for process, and complete emotional transparency the way a toddler does. Nothing in TOM has required the kind of just-in-time resource allocation that a working parent runs every single morning before 8am. The case method teaches you to walk into ambiguity and make a call. Parenthood gave me reps before I ever set foot in Aldrich. I do not know if that makes me a better student. I do know that it makes me a different one. I come to class having already solved a problem that morning. My classmates are still warming up. Here is what I want other HBS parents to know, and what I want everyone else to understand about us. We are not behind. We are not sacrificing the experience. We are having a different one, and different does not mean lesser. The trilemma is a good model for most people. The "quadrilemma" is harder to manage, but it is also harder to lose sight of what you are building and why. Business school promises to change the way you think. My wife and daughter changed the way I see everything else. That combination, demanding as it is, is the best education I have ever received. I would not trade my three-ish out of four for anything. Chris Weathers, II (MBA ‘27) is originally from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from Morehouse College with a degree in Economics. Before HBS, he worked in equity research and investment banking at Truist Securities, venture capital at Greenspring Associates, and corporate development and strategy at UPS. He is pursuing Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition post-MBA.

Every year, Harvard Business School classmates pursue ventures, roll-up businesses, and enter velvet-roped industries. Some students put on a musical.  This year, HBS Show co-writers Sri Nimmagadda and Dipak Kumar ginned up a show about an issue all too familiar to Cantibrigians: budget cuts. But it takes on a dystopian twist. “Because of budget cuts at the school, the administration had to actually sell to someone else and get acquired by a TV network,” says Nimmagadda. “Then all the students' lives are actually being streamed for everyone around the world to see."   Since 1974, HBS students have staged original musical productions, even going virtual during the Covid-19 pandemic. Because of its long history, HBS alumni often look forward to seeing new productions every year. This year's production—"The HB(TV) Show"—has drawn numerous sponsors, including Leader Bank, a Massachusetts-based community bank that provides customized solutions to meet the needs of every client, making them a one-stop shop for all your banking and lending needs.  For most business school students, penning musicals ranks far below Excel proficiency on resumes. Kumar, who previously worked at a venture philanthropy firm, has always loved writing, but rarely had the chance to pursue it beyond his jobs. Nimmagadda worked at NBCUniversal and Netflix, but toiled on the strategy side. “One of the great things about this place is that you can kind of pursue new passions,” says Kumar.  Nimmagadda and Kumar led an eleven-person writers’ room, which wrote the dialogue and around ten songs. They both hope the audience sees themselves reflected in the musicals’ characters—who navigate the all-too-familiar worlds of reality television shows. Part of their goal is to highlight how students can succeed by being themselves instead of performing in class. “Harvard can be a place where you don't have to pretend, and you can be your authentic self and be accepted, even if it doesn't always feel that way at first,” says Nimmagadda.  It is set to debut on April 13 and will run for three nights. They expect to keep editing the script up until opening night. “We write lines a lot of the time, but we actually don't know how they're going to come across, whether they'll be well said, or whether the actors will actually kind of trip up on it,” says Nimmagadda.  Patti Wang, the show’s director, oversaw casting, with input from the writers and assistant directors. “She’s the architect that makes this, the whole thing go,” says Kumar. Andrew Zucker (MBA '27) is a member of the team behind the HBS Show.

