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Jake Goodman (MBA ‘26) shares the script to make you go viral I know everyone wants to know what a day in the life of a HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL student is like, so I’m going to show you what it’s like. Oh by the way, I’m a founder, just to get that out of the way. Let me walk you through a day in the life; let’s go! 7:30 A.M. Woke up, yeah even HARVARD students do that too, haha. Did normal Harvard things like brush my teeth and eat my protein cereal. Oh my god, protein cereal is such a goated business idea. I think I’ll wear this super fun sweater I thrifted last weekend in NYC. I’m like barely ever in Boston on the weekends because it’s really hard living in a Tier 2 city where the food within the 2 miles of campus I voluntarily choose to limit myself to kinda sucks, you know. Nothing is New York, after all.  Anyway, everyone thinks at HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL you wear suits or something dumb like that but no we just dress casual. 8:49 A.M. Boston winter is like so terrible. At least in New York I could like Uber everywhere but my Canada Goose is a godsend, literally, protein cereal level goated business too. All it does is snow and be grey, but I’ve been taking vitamin D pills and have an Oura and a Whoop so I still feel functional.  Even though I literally just came from my on-campus apartment, I had to get an iced latte just so I can make it through class and not fall asleep, which is hard because we do these things called cases where you are supposed to read 10 pages and debate things. Even though I’m a full time student and pay $80k+ in tuition and it only takes 20 minutes and even 10 minutes if you’re fast, I don’t really read the cases because I’m smart enough to make super intelligent and extremely thoughtful comments without doing any reading. That’s how I know I’ll be a successful founder because I can read the room well and improvise. I got this, everyday, all the time. Also, all my professors totally love me which is how you know you made it, when a HARVARD professor loves you. 9:10 A.M. Okay, going to class now. We aren’t supposed to use our phones so I’ll have to leave soon, but don’t worry I’m still checking Twitter under the table. We have these silly white name tags but they feel very HARVARD, look see them. Everyone has them and we sit in these big rooms where the professors use chalk. Chalk, like the kind from the 1800s or whenever Harvard was founded. Everyone has these bright red Herman Miller desk chairs that honestly are more comfortable than they seem because my back hurts sometimes, like actually only sometimes though. Brb, they hate phones here and are archaic about technology, so I’ll come back after class.  12:10 P.M. Class is finally over. Thank god, I was about to pee my pants. I’m going to grab lunch with my friend Jane Deer. See this is Jane, she’s super nice and we have a lot of compatible interests like squash and espresso martinis. Plus, she’s also a founder so sometimes we bond over like the struggle, you know, of having a business idea in your head that no venture capitalist will deploy LP dollars towards, well yet anyways. We’re both pre-revenue and I guess pre-product too, but the pre-product doesn’t really get you any cache so I usually drop that. Anyway, there’s only one main dining hall, which is so sus, this school just wants to bleed us dry. It’s called Spangler since some old geezer donated like a cajillion dollars to have me think of him every time I’m hungry. Ugh, I love walking through and feeling like I’m at a mixture of a wedding venue for accountants and Hogwarts. Even though I’m like super broke, I eat out all the time. Cooking is bad for my aura as a founder because it’s not a good use of my precious mental energy so the cafeteria gets the job done. Like I’m not going to come to school with a lunch box like I’m in third grade again, plus I’ll be rich soon so eating out is like a loan to myself. The options can be healthy and cheap, especially if you have a plate of only spinach and one hard boiled egg.  1:00 P.M. After lunch, I’m definitely not reading cases, because, like I said, I don’t do that. I usually write my to-do-list which has like a million things on it. I never go to sleep with my to-do-list done. I finally remembered to sign up for another free AI tool with my student discount. You honestly can never have too many. AI is like my brain now, literally. I think I’ll print out some notes from ChatGPT for my next class since I haven’t spoken all semester. HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL gets really touchy if you don’t speak a lot since we have these weird number grades where they tax you for being quiet. I literally don’t even have to think anymore, it’s crazy.  Oh I also need to pick up a case for next week which I won’t read. See this is the guy in the case pick up area. Say hi.  3:10 P.M. Ugh, today was also rough since it was a three case day. It’s crazy as a full time student that we’re in classes for most of the day. Like this isn’t supposed to be a 9-5 gig. Anyway, because I’m so burned out, I’m going to go to the HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL gym. Shad is where I ensure I get the proper work-life-balance I need, especially as a founder. Burn out is real. It’s kinda crowded, but the locker rooms are so nice, and god, I need the sauna in this Boston winter to sweat out my stress. 4:30 P.M. My Peloton workout felt amazing, and now I’m freshly showered so time to be productive for a little bit. Maybe I’ll send out two customer discovery emails. I love discovery, feel like I’m the Magellan of vertical AI for the niche within the niche industry I was in before HBS that actually isn’t that niche and has a good of amount of Tier 1 VC-funded competition already. I can’t wait to be in SF soon where I can talk to people all day who do the same amount of discovery that I do, but it’ll definitely be weird being around people who didn’t go to HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL and actually think an MBA is kinda dumb and a waste of time considering I could have just been discovering and even maybe building all day, like Bob the Builder, me yeah the founder Bob. But it’s okay, I’ve always wanted to pay high taxes and high rent to live in an overpriced suburb and sell software. 4:44 P.M. I’m exhausted now, but I’m still going to socialize. I’m meeting up quickly with my friend John Doe to chat about our summer plans and how we’re going to be super locked in. Locking in is so sweet. I can’t wait to spend 8 weeks working on something instead of going to class and not reading cases. My work ethic is so ready for this.  5:02 P.M. Quietly sneaking into the Alix Earle talk. It’s so cool that we get all these amazing guests at HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL who are super famous. I never feel more seen than when people who are just like me and building their personal brand all the time come to campus. I could definitely be like Alix Earle and she’s more relatable to real business today than all of these dumb Warren Buffett cases we do. Anyway, I see celebrities all the time which I guess is a perk of going to HARVARD. Here’s a quick pic of me and Alix. I didn’t pitch her on my startup yet. Need to be post-product, but that’ll happen the next time she’s on campus, which is seemingly all the time now. 6:00 P.M. About to head to dinner at this cute Thai place in Harvard Square. I love Cambridge because it has all these nice little restaurants (again not NYC restaurants though, sadly). I’m going with the Entrepreneurship Club which charges us dues to be in it, which I hate. Most of the clubs charge dues here, which sucks but money isn’t real. Anyway, the dinner is subsidized so it’s more like I gave interest-free financing for a future meal (see I learned something in FIN 1, but not FIN 2).  8:00 P.M. Ugh, I should be tired but socializing wakes me up. I need to quickly go to my friend’s birthday drinks, which features a very select group from our section that clearly only associate with each other and no one else in the section and furthermore don’t attend any section events out of a staunch separatist vibe that mostly stems from feeling like we’re the presumed “cool” crowd or at least that’s what our aura displays.  10:02 P.M. Finally going home. My Whoop is going to hate me tonight, but I’m so glad the Chase Reserve covers a year free now, goated money losing business idea, but the card has good thunk value. Hope you enjoyed learning what a day in the life of a HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL student and founder is like. Follow me for more real talk on what HARVARD is like and how my startup is going. I also need to end this video by telling you I’m a founder because Kevin O’Leary said it was good to have a personal brand. This is my personal brand, hope you were influenced  to like me. 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.