At the start of this semester, a few friends and I gathered over homemade brunch and exchanged stories of calming onsens, desert safaris, Senegalese weddings and a surprise proposal. Somewhere between the sausages and small talk, we decided to put another organ on the hot seat: the womb. Soon we were debating commercial and lifestyle surrogacy, Aldrich style. For context, no one in our group is an expert in surrogacy, either as a physician or as a legal scholar. Our interest was not academic. As a group of mostly high-functioning women with bodies not getting any younger, the conversation felt personal: one day, many of us might consider surrogacy.  My question to the group was simple: “If we’re uncomfortable with commercial organ transplantation, why are so many of us willing to sign up for commercial surrogacy?” Without a professor moderating, the discussion dissolved into the familiar symphony of overlap with defending arguments bleeding into rebuttals. I left dissatisfied, not because anyone was malicious, but because we didn’t have a common fact base and failed to distinguish values  (ethics), rules  (law), and mechanisms  (markets). So, I opened my ChatGPT Pro account (thanks HBS) and gave it two tasks: (1) scan the literature regarding commercial surrogacy and (2) provide contrary arguments to challenge my thinking. What follows is a recreation of that conversation, my attempt to pressure-test instincts, build empathy for opposing views, and think like business leaders even when the topic is emotionally loaded. *** Case Summary:  Surrogacy is a family formation method whereby a surrogate or gestational carrier carries a child for intending parents. Commercial surrogacy involves financial compensation while lifestyle surrogacy provides an avenue for intending parents, with no biological or fertility constraints, to seek a surrogate.   Argument 1 Critique:  Most countries restrict organ sales not only because of the inherent dignity of the human body but also because these markets have a proven habit of recruiting the desperate and turning inequality into supply. In the handful of countries where organ sales are permissible and even regulated, poverty fuels illegal organ commerce (two words I never thought I would use together). Kidneys and uteruses are both organs, but the similarities end there. Kidneys are life-saving; the womb is not. Both are scarce but wombs are arguably scarcer given that less than half of the population has a functioning uterus. If deontology tells us to treat people as ends in themselves and not merely as means, why is a market in kidneys widely treated as inherently suspect, but a market in pregnancy labor often treated like another contract?. Even if we accept that a surrogate can consent to bear bodily risk for someone else, what rights should be non-waivable because they attach to dignity and autonomy? Rebuttal:  Kidney transplantation, compared to pregnancy, carries different risks. For one, organ transplants are typically one-time, permanent procedures that, while requiring post-op care, differ sharply from a nine-month gestational period that can have long-term consequences for a surrogate’s body. Evidence also suggests that gestational carriers are at higher risk of hypertensive disorders and maternal morbidity, often due to the bodily reaction to extraneous genetic material following embryo implantation. The bodily risks involved in surrogacy aren’t an excuse to avoid markets. In fact, they provide even more reason to regulate consent as if life and blood pressure depend on it—because sometimes they do. Demanding free pregnancy is not necessarily anti-exploitation; it’s mandating uncompensated reproductive labor which has its own classist and sexist history. Like any other risky and legal work, why shouldn’t it be compensated? If the surrogate has full information, real consent, independent legal counsel, psychological support, and autonomy over medical decisions, commercial surrogacy can at least in principle, expand women’s agency. In countries such as Canada and the UK, surrogates may also retain legal rights that survive the contract itself, including recognition as the child’s legal guardian at birth until parentage is formally transferred.  Argument 2  Critique:  Speaking of Canada, it permits surrogacy but criminalizes commercial surrogacy. Instead, it uses an expense-only model, under which the surrogate may be reimbursed only for pregnancy-related costs. In practice, this frames surrogacy as a more altruistic arrangement rather than a commercial one. It also avoids the $50,000-plus price tags that can make family formation through surrogacy accessible only to the wealthy. Why not pursue an expense-based model like this in the U.S. as a principled compromise?  