Over winter break, while catching up with my cousins, we discovered something curious. Over the past few months, one of our uncles had contacted each of us separately, asking for $30 to help his cow, which was supposedly struggling through a complicated birth and needed a vet. The requests were spaced just far enough apart to avoid suspicion. By our count, the cow had delivered five times in three months. If true, my uncle had quietly solved world hunger. We laughed. But beneath the humor was something familiar. This was not the first urgent request, and it would not be the last time we sent the money anyway. Many Africans in the diaspora know this script well: a health emergency, a small but immediate cash need, and the implicit understanding that family shows up. Remittances are not trivial flows. They total over $100 billion annually across Africa and, in many countries, exceed foreign direct investment. In effect, they function as an informal insurance system, filling gaps left by weak formal health financing. But once the money arrives, it enters a household with competing priorities. Hospital bill or school fees? Painkillers now or savings for the next emergency? In environments where formal insurance is scarce and liquidity is fragile, every dollar carries multiple obligations. The trust that holds this system together is real. But it is also fragile, and it is no substitute for a product that actually works. So what happens when it comes to our health; the most important thing we all have? How do families protect themselves against the shocks and emergencies of health?  Why Insurance Has Failed Africa Imagine being offered a product that asks you to hand over money every month, money you may not have, for a promise that will only pay out if disaster strikes, only if you can navigate the paperwork, and only if the clinic approves that they actually have your file on record. Now imagine that product being sold to someone who earns $8 a day, in cash, in a small business in Nairobi. This is the story of health insurance in Africa. It is a story of spectacular, predictable failure, and one that even its architects are beginning to admit. The numbers confirm what any market vendor already knows. Health insurance penetration across Africa is among the lowest in the world. Analysis of over 35 countries on the continent showed an average of just 7.9% coverage across the continent. In large and small countries alike, for example Nigeria and Zambia, the rate is below 2% in informal sectors. Even in Kenya, routinely celebrated as East Africa's most sophisticated health market, only about 18% of the informal market is actually enrolled. These are not statistics about poverty. They are statistics about product-market fit, or rather, the complete absence of it. The structural reasons are not mysterious. First, more than 80 to 90% of workers across many African economies are employed informally, without fixed salaries or predictable monthly income. Asking this population to commit to recurring premiums is not a policy failure. It is a design failure. You cannot sell a fixed-cost product into a variable-income economy and then blame the buyer when adoption stalls. Second, health insurance has a trust problem that goes beyond affordability. When premiums are paid consistently but claims are delayed, disputed, or simply denied, the product stops feeling like a safety net and starts feeling like a gamble the house always wins. In much of Africa, that perception is not paranoia. It is accumulated experience. Third, African governments have consistently underinvested in the foundation on which any insurance system must stand: In 2019, health spending averaged just 5.3% of GDP across the continent, well below a global average of 10%. The human cost of this failure is not abstract. In 2019, over 95 million Africans experienced what economists coldly call catastrophic health spending, meaning a medical bill that consumed more than 10% of household income in a single blow. For 152 million people, a health crisis meant crossing the line into poverty: selling a motorbike, withdrawing a child from school, borrowing at punishing rates from a neighbor, or simply not going to the clinic at all and hoping the fever breaks on its own. Fifty years of trying to transplant a western insurance model into this reality has produced these numbers. Perhaps it is time to try a different product altogether. The Airtime Moment Here is what Africa did not do with telecommunications. It did not wait for everyone to open a bank account and set up a monthly direct debit before buying a phone. It sold prepaid airtime, scratch cards, top-ups, pay-as-you-go bundles, and watched mobile penetration explode across a continent that had never had the landline infrastructure, the conventional model supposedly required. By 2024, mobile money platforms like M-Pesa were processing over $314 billion annually across seven African markets alone. The leapfrog was not accidental. It was the result of matching a product's payment structure to how people actually earn and spend money. What if we applied the same logic to healthcare? A prepaid health pass system would allow individuals, businesses, and diaspora families to purchase credits covering specific bundles of primary and non-surgical care: a clinic visit with basic labs, a maternity and child care package, monthly chronic disease check-ups for a diabetic parent. No monthly premium. No insurer who vanishes when you actually need them. Just a tangible credit, bought when you have cash and redeemed when you need care, as familiar and immediate as buying airtime on a Monday morning. The concept is already taking shape in pockets across the continent. Microinsurance and community health platforms are experimenting with low-cost, condition-specific coverage, products targeting malaria, maternal care, and chronic disease management at price points that match the daily realities of informal workers. These models work precisely because they are not selling probability. They are selling access. That distinction, between paying for an unlikely payout and paying for guaranteed care, is the entire argument. Two Reasons This Can Scale The pass model has structural advantages that traditional insurance has never managed to replicate. The most personally familiar to many Africans in the diaspora is what might be called the leakage problem. Africa receives over $100 billion annually in remittances, more than it receives in foreign aid or foreign direct investment. But when money is sent as cash, it enters a household economy with many competing claims: hospital bills, school fees, groceries, and yes, occasionally, the local drinking den. Even when the original request is entirely genuine, the cash rarely arrives ringfenced for the purpose it was sent. The sender has no visibility. The recipient has no accountability. And the healthcare need, which was real, goes unmet or underfunded. A health pass changes this dynamic entirely. Instead of wiring cash and hoping loved ones make it to the clinic, a relative in London or Houston purchases a specific healthcare credit, one that can only be redeemed at an accredited clinic for an agreed bundle of care. The money does not pass through a household budget. It goes directly to a healthcare interaction. For the diaspora, this is not a new financial instrument. It is a solution to a problem they have been living with for decades. There is a second advantage that is perhaps the most underappreciated: prepayment may actually address the supply side of the healthcare market, not just the demand side. Many African private clinics operate on razor-thin working capital because out-of-pocket payments are volatile and insurance reimbursements, when they come at all, can take 90 days to arrive. A prepaid system with instant digital settlement gives providers guaranteed, predictable revenue. That is the financial foundation a clinic needs to stock medicines, retain qualified staff, and invest in reliable equipment. The pass does not just buy care. It finances the conditions required to deliver it. What It Needs to Work The infrastructure for this system is not a future aspiration. It already exists. M-Pesa and its equivalents have demonstrated that digital payment rails can reach the most informal corners of African economies. What is required now is three things working in concert: platforms that process pass redemptions on top of existing mobile money systems; provider networks willing to honor standardized care bundles at agreed quality levels; and regulatory frameworks that protect consumers and align prepaid healthcare with broader universal coverage goals. These are not trivial requirements, but they are orders of magnitude simpler than what Rwanda and Ghana attempted, and achieved, with their national insurance schemes, which required fiscal capacity and state coordination that most African governments cannot currently replicate. A pass system can begin with 50 accredited clinics in Nairobi. It does not need to start everywhere at once. The Honest Caveat To be sure, a prepaid health pass is not technically insurance, and it should not be mistaken for one. It cannot shield a family from the financial ruin of a cancer diagnosis, a surgical emergency, or a prolonged hospitalization. These catastrophic events are precisely what risk pooling exists to cover, and a pass does not pool risk. But here is the strategic logic that critics often miss: in markets where insurance has become synonymous with money that disappears, attempting to sell invisible risk protection first is a fool's errand. Fifty years of that approach has left 97% of the continent uncovered. The pass does something more immediately achievable. It solves for the high-frequency, low-cost healthcare interactions that constitute the vast majority of what African families actually need, while building the digital data and institutional trust that make more comprehensive coverage thinkable over time. You don’t build a bridge where no one’s trying to cross. You want to see people gather on the river bank first. The Choice Africa's healthcare crisis is accelerating: rising chronic disease burdens, persistently high maternal mortality, and government health budgets that have barely moved in a decade. Waiting for traditional insurance to eventually find its footing risks condemning millions to the impossible arithmetic of choosing between medicine and school fees, clinic visits and rent. Healthcare passes may not be a silver bullet. No single product ever is. But they represent something rarer in African health policy than a grand vision: a starting point that matches the economic reality of the people it is meant to serve. The lesson from mobile money was never that the technology was perfect. It was that when a solution meets people where they are, adoption can be transformative. The choice before Africa's health sector is not between flawed passes and perfect insurance. It is between accessible imperfection and inaccessible perfection. One of those options has been tried for fifty years. It is time to try the other. As for our uncle and his extraordinarily productive cow: we are still deciding whether to believe the story. But the next time one of us gets that call, we would rather send a health pass than send a prayer. Kelvin Chege (MBA ’26)  is originally from Nairobi, Kenya. He holds a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology and, prior to HBS, worked at McKinsey & Company in Nairobi, advising clients on strategy and digital transformation.   Joel Adu-Brimpong  is a Ghanaian American MD/MBA candidate at Stanford University and a policy student at Harvard Kennedy School. He works at the intersection of medicine, technology, and health system strategy. His background includes digital health and care transformation at Cleveland Clinic and Stanford Healthcare, early-stage healthcare and life sciences ventures, and precision medicine research in obesity and cardiovascular disease at the National Institutes of Health. His work focuses on building digital infrastructure and behavioral systems that enable high-value care at scale.

Ten years into the new paradigm Editor’s Note: This issue’s From the Archives piece originally ran in November 2016, capturing HBS students’ thoughts and live reactions from midnight to noon. Donald Trump, then the Republican nominee running against Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, won the presidency, defying all odds and the predictions of America’s political establishment—and, seemingly, its business-oriented counterpart at HBS. Ten years on, President Trump, now 79, enters the second year of his second term in office.  As the world reels from the shocking result of the U.S. 2016 Presidential Election, HBS students have written to The Harbus  with their reflections. The mood on campus this morning is somber and perplexed; no one expected this. Sitting in class on Monday morning, only three people raised their hands, when asked by Professor Kevin Sharer, “Who here thinks Trump will win?.” Just last month, a poll across the business school showed that 82% of the student body supported Hillary Clinton. HBS students are known to say (somewhat flippantly) that we live in a bubble. As the anonymous reflections below show, just how much of a bubble we live in seems to finally be sinking in. 11/9/2016 0:21:44 I am extremely disappointed and worried about the message this sends to the rest of the world. 11/9/2016 0:22:05 This election has demonstrated to me, more than anything else, how out of touch I, my friends, my school, the media, and society at large are with what most Americans really want and are truly concerned about. The public discussion has focused so strongly on character attacks (to be fair, most of them have been quite warranted) at the almost complete expense of the real issues at play that the rhetoric rapidly regressed into "How can you vote for a liar?" with smug responses of "Because I won't vote for an egotistical bigot." Flip the nouns to capture the opposing side. We (and I really mean everyone) have spent months very, very closely examining two trees and ignoring a huge forest. The reality is that America is filled with huge numbers of people who feel poignantly disenfranchised and alienated. They don't like the direction the country is moving in. They may have lost their jobs to globalization. They think that the U.S. caters to international interests instead of standing up for its own. They aren't interested in open immigration. They believe that the threat of terrorism is real and that we must do something about it. And now the silent majority has spoken. It's happened. Rather than lamenting our country, joking about moving to Canada, and attacking the other side, we need to recognize that Trump isn't about to win because of his character. He's about to win because he's made the best appeal to address the worst grievances of the largest constituency of voters. We need to recognize these problems and not dismiss them, as we have during the election cycle. Trump is certainly a new page, probably a new chapter, and maybe even a new book. But one man, flaws and all, does not a nation make. We make it. We did yesterday and we're going to tomorrow. Even if many of us feel we've taken a step backward, we still have the power to make America great. 11/9/2016 0:23:48 MY recruiting job just became much simpler. Previously I thought I mighty want to stay in the US a couple of years before returning to my native Colombia. With mr. Trump as president I will most definitely return right after my MBA. A sad history in the history of mankind... 11/9/2016 0:25:15 What the ever lovin' f?!? 11/9/2016 0:26:15 Disappointed but not surprised. We as a liberal coastal intellectual elite consistently underestimate the anger of the average American because by definition we have lost the ability to empathize with them given our "outlierish" characteristics. This leads to a misinterpretation of data and a confirmation bias that blinds us to outcomes which we can't necessarily fathom emotionally. 11/9/2016 0:27:21 Trying to wrap my mind around how disconnected I am from the rest of America. I have over 1,000 Facebook friends and did not see a single pro-Trump post today (aside from a handful who emerged after it became clear he was far ahead). How do I make sense of this? What are the implications for my aspirations as a leader? A female leader, no less? 11/9/2016 0:28:21 Embarrassing. Infuriating. Terrifying. I am trying to be patriotic and accept democracy. I am trying to empathize and understand how a Trump voter could possibly think that he was a better candidate (both morally and tactically) than the most qualified presidential candidate our country has ever seen. I am trying to find a way to fix our broken country that is full of such sad people. But I fear this is impossible to recover from. I fear economic devastation, pervasive hatred, and war. It actually makes me afraid to live here and to be from here. 11/9/2016 0:28:25 Unbelievably scared for our democracy if Trump wins. 11/9/2016 0:30:05 I am scared. Scared we moved backwards. Scared about tomorrow. I am glad I don't have kids because I'm not sure what I would tell them. How is our country so divided? 11/9/2016 0:30:06 "And the world keeps tumbling down...." 11/9/2016 0:30:11 Thinking about HBS' mission, we as HBS MBAs have a choice as to where we want to make a difference in the world. Tonight has made me reconsider my commitment to bringing good jobs back to US manufacturing centers. Why would I want to help people that don't recognize the dignity of my friends and loved ones? Shouldn't I try to improve outcomes in places that don't apparently hate what I stand for? 11/9/2016 0:30:40 I feel like the glass ceiling is taller and tougher than I ever imagined, and that makes me feel hopeless. 11/9/2016 0:30:48 While answering prior to the final verdict, I'm honestly heartbroken at the prevalence of racism, sexism, xenophobia, and white supremacy in a country I am a citizen in. What do these results say about our values? This is the first time I am legitimately having difficulty recognizing or identifying with "my country." There is something seriously wrong in this country right now. 11/9/2016 0:31:01 If only Bernie had been the candidate... 11/9/2016 0:31:50 It's not a vote for racism and misogyny. It's a vote against the inequality and insecurity that globalization and technological advancement have brought, and a vote against losing identity. 11/9/2016 0:31:51 Unconscionable. 11/9/2016 0:32:12 WTF?! 11/9/2016 0:32:16 FML 11/9/2016 0:32:27 We are a nation that doesn't speak to each other. The fact is there are two completely different societies in America. And I don't know how to fix it. 11/9/2016 0:33:35 I am so scared for my rights as an immigrant, a person of color, and a woman. 11/9/2016 0:34:47 Now the Americans know how the Brazilians felt after 7x1 and what the British felt after Brexit. 11/9/2016 0:35:00 I am stunned by the outcome. I cannot believe that the United States is electing someone who is basically a sex offender to the highest office in our country. In doing so, the majority of voters are endorsing disrespect and violence towards women - and to many other segments of the population, among them Muslims, Latinos, people with serious health issues and disabilities, and more. I am seriously concerned about the impact this election will have on the well-being of many people in our country, and especially those who are already the most marginalized or vulnerable - for instance, through likely rollbacks of the ACA, empowerment of those seeking to buy deadly weapons for personal use, and disinvestment in social welfare as a result of a coming reduction of taxes on those who can afford to pay the most. And I am at a loss to know what to do and how to respond in what feels like a true crisis situation. As a business student, I am in search of words of wisdom on what I can do to help make things better in even a small way at what feels like one of our nation's most dire moments in recent history. 11/9/2016 0:35:53 Despairing for all of the progress we have made. 11/9/2016 0:36:29 I'm an Asian-American woman, a first-generation immigrant, and a first-time voter, having become a citizen in 2014. During my citizenship ceremony, I felt so proud and excited to become an American. The origin country of every new citizen was announced that day to cheers and celebration. I felt I was entering the embrace of the greatest country in the world - one that honored my heritage and personal identity. Today, that excitement has fallen through a pit in my stomach. To me, Trump's impending victory tells me everything I need to know about how I am seen by half of America. It tells me how little value is placed on me as a person of color, an immigrant, and a woman. I feel put in my place, and my place is not here. 11/9/2016 0:37:40 The real American is what Trump represents. People in the MBA are in their own bubble and not seeing the silent majority. 11/9/2016 0:37:48 I feel devastated. 11/9/2016 0:51:32 HBS gave the world Bush. Wharton gave us Trump. 11/9/2016 0:51:42 HBS voted 85-3 or something like that in favor of Hillary. It was socially unacceptable for someone to say they supported Trump. About time for people at HBS to reconnect with common people and step outside the bubble. How do people plan to lead and change the world if they don't even have an iota of sense about what the "other" people are thinking? 11/9/2016 0:55:10 The popular vote tells me that America is just as racist, sexist and xenophobic as I always feared it to be. I hope we can now stop being in denial about it, so we can start the difficult process of education and healing. 11/9/2016 0:56:55 This election has affected me in so many ways: as a woman who has seen a candidate casually brag about sexual assault, as a member of the LGBT community watching a candidate threaten to take away marriage equality and the fundamental rights that accompany it, and as the daughter of a Syrian immigrant watching a candidate describe immigrants as rapists, thugs, and terrorists. I am deeply saddened and shocked at how the election results are turning out. This election has made me realize how truly divided our society has become, and how much work we have going forward to repair it. I am afraid for the future of our country, socially and economically. I am afraid that we will lose all of the progress obtained towards key civil rights issues affecting women, LGBT, ethnic minorities and immigrants. Lastly, I fear the impact that this will have across the world in terms of economic impact and global stability. This is not the America that I know and love. 11/9/2016 0:57:18 I am heartbroken. Today changed the course of our lives, no matter where you come from, what you believe in, who you are... after today, freedom is at risk. Today is not about America, today is about the world, today is about HUMANITY. We underestimate the impact this moment in time will have in our history. I am concerned for my country, I am concerned for my people, I am concerned for your people too. More than ever, it is important to be OPEN, FAIR, WELCOMING, DIVERSE, LOVING. We are all in this together, let's stand strong and prove that we can endure because WE ARE GREAT already. #iamwithher 11/9/2016 0:58:05 The debates were very superficial! The truth is that people base their votes on impressions! This result will break America apart and I hope the US citizens will know how to deal with this new future. 11/9/2016 1:05:09 So this is how liberty dies. With thunderous applause. 11/9/2016 1:16:12 We've come so far. If this presidential race has taught us nothing else, it has taught us to BE the change you want to see in the world. Don't leave success up to chance. Don't allow fear and anger to freeze your ability to act. Go out and make change happen. If you are upset about the results of the election, don't despair for long. The fight for equality continues. I'll see you out there. HBS Class of 2018 Proud veteran of this great nation Future change-leader of the world 11/9/2016 1:59:19 I'm one of the secret Trump supporters. He's an impossible candidate to be proud of supporting, or to even defend, but I truly believe he is the lesser of two evils and still very much an unknown in terms of how he will lead. My decision ultimately came down to my belief that our nation's system of checks and balances will keep Trump in check, with even his own party guaranteed to challenge him, whereas Hillary will never be held accountable for her actions by any of the institutions that are supposed to do so - the courts, the media, even the FBI. What troubles me deeply is that anyone who saw Clinton's corruption, dishonesty, terrible judgment and history of placing her political interests above all else as being a more certain harm than Trump's bluster and narcissism, has been completely dismissed by so many Americans and international citizens as racist, misogynistic, ignorant bigots. I found this attitude even more severe in our elite academic bubble than in my other networks, which is why I've kept my political thoughts to myself. I hope that we can have more faith in each other, and in the American citizenry - many of whom have not been given the incredible blessings we have - that our decisions were motivated by legitimate reasons and very real concerns. HBS teaches us that we can disagree with someone yet "assume the best" about where they are coming from and seek to better understand their viewpoint, and I hope we all have the courage to do that going forward in order to unite as a country and as a global community. 