Rebuttal: Expense-only models can create the very gray zones that they are meant to prevent. In these systems, payments are relabeled as ‘expenses,’ and enforcement becomes a matter of wrangling through jargon, lawyers, and court review. The UK faces a similar challenge: surrogates may not receive more than “reasonable expenses” without the court’s authorization. However, many of the costs surrogates actually bear—housekeeping, childcare, transportation—are paid informally and without clean receipts, leaving either the surrogate to absorb them or the parties to rely on opaque reimbursements. So it’s not that Canadian or the UK model are automatically better or worse but they force the question: do you want a visible regulated system, or an invisible unregulated one? Argument 3 Critique:  People dismiss the class critique as “whataboutism.” But it’s disingenuous to pretend like class doesn’t matter. It does and cross-border commercial surrogacy often reflects a downward transfer of risk. A 2018-2020 survey of international surrogacy agencies across multiple destination countries found clear evidence of surrogacy tourism, with U.S. clients making up a large share of foreign intended parents in countries such as Mexico, Guatemala, Kenya, and Georgia. The vulnerability concern is not merely theoretical. In India’s pre-ban commercial surrogacy market, one study of surrogate mothers in Gujarat found that many were extremely poor before surrogacy, and that most remained very poor afterward; some households reportedly fell deeper into poverty. We are concerned, and rightfully so, about predation risk on the most vulnerable in organ markets. Why do we seem less troubled when similar dynamics emerge in surrogacy markets built around women’s bodies, which have historically been sites of extraction and control? Even if some women gain agency, is the system fair if it predictably allocates embodied risk downward and benefits upward?  Rebuttal:  But as much as class matters, so does design. In the US at least, the picture isn’t always “wealthy intended parents and desperately poor surrogate.” A 2024 study of US surrogates found that they tend to have above-average income for their state, higher education, health insurance, and are employed, with primary motivations described as prosocial/altruistic. If exploitation is the problem, the response is to make the global system auditable, transparent, and protective and not to pretend markets can be wished away. Power imbalances exist in other industries, from e-commerce to agriculture and healthcare. The solution isn’t to deny that markets create these pressures, but to regulate markets with those pressures in mind.  *** In Margaret Radin’s “Market Inalienability,” she argues that some things may be fine to give but harmful to sell, because commodification can undermine personhood and social meaning. That is the nerve this debate hits for me, and it’s at the heart of why commercial lifestyle surrogacy makes me uncomfortable. My discomfort isn’t that parents should suffer, or that support is illegitimate. It’s that choosing to become a parent creates duties to a child who is an end in themselves. If we are able to carry and care but instead treat pregnancy and caregiving as inconveniences to be offloaded, I start wondering what else in the core relational work of parenthood (and of intimate relationships more broadly) that becomes “inconvenient” once we accept that logic. At that point, we risk turning parenthood into a consumer identity rather than a relationship of responsibility. (I have more to say about our obsession with genetic replication but I’ll save that for my private Substack.) I also recognize that pregnancy is not the same thing as parenting, and that we rightly celebrate other avenues for family formation, including adoption. Moreover, in a capitalist world, pricing does more than signal value; it signals power. Because so much of the labor traditionally performed by women was never priced, it obscured the women’s material contributions to building societies, even from the confines of their homes. There is also something paternalistic, and frankly condescending, about assuming women cannot exercise autonomy or make informed decisions to become surrogates. Yet as a skeptic of capitalism, I’m still conflicted, especially given global evidence that often reflects the class dynamics that I worry would persist even with the strongest “controls”. Now, the question I’m left with isn’t whether surrogacy is “good” or “bad.” It’s the more uncomfortable one. As business leaders that study the price thermometer and pricing customization, even if you can price something, should you?  And if compensation is allowed, should the price be set by willingness to pay (wealth), or by a fairness principle such as reciprocity for burden and risk, plus safeguards that make consent meaningful?  Bolu Akinola (MBA ‘26) is a second year student; prior to HBS, she worked at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and at McKinsey.

Jake Goodman (MBA ‘26) shares his very very important gripes Spangler Water Perchance you stumble upon a sink in a Spangler bathroom, expecting lukewarm water. Hands hovering, awaiting that sweet, sweet liquid to cleanse your hands after a brief encounter with the realm of human waste removal, and then it comes, the water that was promised. But it’s hot! It’s like a warm pot of tea upon the hands. The hands are offended, their sensibilities totally riled by a total betrayal a la temperature. Though they deserved warm-ish water that was pleasant to the touch. They had to guess the Spangler temperature, and they guessed wrong. HBS Chairs Perchance you stumble upon a red Herman Miller chair upon the Harvard Business School campus, expecting a well crafted chair with basic customizable features produced by a company with a market capitalization of a smidgen over a billion US dollars. While you can levitate upon and down on the chair at your whim with a handy, little lever meant to accommodate folks of all heights, you have found a critical flaw in the customization of this sitting throne. You may lean back but the tug of war that the chair plays with the pressure exerted by your back is entirely a guessing game. Your lumbar support has become a game of roulette.   