11/9/2016 2:13:02 First, the American people have spoken and (very likely, at this point) Trump and a Republican congress is what they chose. While I respect everyone's right to express their opinion and sadness on social media, there is a point at which we need to realize this is about our country. Vehemently berating the elected candidate not only demeans over half the population that elected them but diminishes these voters' voices in the democratic process. From a broader perspective, the election results demonstrate that there is a large voice in the American population that the elite, media, and politicians have failed to identify, understand, or represent. As business leaders, we need to be aware of our environments and how they can insulate us to thinking one opinion is shared, when in fact, there may be a large majority that is simply quiet and reserved about their personal opinions. The fact that Republicans won each branch of government proves the significant underlying dissatisfaction with the current government. Hopefully, the next 4 years bring conversations about what those dissatisfactions are and how they can be addressed. 11/9/2016 2:14:13 I feel as if the curtain was lifted to reveal the ugly face of a nation driven by fear, greed, and anger. 11/9/2016 2:26:06 It's the inequality, stupid. Positive economic growth caused by globalization, freedom of trade and technology has been highly unequally distributed. As an example, median household income in the US has remained stagnant for the last 30 years while the top 10% of the population has seen an important income growth. The increased population polarization has translated into frustration from the ones not benefiting from growth, making them open to listen to more radical views. These people are not stupid, they are looking at past political actions and their current reality. The popularity of extreme right parties in France or Germany, Brexit and now the Trump Presidency are testimonies of how people are willing to trade social rights for the promise of a better well-being. While I personally believe the Trump Presidency will be a backlash in both social and economic issues, this election is a representation that, contrary to what many believe, our system actually works. Democracy is right now channeling a strong frustration that a couple hundred years ago would have been repressed until a war burst. Reversing the increasing inequality trend is not a question of morality or fairness anymore. It's about social stability for our generation and the ones to come. The 2016 electoral events across the West have granted us the luxury of a wake-up call about rampant inequality. Now we have to seriously act on it. 11/9/2016 6:37:06 Worried for the future of the republic -- disappointed in our fellow citizens. 11/9/2016 7:03:09 Every great society has its run. Time for humanity to repeat its mistakes! 11/9/2016 7:58:21 The election has shown that HBS should place much more of a moral obligation on us to think about what is important in the world in our time here. We can't just spend the majority of our valuable time here learning the same financial models as students 10 years ago and 10 years from now. We need to debate the current state of our world, the state of politics, the state of the world economy - if we don't make sure we understand why more than half of the U.S. Population and UK population (in Brexit in June) feel left behind, then who will? Learning tools to proliferate ourselves in high paying jobs has no meaning if we as future leaders don't understand what is truly going on outside our bubble of high performance and a globalized lifestyle. 11/9/2016 9:06:51 As an international student, I could not vote yesterday and I would not have voted for Trump. However, I believe that there are many reasons that explain his victory. First of all, he is the first relevant figure in the USA who has confronted the "dictatorship of political correctness". Most citizens in this country are judged harshly for expressing their views out loud if these are traditional and are therefore extremely frustrated by this situation. Democrats usually feed this monster by criticizing immediately any sentence that could be misinterpreted to try to assert themselves as the moral references. This leads many Republicans to stop expressing their opinion in polls or social groups (but, of course, they still vote!!) Secondly, Hillary was a horrible candidate. She does not connect with other human beings in an authentic way. She has focused her campaign on her condition as a woman, but that is not a reason to vote for or against anybody! Finally, mass media and other citizens that represent the elites have aligned perfectly with Donald's interests. He claims that the political elites don't want him to win because he will stop favoring them. What did all these elites (including Harvard) do? They tried to destroy him. This unanimous support for Clinton has helped him immensely. HBS endorsements (like polls in which 85% of RCs would vote for Hillary) and decisions such as the Republican club of Harvard not supporting Trump have actually reinforced his message. HBS students: next time, if you want to help a candidate, remember who you are and who you represent. Maybe the candidate does not need your help. 11/9/2016 9:58:22 As a brown woman who came to this country five years ago, I never once felt discriminated against and always appreciated how America is so progressive considering gay rights, equality, and pro-choice! And now I realize this was because I was primarily living in the blue states. Today, I'm appalled to see that the country I've loved actually has a majority that sees me as both brown and a woman. I feel weirdly unaccepted. 11/9/2016 10:01:56 Shock. 11/9/2016 10:34:14 My thoughts? Shocked. 11/9/2016 11:36:05 Stunned. 11/9/2016 11:53:15 To those of us whose voices cry out in fear and pain today, this is what I know to be true: our freedom comes from within. Politics are not what make us free. Belief in our inalienable civil rights, our love for ourselves, and our love for all others in the face of hate and injustice is our source of freedom. 11/9/2016 12:43:21 I very intentionally eschew sharing about my deeply personal feelings but this is the rare instance where I needed a cathartic outlet for my thoughts. It is apparent that a tidal wave of despondency has swept over many of those I surround myself with. I, too, feel incredibly dejected and incredulous at what transpired during this election. I wake today struggling to both process my thoughts and to internalize what these next four years might have in store. Do I fear the Trump presidency? Yes. However, do I want him to fail? An unequivocal no. Like many of you, I am highly skeptical of his ability to move this nation forward but we cannot afford to hope that administration fails just so that we can satisfy our vindictive demons and say to his supporters that “we told you so.” As crestfallen and angry that some of us might be, half the nation is celebrating and the way forward is not to blame “White America” or “whitelashing.” Though there may be some truth to such sentiments, it does more harm than good to stoop to his level and allow us to harbor and cultivate hate. Trump ran a fierce campaign grounded in hate and we will have failed, we will have failed her, we will have failed this nation if we allow such hate to transpose onto us and to dilute our values and what we stand for. To my friends, I grieve with you all today but when tomorrow comes, I implore you all – as difficult as this will undoubtedly be - to not let this divide us but rather ask why so many fellow Americans feel unheard and what role have we may have played in contributing to this outcome. Let us suspend disbelief in the United States we think will be and instead rally collectively around making this the United States we all want and deserve over the next four years and in preparation for the years following this chapter. This is exactly that, a chapter, and far from the last one. I end by saying let us not make false gods out of politics. We as a nation, as a people, are so much more and will refuse to let any one presidency define us but rather we will let our actions define what type of presidency this could be.

When Big Sugar bore the arms of empire and why we may, too. We Americans love democracy. Our government has long paid more than lip service to the ideas of Locke and Lincoln. As the world’s foremost republic, we have been — we are — unwilling to acknowledge any imperial kinship with the Empire we divorced. America, nonetheless, shares more than language and a history with Britain. She shares the same lover: big business, who could not get enough of this affair. Companies went overseas to bring home the spoils of conquest. When convenient, they rewrote constitutions. When necessary, they toppled nations. Their fat wallets purchased candied prizes, colonies, for their sovereigns. If the directors of the East India Company could take India for the Crown, then Hawaii’s sugar barons would seize the islands on behalf of Manifest Destiny. There was, though, an important distinction in the way these commodity kings handled their business. Only in the clash between the houses of Dole and Kalākaua did profit show its betting hand. The native people of Hawaii caught a whiff early on. “They came here to do good, and they did very well indeed,” so the saying went, of American missionaries who arrived in droves during the early 1800s. Hawaii was rich with potential converts (the Queen was one successful case), and its earth was even richer with the potential for profit. Sugarcane grew vigorously in its volcanic soils and fair weather. Plantations sprouted up all over the islands. Although already a household staple the world over, America clamored for ever more sugar, and missionaries-turned-planters were happy to oblige its sweet tooth. From 1846 to 1874, Hawaii’s sugar exports climbed 80-fold . 300,000 pounds grew to 24 million. With agreements like the Reciprocity Treaty of 1874 , which removed taxes on Hawaiian sugar imported to the U.S., Big Sugar flourished. The commodity, however, soon came under attack in the United States. Hawaii’s success had seeded resentment among domestic producers, who called for protection against Hawaiian dominance. Their chance came with the McKinley Tariff of 1890 , which raised tariffs for many industries and lowered them for some. The act leveled the field by removing tariffs on all foreign sugar and stripped Hawaii of its privileged status. Island planters suddenly faced competition from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and beyond. Prices collapsed, as did profits. Depression thundered on the horizon. Big Sugar, despite its American heritage, was powerless against the winds of misfortune, and it desperately searched for shelter. Its barons charted but one path forward. Only annexation could restore profits. Fearing a consolidation of royal authority that could further threaten their interest, the sugar elite wrote a new constitution and forced King Kalākaua to sign it at bayonet point. His sister and successor, Queen Lili’uokalani, was not blind to her fate. In an attempt to arrest the zeitgeist and the concentration of power amongst the industrialists, she tried to enact a new constitution, one that would limit voting to naturalized citizens and restore the Hawaiian crown’s emergency powers.  But Sanford Dole — best friend of the barons, member of pro-annexation secret societies, and of the family behind Dole Food fame — would not have any of it. He figured the same tactic his predecessors pulled against Kalākaua would work against Lili’uokalani; only, this time, it would be used to create a new pro-annexation government. Forming the Committee of Safety, Dole and his allies went to a confidant in the State Department for help.  U.S. Minister to Hawaii John L. Stevens, tuned well to their intent, needed no convincing. “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe,” Stevens wrote  to his boss (Secretary of State John W. Foster), “and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.” Under the pretext of safeguarding Americans, the Minister parked the USS Boston in Honolulu Harbor and sent 300 marines ashore to back the plantations’ bid for power. On the grey morning of January 17, 1893 — a stormy day in a month plagued by floods — Big Sugar’s agents shook down their second monarch. Lili’uokalani, facing the threat of a violent coup, surrendered. She did not lose all hope though. Anti-imperialist and one-time President Grover Cleveland had returned that same year to the White House. Compelled by conscience  and the findings of his special investigator’s report , the President publicly dismissed any notion that America was cut from the same cloth as the empires of old Europe. Sanford Dole, he thundered, was to dissolve the provisional government. His compatriots would reinstate Lili’uokalani as Queen, and they would return Hawaii to its people. Cleveland decried to Congress, “the lawless occupation of Honolulu under false pretexts by United States forces.” America — ever conscious of its founding principles — wobbled then against the instincts of empire. Cleveland was not the country’s only anti-imperialist. They came from all walks of life, including steel magnate Andrew Carnegie (who tried to buy  the Philippines' independence) and writer Mark Twain (“ Give her the soap and a towel, but hide the looking-glass ”). With such prominent supporters, they and the Union resisted, for a time, that fervor that grips every great nation in its ascent to hegemony. But only for a time. With Big Sugar’s profits on the line, planters agitated to continue the match. Staring into the jaws of defeat teethed with Washington’s decrees, Sanford B. Dole decided he would not let any government dictate to him his interests. In open defiance of the White House, he declared that the President of the United States had no right to intervene in Hawaii’s domestic affairs. To buy time, Dole reformed the provisional government into the more permanent Republic of Hawaii, with Big Sugar cronies in every high office. If annexation would not happen under this administration, the businessmen knew all they had to do was simply wait for the next. In his letter  to the White House’s envoy, Dole said the collective thought out loud: “We do not feel inclined to regard [President Cleveland’s order] as the last word of the American Government upon this subject.” And indeed it was not. Though President McKinley’s (of McKinley Act of 1890 infamy) 1897 annexation treaty fell short by seven votes in the Senate — due in no small part to a petition  protesting annexation signed by 21,000 of the 39,000 native and mixed-blood Hawaiians on the islands — the outbreak of hostilities with the Spanish Empire the following year sealed Hawaii’s destiny. A strategic logistics base in the middle of the world’s largest ocean was a military asset America could no longer resist. Still, even at war’s end, the issue was controversial enough for McKinley to judge that annexation would not survive a two-thirds vote in the Senate. Unlike in Texas, where a majority of voters backed annexation, Hawaii’s citizens appeared resolutely opposed. Congress thereby approved, through a simple majority, the absorption of Hawaii into the United States — to the sugar industry’s relief. Dole was appointed governor of the new territory. And as territorial status sufficed to relieve the plantations from any tariffs in perpetuity, the question of statehood would remain unanswered for another 60 years. So it was in the summer of 1898 that the house of Dole finally toppled the house of Kalākaua. To Hawaii’s shores came troops and warships from a less foreign land. Therein reveals the nature of profit. Its narrow pursuit, as some of our cases show, results in casualties. Something more insidious happened in Hawaii. Profit operated in the shadows. It was never fully exposed, enforcing its own interest while cloaked in other pretensions. It stacked the deck against hopeless, naive idealism and made a bet. In manipulating parts of a divided American government, sweet profit pushed its whole into acting against its founding philosophy. But through the businessmen’s decisions in each act of Hawaii’s play, profit became more potent an animating force than the idea of government of and for the people. Sugar is no longer made in Hawaii. Its plantations have been cleared. Its sugar kings are dead and gone. A century has passed since Sanford Dole last walked the earth. In retracing his steps on the beaches, we may think Big Sugar’s clash with the Hawaiian monarchy a thing of antiquity to be left behind in dusty newsprint or the empty stacks under Baker. So we do not reflect, nor do we prepare. In the not-so-distant future, then, other hands will come to fully guide our own. Time knows this. The 21st century’s dealings will rhyme with those from the first through the 20th.  In thus looking back, one might wonder: if, after a certain scale of no return, nations are destined for empire and companies profits, why resist? There is no other answer than if we can, we must. The tension between our principles and the compromises demanded by practice is the crux of human struggle. It is one no leader should ever turn away from. 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.

It has signed a social contract that cannot be undone. “Medicine is to health, law is to justice, and business is to…?” In confirming our enrollment at Harvard Business School, we all already have answered this question. Innocuous in appearance, it invited no easy answer, likely by design, given the melting pot of perspectives that comprise our incoming class. Yet for Milton Friedman, one of the twentieth century’s two most influential economic thinkers, the answer was unequivocal. In 1970, writing in the pages of The New York Times Magazine , Friedman declared , “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits.” Business was not a vehicle for charity. It was not a substitute for government. Collective ends, he insisted, were to be pursued by collective means. Business, where the CEO reigns as elected dictator, was to profit. This thesis, when first written, was controversial. But like so many doctrines in American life, once it was adopted, it became orthodoxy. In the half-century since its publication, Friedman’s words have shadowed the every decision of a generation of corporate executives, Wall Street financiers, and managers, all cranked out by the dozen from America’s top business schools. What began as one cornerstone of a benign libertarian philosophy hardened into creed. And as with all creeds, its founding ideals would warp to fit its followers’ fancies. If we are to blame Karl Marx for the ills of communism, then we must blame Milton Friedman for the ills of profit, for his provocation has armed ransackers and raiders. His influence must be measured not in words but in consequence. One man who absorbed the creed more fully than most was Jack Welch. In 1981, he stepped up as General Electric’s youngest-ever chief executive, and for many of the next twenty years, he would be celebrated as the pinnacle toward which all other CEOs strove. “Neutron Jack,” Wall Street called him — a reference to the neutron bomb, a weapon that targets people while leaving infrastructure intact.  To cut costs, Jack’s strategy did something similar to communities. “Ideally, you’d have every plant you own on a barge,” he quipped. Over the course of his career as chief executive, Jack laid off tens of thousands of, if not a hundred thousand employees, in the United States. He demanded that the bottom 10 percent of every department be fired every year in a management innovation he called the “vitality curve” and what most everyone else came to sordidly dub the “rank and yank.” He demanded that every quarterly earnings report meet or exceed analysts’ expectations, even if it meant resorting to accounting maneuvers that, with hindsight, stretched credibility. After all, what company’s earnings could so consistently match or beat consensus by at least a penny through every business cycle?  For a time, though, it all worked out. With profit as North Star, General Electric’s stock ripped and roared. Its market value grew from $12 billion to $410 billion . Neutron Jack’s face plastered the front pages of media from Fortune  to The Wall Street Journal . In 2001, as dot-com stocks swooned, General Electric moved to increase its dividend as it had the previous year and the 24 years before that. Yet numbers and the headlines cheering them on masked a deeper rot. A company of engines and appliances had gradually hollowed itself out and stuffed the void with GE Capital, a profit-cranking financial services business that could turn water into wine come earnings time. Jeffrey Immelt (MBA ‘82), Welch’s chosen successor, oversaw seven more years of its continued expansion. In 2008, however, the Great Recession plunged GE Capital into crisis, and the rest of the company followed, its erstwhile-crown jewel hanging around Immelt’s neck like an albatross. A decade of strategic reversals could not fix what had been done. By 2020, America’s “everything company” had been booted from the Dow Jones and split into three. The philosophy that Jack Welch so dearly took to heart was not content to stop at General Electric. Globalization and alpha-seeking financial markets opened doors to its miasma, which seeped into the American industrial landscape. Given cover by the new paradigm, companies like Boeing dismantled their industrial hearts in the shadow of shareholder primacy. Cities that had boomed in the era of homegrown metal and machinery fell into decline. And what was known as the Steel Belt corroded into Rust. Friedman’s rhetoric was reality, and its cost — for, in his own words, no lunch was ever free — was carved into the faces of workers who had made lives around companies that no longer wanted them. They, on whose backs the Blue Wall was built, would eventually take their hammers to it and deliver the White House to the promise of making America great again. While factories shuttered in the East, a small tremor ran West. Innovation, which, for a time, called Detroit, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh home, had already begun its emigration to a thin strip of land that stretched from San Jose to San Francisco. Silicon Valley was born of a different history: from the marriage of government and academia during World War II. Universities, semiconductor manufacturers, and defense research dollars laid the foundations for a new economy. By the turn of the century, this new economy was presenting itself as nothing less than a new renaissance. Contrarians like Steve Jobs spoke not only of profit but also of progress. Boasting muscular engineering cultures with no place for MBAs and the lords of strategy, this new breed of business made a series of vows. Technology’s purpose was to democratize information. It would empower the individual and safeguard human freedom. Apple’s 1984 Super Bowl commercial , which introduced the Macintosh personal computer as a rebellion against Big Brother’s control, mythologized the industry’s self-image. Though libertarianism suffered defeat after defeat at the ballot box, it sounded victory in the Valley. For the first time, profit could march in lockstep with liberation.  In one respect, Silicon Valley succeeded beyond its wildest imagination. The dot-com boom was but a taste of what was to come. Instead of managing earnings and cutting costs, the play was to go deep in the red early on to generate hypergrowth and enduring profit in the long term. Bets paid off. Valley institutions grew into the most efficient money-making machines in human history. Today, Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, Google, Amazon, and Meta rank among the most valuable corporations on earth. Each spends as much on R&D as the market capitalizations of the industrial giants that preceded them. Their products, the foundations of the Information Age, reshaped the world from how we pay taxes and work and convene and relax and buy, to how we know. Yet in another respect, the revolution went the way all utopian promises go: the Valley’s libertarian fantasies ultimately bent the knee to profit. Then-millionaire, now-billionaire Peter Thiel, for example, once imagined PayPal would end the U.S. dollar and government’s “monetary sovereignty” over the individual. It instead became a conventional payments processor that turns a tidy $5 billion in operating profit per year . Social media companies pledged to connect humanity, yet they have only but in name. Study after study shows that America has scarcely been lonelier, more depressed, and more polarized, with technology a major culprit. So is the cost of our addiction to convenience.  As profits continue to climb, Friedman’s grip over the corporate conscience shows no signs of weakening. All else appears as window dressing, from technoutopian dreams to the ESG movement , tacked on by fashion and removed by profit’s pressure. Might that be the takeaway? Profit, after all, is the necessary condition of business. Remove profit, and business is no longer business. The question — what business is to — has been answered by its own history. Yet the question our survey silently posed — what is business for ? — remains. Few believe that the ultimate purpose of our time here on Earth is reproduction, though reproduction is all life’s biological imperative. Many insist there must be something more. Business likewise cannot be reduced to solely its biological nature. That would surrender any possibility of shaping it toward a higher purpose. Is business a dog on a leash? No! For business possesses agency — agency assumed when it, in the pursuit of profit, anchored itself to community, culture, and civic life. Today’s increasingly all-encompassing definition of what constitutes a good and a service has forced business into a social contract with the people. That is why the question matters. Our challenge as aspiring leaders in business is not merely to master its means and the tools of its trade. It is to ask of its end: of whether business can be a guarantor of plenty beyond profit; of whether it can serve not only Silicon Valley and Wall Street but also Main Street; of whether it can do so for generations to come. In keeping with this spirit, if business is to provide to society as medicine does health and law justice, then we must instill in it a raison d’être beyond survival and progress for progress’ sake. Such is the responsibility of today’s prosperity to posterity. 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.