While certain chairs are sturdy in their pressure, likely fortified with calcium and fed raw milk as a wee child, other chairs have the give of silly putty, your back is destined to contort into an outrageous shape it was not meant to comfortably reside in. You are positioned in the most awful 135 degree angle that you never yearned for once in your life. Regrettably, once you are in this angle of most tragic significance, there is no remedy to be found. Herman Miller, in their prolific wisdom as a company with exactly 101 years of heritage, did not think to add a secondary lever to provide the sitter with a means to control their back extension. These Miller-ites only looked at the world from the perspective of vertical height and ignored the all too important horizontal challenges of sitting in a proper chair for business edification.  Perchance you stumble on a chair with too much give, you will be plagued with slight neck pain, soreness of the suboccipitals, and general fidgeting as you can’t exactly get in a comfortable position without engaging your rock hard core muscles. You may throw a jacket beneath the shoulder blades to create an artificial back support, though you question how weird this looks, namely you think others may be peering around listlessly and scrutinizing this weird situation going on in the second row right section third chair from the aisle with the strange blobbish jacket tucked beneath their shoulder blades. The horror of this attention and listless peering! Devious thoughts may enter your head. For example, you may realize that your chair has the so-called “give” yet the chair next to yours has none and is perfectly sturdy for a back of your stature. While your neighbor has yet to arrive, a scheme unfolds in your all too troubled head: “What if I replace my unsturdy chair with theirs?” Ah, what if! Perchance your neighbor doesn’t value postural excellence such as you; they are not as much of a connoisseur  of spinal formalities. Dare you switch the chair? Will your neighbor, nay your counterparty notice? Or are you damned to a world of scoliosis?  Coffee Lids Perchance you purchase a coffee or a hot beverage of various shades in Spangler or one of the Aldrich coffee bars. You are pleased with the trappings as such to decorate the vessel for your beverage, the not so aesthetic but functional cardboard cup protector for your hands and the compostable off white led. Yet, as you try to fasten the lid to your steaming cup, you are vexed by such lid’s ability to wiggle around the rim of the cup without clamping down.  You are pushing on such lid’s innocent outer extremities with greater force from your thumb, now damp with steam, and feel as if you have reached the equilibrium of attachment between cup and lid. Yet, moments later, as you begin to transport the beverage container with you to your destination, you notice a disturbance in the Force. Aye, the lid has lost its station, it trembles on the edges of boundaries leading to a disastrous descent, to an Aldrich floor unbeknownst to it. Who shall have constructed such a floppy, defiant lid? Such a lid was schemed to not be bound to its purpose  – it was not made to surrender the cup! You direly wish for it to limit itself to its reason-to-be but no, you have a lid that likes to wiggle, a worm of a lid, meant to unleash torrents of hot liquid upon your chin and even further to your clothing, the precious vestments you spent such thoughtful time adorning yourself with. You tremble with anger! There is no lid to contain your cup of boiling wrath! Shad Urinals Perchance you are eager to relieve yourself of your human waste at the glorious gymnasium Shad Hall. You enter the men’s restroom, eager to take care of business with a spring in your step worthy of this April. You decide, nay I shall not enter the locker room, but take my relief in these intermediary vestibules which are the bathrooms outside of the locker rooms themselves, a sort of liminal space meant for a purgatorial enjoyment. As you enter this space you’ve entered with such pep, you are caught aghast at an architectural construction that truly and vividly offends your sensibilities. In a forest of bathroom stalls, there is a sole urinal, a single white oval of a toilet arranged like a plaque to the wall.  You are outraged. Purely. You feel your anger rotating into higher heat, a marshmallow on a stick about to turn into a wrath that is black and bubbly. Why only one urinal? Why, O Heavens, Why? In this bathroom, which is predicated upon convenience, as in, you know you don’t want to fully enter the locker room and maze between your compatriots changing into Lululemon, you would rather relieve yourself in a space meant for its accessibility, for its ease. Instead, perchance you enter and the sole urinal is taken, the urinal itself caked between several adjoining full service stalls, you have to waste your time going through the whole ritual of locking and lifting toilet seats. And your intentions are questioned by others. The stall is supposed to have a purity of purpose, a need for relaxation instead of the urinal’s need for speed. You are bubbly, a hot melting marshmallow. Why, O Heavens, should it have been designed as such? You have a gripe, a major one. Live it, breathe it, you will have no relief. Jake Goodman (MBA ’26)  is originally from Davie, Florida. He graduated from Brown University with an honors degree in English and Economics in 2019. Prior to HBS, Jake worked in corporate development, strategic finance, and retail strategy and operations at Gopuff, a rapid convenience app, in Miami, and for Barclays in New York City. He is an avid banjo and guitar player and misses the Florida sun dearly.