Dawn arrives for a new, yet old, American populism. America’s newest tribunes make for an unlikely pair. One of them built a career on the story of his origins. From Appalachia, he scaled the ladder that America keeps insisting still exists. Up, up he climbed, past the Marines, Ohio State, Yale Law, a bestselling memoir, and the Senate. The improbable final rung delivered him into the White House. Along the way, he accumulated patrons — professors, politicos, billionaires, a president — who recognized in him a sui generis blend of potential and usefulness. They invested time, money, and titles into someone who, despite his credentials, was never quite one of their own. The other man’s mettle was also forged in ideas, though of a more activist sort. Born in Uganda to Indian intellectuals and raised in a Manhattan private school, he found his political footing in pro-Palestinian protests at Bowdoin, an exclusive liberal-arts college. With little to his name beyond promises of cheap rent and cheaper groceries, and with New York’s political machines arrayed against him, this little-known assemblyman became mayor of the world’s city. In his campaign against the has-beens, he toppled a Cuomo dynasty that had ruled for decades from Albany. No one in their right mind would vote for these men, the pundits grumbled. The hillbilly was too intellectual; the democrat too socialist. Their ascent provoked disbelief as much as ridicule. Yet here they are: Vice President JD Vance and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, two men poised to inherit the batons of political power. And though they hail from opposite aisles and opposing traditions, and though they speak different languages to different constituencies, their cadence is unmistakably similar. One can hear in both the same plain insistence that the people have been talked past, overmanaged, and left behind. “The people,” ironically, is a phrase for which the politician reaches when he has nothing more precise to offer — a chameleon of a term, meaning everything and nothing at once. Men and women far more ordinary than Vance and Mamdani have wielded it to lesser effect. So how did its usage empower these two and not others? Most use it as pastiche, in imitation rather than with conviction. To understand why Vance’s and Mamdani’s language lands, it might be simpler to begin with what the ordinary is not . We must first name the extraordinary: the elite whose decisions, incentives, and blind spots have terraformed what the rest of America must navigate. Though “the elite” is also a nebulous term, they — and their failings — are much easier to identify. 64 years ago, President Eisenhower made it a point in his farewell address to speak to the rise of a military-industrial complex, the iron triangle of defense contractors, military brass, and policymakers whose interests aligned a little too neatly. If this alliance were to accrue unwarranted influence, he warned, it would pose a principal threat to American democracy and self-governance. Eisenhower could not have predicted how this dynamic played out in another more germane area of American life. What might be called an elite-industrial complex emerged with far more cachet and power than its military counterpart. Over the following decades, America’s governing class, a group of technocrats, financiers, and highly credentialed professionals, coalesced and then convinced itself it had mastered the art of running a modern nation. The fall of the Soviet Union added fuel to this belief. Neoliberal thinkers, emboldened, declared that their way represented the end of history that would lift all boats with its tide. Under this umbrella, the elite were free to pursue their own interests. With that came the notion that the right policy memo and the right multilateral deal could, so long as they stuck favorably to their preferred metrics, guide a country of 300 million into a seamless Pax Americana. The formula seemed to work, at least for those designing it. Deregulation buoyed asset prices; globalization cheapened goods; financialization made wealth abundant for the few. Offshoring removed labor, the costliest component of production. Corporate pensions gave way to 401(k)s that shifted risk away from management and shareholders. A gig economy fueled by technology rose up and lined the pockets of their founders and investors. Regulatory capture blurred the line between public duty and private reward; “public-private partnerships” became fashionable jargon. The elite evolved from a somewhat rich, old, white men’s club into an even richer, younger, cosmopolitan one. The result was a strange homogeneity: a ruling class that spoke the same language, passed through the same institutions, lived in the same zip codes, and interpreted American life through the same periscope. They trusted — still trust — metrics because metrics absolved their actions of accusations of self-interest. And so the numbers they prized most were the numbers that mattered least to those they governed. GDP was perennially up as life expectancy fell. The S&P 500 made high after record high while real wages stagnated. Seductive top-line growth masked economic reality, but that was not material because who could argue with the data? It was in that widening wedge, between the numbers celebrated in Washington and Wall Street and lives lived far from it, that another truth became impossible to ignore. When people feel unseen at home, the matters that consume their leaders abroad begin to look not only distant, but also beside the point. Foreign policy — long the favored arena of elite earnestness, populated by pedigreed technocrats from universities and think tanks — makes this gap obvious. To that class, Ukraine is a question of grand strategy, credibility, and the durability of the American experiment itself. To millions of Americans, including the rising populists, such high-minded prose does not click as it did before World War II. It represents something else entirely: a distant conflict with no evident bearing on their paychecks, hospitals, or schools. Thus, Vance can say with a candor that rattles establishment nerves, “I don’t really care about what happens to Ukraine one way or another.” Thus, Mamdani, when asked which foreign country he would visit first, can shrug and reply, “I would stay in New York City” (this is after three candidates on the debate stage before him all declared they would pay a visit to Israel). Neither are to pay a price for their remarks because their instincts align with the people’s: that the foreign has become a distraction from a domestic order in deep disrepair. But fundamentally, what beats in the chest of the populist is not foreign policy or rent control or culture wars. To define them by individual campaign positions and policy white papers is to misunderstand their reason for being. They are channeling a pervasive, creeping feeling  that the institutions invented to serve ordinary people have been captured and repurposed for someone else’s benefit. This is one of those few measurable intuitions: Gallup polls show that Americans’ trust in the federal government has fallen from 77% at the end of the 1960s to 16% in recent years, where it has flatlined. It is unfair to say the elites caused all of this. But Americans have watched them pass enough times through familiar revolving doors — from official to consultant, consultant to board member, board member to commentator, in varied order, parroting the same three lines on efficiency and innovation and competitiveness, all while ordinary people's own circumstances narrowed.  Their lived experiences, anecdotes, are evidence enough. Who frets about taking a child to the ER out of worry that they can’t afford the bill before the deductible is met? Who sits for six hours on hold with an understaffed unemployment office or waits in a miles-long digital queue for social services? Who worries about their mom not speaking the language of the only nursing home within a 30-mile radius that doesn’t require dipping into the last days of sick time just to visit? The local church stands empty, its communal congregation dispersed. The local newspaper, if it has not already been rolled up by a private equity firm, operates with a skeleton staff wholly unable to meet the reporting demands of active civic life. Rent, outpacing both inflation and the annual 2% salary bump, eats half of take-home pay. Americans developed their own names for the feeling that something, somewhere, had gone wrong. And now they sense that the country’s newest tribunes speak this language from the heart. Our history shows what usually follows. Populism has appeared time and again in the republic’s story, frequently in reaction to the overreach of elite interests: Andrew Jackson’s war on the Second Bank; William Jennings Bryan’s crusade against the gold standard; Huey Long’s redistributionist “Every Man a King” campaign. Populists fight for what the people believe is in their interest. Because of populist pressure, institutions like the progressive income tax and Social Security came into being. And their character is rarely polite. Sometimes they veer into dangerous demagoguery; sometimes they are full of air and false promises; but they are a start and more often necessary than not. One could call them wildfires for democracy’s old forest. Which brings us to last month’s Oval Office meeting between the mayor and the president. Many in the commentariat predicted a showdown, or at least some measure of spectacle. What they got instead was hardly surprising: Mamdani and Trump presenting a more-or-less united front on making New York great again. As Steve Bannon, divisive Trump strategist and resident of the elite world he disdains (MBA ‘93), said of the two a few weeks before they met: “game respects game.” The point is not that populists like Vance and Mamdani agree. On many things they do not, and they will likely tear each other apart before long. The point is that their insurgent and unexpectedly convergent movements are no longer fringe. They are now fixtures of a country searching for a vocabulary adequate to its discontent and in proportion to its malaise. Men of the people, in short, are here to stay. 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.

This year marks the two hundred and fiftieth of the American experiment. It also marks the passing of the baton on to the ninetieth generation of this publication’s leadership. Holding it, we reckon with time - as do the institutions where longevity is both asset and liability. The Harbus  has long printed bound collections of every issue published during the school year. Our little office under Gallatin Hall, if you ever stop by and visit, has a shelf of them going back to the years following the Second World War. Their yellowed pages feature everything from coverage of Holidazzles and recruiting announcements to full-page ads on the American Express Gold Card. Time has not been kind, in some ways. 1999 stood as the high-water mark of this newspaper, if we measure it by page and ad count. That year’s bound issue weighed in at over 1000 pages. Over the last two decades, they have thinned to 200. The internet has claimed, in a story familiar to any newspaper, what were once our pillars. 12twenty and private listservs have taken over our monopoly on recruiting notices; social media and messaging apps, the lively minutiae of campus life. Other campus papers have not survived the onslaught. Stanford GSB’s The Reporter , for example, shuttered by 2015 after over half a century in operation. The information age has disaggregated much of our business model. Its disruption has slowed our cadence from a weekly to a monthly news outlet. This loss, however, has provided needed breathing room. Room to reflect, to prepare, to debate during the last schooling most of us will ever undertake. Room to encourage more thoughtful writing from a student body so well-trained in forming opinions yet so reticent to express them. The world that awaits us is one where business confronts from every direction questions we cannot defer. Yet after we leave Harvard’s grounds, we will lower our gaze toward the grind of execution that so fully characterizes the corporate boardroom and the startup garage. Will we then wait to be hauled to a government hearing before tending to our beliefs? For better or worse, capital answers to the few. We, its future stewards, therefore bear the responsibility of self-interrogation - now , before day-to-day leadership consumes us. And, as investors in an education on America’s functional power at its oldest university, we would also do well to ask questions of this nation’s character on its 250th anniversary. There are few better places to do so than its first business school newspaper. As Pranav and I assume the helm, we look forward to elevating not only pluralism on these topics and on the business school experience, but also a fuller and sharper dialogue. In a rebellion against the times, we also believe The Harbus  must reclaim some, though not all, of the role it once played in HBS’s social fabric. These are not impossible tasks. The feedback we and our predecessors have received from peers and professors - that the HBS community turns to The Harbus  as an outlet for genuine, reflective, and penetrating thought - shows the strength of our foundation. In this issue, you will find a meditation on the meaning faith carries at HBS; a survey of who actually builds companies on campus; a defense of and call for renewed American patriotism; community profiles of our artists; gentle satire of our beloved professors; an archival feature on war and peace in Venezuela; and much more. Over the break, we have also launched initiatives that reflect changes to come: a new brand that elevates our legacy, an updated digital presence, and an archival column. We look forward to sharing more developments as the year progresses. If there is any takeaway you wrestle from this column, it is this: be mindful of discomfort. Though we are a school of doers, we have our entire careers ahead of us to indulge in action. Know there is value now to be mined from the slow and difficult work of contemplation. 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.

Jake Goodman (MBA ‘26) shares his reminders of patriotism The White House’s website declares “we have unmistakably entered a Golden Age of American greatness,” but you might not feel like it. I’m not talking about the kind of partisan battling that accompanies living under a president whose policies you may disagree with. I’m talking about how a sense of patriotism has become a political badge rather than a default state of national engagement. I’ve noticed an elevation in what one of my favorite writers, Jack Kerouac, called the “negative, nightmare position of putting down society” become more present in my life. If your eyes were pointed towards the general locus of culture, you would think that America is more divided, more antisemitic, more racist, more fascist, more bankrupt, more taken advantage of, more unfair. All these mores add up to an impression of America as a nation betrayed, an organism past its prime and worth giving up on. Like a good, proper student, I cannot just speak to vibes and will cite some real data. Recent data reveals a stark and steady decline in American patriotism, with national pride hitting historic lows as the country becomes increasingly polarized. Forty-four percent of Americans said the country is becoming less patriotic, according to an Economist/YouGov poll . According to a June 2025 Gallup poll, only 58% of U.S. adults say they are "extremely" or "very" proud to be American—a record low that marks a sharp drop from the nearly unanimous 90% recorded shortly after September 11, 2001. This erosion is particularly pronounced among younger generations and along partisan lines; for instance, Gallup found that only 36% of Democrats express high levels of pride, compared to 92% of Republicans. This "pride gap" is mirrored in generational data from 2025, which shows that only 41% of Generation Z adults feel "extremely" or "very" proud to be American, whereas 75% of Baby Boomers and 83% of the Silent Generation maintain those sentiments. Beyond national pride, public trust in the institutions that underpin the American identity has also withered; Pew Research Center reported in late 2025 that only 17% of Americans trust the government in Washington to do what is right "just about always" or "most of the time," reflecting a broader disillusionment with the nation's current trajectory. However, I’m not here to report the news on what people at HBS seem to already have an underlying intuition of. The belief that America is off the rails, that things only get worse, that the future is dim, and America is bad for the world has become so present in my social media feeds and friend groups that I worry more that more of my fellow students accept a construction of a declining America that is self-fulfilling. As citizens and by extension those with visas to live in this country, there is a grand purpose to believing that the United States of America is the greatest engine of human prosperity that has ever existed. Even further, the United States, while not perfect, should and could have the most moral system of government with the most capable leadership to lead this world into greater abundance, even should that leadership stray from our founding principles. Why not believe in this understanding of America? Why not believe that American innovation is going to lead the AI era? If we interrogate our beliefs, we should reckon with the discomfort some feel comes with asserting America’s imperative to prosper and lead. I want this country to be boundless in its pursuit of greatness—economic, cultural, and militarily—and I hope every American can rejoice in a similar belief. When divisive events diminish our sense of well being in the country, I often notice that the anger in America is not typically backstopped by a fundamental desire for the slow, steady work that is the conserving of our founding principles of justice and self-reliance. To feel inspired by our patriotic duty to see a better version of America and usher it in should be a part of the practice of being a citizen, particularly at this university, where the standards of leadership are rightfully higher.  At least at HBS, this version of an America bound to a higher calling feels alive to me because Harvard is a celebration of America. There is daily joy to be had in knowing that the international students at Harvard Business School chose this country and its greatest educational institution rather than anywhere else in the world to study business—the root of our prosperity. The thousands of students at Harvard University who uproot their lives each year say with their feet that they believe in the power of this country to vault talent from all over the world into wealth. I believe the world’s best university should be in America, and an elite institution like Harvard should be emblematic of our national penchant for excellence, innovation, and global talent.  Andreessen Horowitz in their grandiose fund announcement  echoed this concept of patriotism, tying the fate of the world’s prosperity to America’s success and crediting the American system for generating a “miraculous improvement in the human condition.” While one can quibble about the motives of Andreessen Horowitz, it is refreshing to see such a prominent display of the application of wealth and resources to drive success both for and through America. Venture capital has created massive wealth for investors by underwriting in the tremendous drive to create prosperity under an American system that encourages risk taking and the chance to generate significant equity value. HBS lives within the venture ecosystem as an institutional beneficiary of the same American value set.  My stance is not intended to brush aside political concerns or bury important issues. Rather, I want to show that being a HBS student is to involve yourself with many of the greatest parts of the United States and to do so daily. To be funded to pursue a dream, to learn from brilliant professors from all around the world, to attract luminaries eager to give back to a younger generation, to rejoice in the bounty of tremendous institutional resources and wealth in pursuit of building the great leaders of tomorrow, these are the routine reminders of patriotism that shape my personal pride in being American on campus. I feel lucky every day to walk the beautiful streets of Cambridge, going to classes with talented students from around the world or across the coasts of this country and the land between. Attending this university, studying the heart of what makes this country so prosperous, and trying to play my own part in the patchwork of American progress has been a daily act of patriotism that I hope can be celebrated in a sphere of thought beyond politics, in the moral theater that is love for a land of opportunity and the seizing and enlarging of that opportunity. 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.

How Founders Find Technical Support at HBS Eighty-five percent  of MBA students begin school wanting to be entrepreneurs. In an age where the MBA degree can feel ever more optional, business schools have doubled down on this value proposition—presenting themselves as a breeding ground for the next great unicorn startup. Harvard Business School is no exception. Between the Innovation Lab, Rock Center, and numerous pitch competitions, at times, campus can feel like a you-pay, degree-carrying version of Y Combinator, boasting rarer but similarly standout successes among the likes of Cloudflare, Coupang, Grab, Rent the Runway, and Hinge. But attend a pitch night, talk to a student founder, or sit in on an Entrepreneur-in-Residence advice session, and one unresolved question becomes clear: within a class of former operators and investors brimming with ideas, who will actually build these companies? This is a question I’ve been kicking around since starting at HBS this fall, and so, to try and answer it, I did what I’d assume any investigative journalist would do: surveyed my classmates and cornered founders in Spangler for quotes. Among survey respondents, only 9% identified as skilled enough to build the products they are designing. 39% say they can “speak technical,” often because of product backgrounds, while 52% report not being technical at all. Excluding the 4% who neither needed nor wanted technical support, nearly half of respondents were still searching for it. 17% had found technical support, and 30% had secured a technical co-founder. 48% described the search as “harder than expected,” citing—more than any other reason—the lack of technical talent at their school. Miles Francis (MBA ‘27), former operator and founder of  Brand Muse —the AI-native strategic intelligence platform for creator marketing—describes the challenge: “There just aren’t many people in the MBA program with true technical backgrounds,” he says. “And if they do have one, they’re likely getting an MBA to pivot out of engineering or start something on their own. They know their value, so it’s tough as a founder to find someone willing to meet you as an equal, work with you, and be passionate about the idea. There are too many business or idea people looking for a technical co-founder. It’s kind of a joke on campus at this point.” Even when technical students are present, incentives often misalign. “Students coming from technical backgrounds seem to want co-founders who are also technical,” says HBS ‘27 Arshaan Ali. His classmate, J.C. Moubarak (HBS ’26), echoes the sentiment: “The technical people here, myself included, don’t always want to be the technical co-founder in their startup, which reduces the options available.” Some entrepreneurial-minded technical students have capitalized on the demand for their skill sets, building out informal one-person development shops to help classmates build MVPs. Nathan Alam, a student in Harvard’s dual-degree Master of Science-Master of Business Administration (“MS-MBA”) program and a former software engineer at Scale AI and Amazon Web Services, has volunteered his expertise to help three founders build MVPs so far. Alam spends the rest of his time working on his own startup—a requirement of the joint-degree program. Through the Technology Ventures Initiative (“TVI”) and Designing Technology Ventures (“DTV”) courses, MS-MBA students must research, prototype, and pitch a startup idea, leaving little room for outside entrepreneurial commitments. “Most MS-MBAs want to work on their own idea or commercialize research a lab has already done,” Alam explains. “But if you engage early, they might bring you into their TVI project.” Alexandra Zaoui, a former data scientist building an AI startup for the music industry, did exactly that—reaching out to a technically trained classmate before school even began. “We connected through an admissions list, realized we shared an interest in entrepreneurship within the music industry, and have been working together since,” she says. The pair will participate in TVI together this winter. Beyond campus, aspiring HBS founders report finding support through nearby technical programs like those at MIT, online job boards like the  Harvard Grid , or former colleagues. Of those who succeeded, 36% entered school with technical support already secured, another 36% found it among classmates, 18% through prior co-workers, and 10% online. Most searches took between one and three months. Unsurprisingly, higher levels of commitment correlated with success. Every founder who secured technical help viewed their startup as a full-time post-MBA pursuit, spending an average of 14 hours per week on it during school. In an age of vibe-coding and the lore of Sam Altman ’s “one-person, billion-dollar company,” a natural question emerges: is a technical partner even necessary? Despite his engineering background, Alam argues no. “A lot of people who think they need a technical co-founder don’t. Giving up significant equity for a technical co-founder is the most extreme option,” he says. “There are other ways to be successful.” Alam suggests founders vibe-code MVPs and outsource development to make products scalable. “It’s probably better to bootstrap a build for $500 on Fiverr than to give away so much equity early on.” Alam also suggests recruiting technical undergraduates: “There are a lot of undergrads looking for something to put on their project portfolio.” Francis is living Alam’s advice. He and his co-founder have scaled Brand Muse to its first customers simply using Cursor. “There’s a learning curve,” he says, “but with a little help upfront, it’s manageable.” Still, he sees the solution as temporary. “We’re actively looking for a founding engineer, both to move more quickly and to have a product that’s more cutting-edge. But the way we’re set up works well for now.” Kiera Klinsky (MBA ‘27) is a born-and-raised New Yorker and Dartmouth College alum. She is a former BCG consultant and Chief of Staff at a consumer AI startup. Today, Kiera serves as the MBA Associate at NextView Ventures and writes about startups and consumer trends on her Substack, The Kitchen Fridge .

After years of grading students on a strict distribution, professors finally get a taste of “the curve” In a revelation that many faculty members are calling “deceptive,” and “unsettling,” professors at Harvard Business School were shocked this week to learn that they, like the students, will now be evaluated on a strict, mandatory forced curve. The bombshell was delivered during a normally scheduled faculty meeting in Klarman Hall. After discussing normal faculty topics such as “running over the allotted class time” and “effectively using colored chalk,” school administrators delivered the stunning news to faculty. A quiet hush spread across the auditorium as professors started to process the implications of the news in real time. “At first I thought it was a joke,” said one newly appointed professor of Finance, who asked to remain anonymous. “I mean, during the interviews, everyone told me HBS is a warm, collegial, collaborative environment. I didn’t know I was signing up for the academic Hunger Games.” According to newly surfaced documents, the existence of a teaching forced curve was added to the faculty guidelines and reads: All faculty shall be competitively ranked against each other, and the bottom decile will be subject to corrective coaching, performance plans, or, in extreme cases, reassigned to section chair duty. “I thought students were joking,” says professor who now realizes the truth about the curve Many faculty, having heard rumors from RC students about “the curve,” assumed it was students being dramatic. “But the students weren’t lying,” confessed a Marketing professor, trembling slightly. “The curve is real. And now it applies to me?” She looked down at the neat stack of cases and teaching notes on her desk. “Ever since the announcement, I’m already comparing my chalkboard handwriting to other professors’. I caught myself Googling ‘How to cold-call students with compassion’ at 1 a.m.” Another professor said he had long assumed student paranoia about grade distribution was just a product of over-caffeination. “But no,” he whispered. “This forced curve . . . it comes for us all.” Professors now frantically repositioning themselves to avoid being “bottom decile” Within 48 hours of learning about the forced curve, professors reportedly began aggressively optimizing their classroom personas in ways students describe as “kind of desperate,” and “oddly familiar.” One TOM professor allegedly spent an entire afternoon attempting to calibrate the optimal percentage of time to nod encouragingly during student comments. A Strategy professor was seen practicing her “listening faces” in the Aldrich bathroom mirrors. Witnesses say she cycled through multiple expressions including ‘supportive curiosity’ and ‘warm reassurance’. Faculty lounge devolves into paranoia The faculty lounge, typically an environment filled with free coffee and lighthearted gossip, has transformed into a hyper-competitive psychological battleground. “I walked in and everyone went silent,” said a new LEAD professor. “I knew instantly they were evaluating me. One professor even asked me, ‘So… how engaging are your lectures on a scale of 1 to 10?’ I think she was trying to benchmark herself against me.” At least one professor has reportedly begun casually dropping comments like, “I heard Section G really loves my cold calls,” or “students told me I have very clear handwriting.” Administrators respond with warm indifference When confronted about the new policy, the administration maintained their usual posture: smiling warmly while offering up generic platitudes. While glancing at a color-coded faculty roster, one administrator commented, “We simply encourage instructional excellence by ranking professors against one another in a fixed distribution.” The administrator paused, adjusted his glasses, and continued: “We believe in collaboration. So much so that we want professors to experience the same kind of supportive, motivational environment that students do. And nothing motivates quite like a forced curve.” Some professors already resorting to questionable tactics Reports are emerging of professors attempting to sway student evaluations using methods widely considered suspect but, unfortunately, also extremely effective. One Finance professor began ending every class by wheeling in a tray of warm Dunkin donuts. Students confirm she looks at them expectantly while they fill out feedback forms. Another professor apparently sent an email encouraging students to write favorable reviews in their feedback forms in exchange for glowing endorsements on LinkedIn. And in one troubling incident, a new LEAD professor allegedly offered $20 gift cards to Dumpling House to any student who rated his teaching as a “1.”  Students amused to learn professors also spiraling Students, who had always assumed professors were immune to the academic pressures they themselves suffer, are reportedly watching the faculty meltdown with a mix of confusion, amusement, and satisfaction. “It’s honestly surreal to see a professor panic because they don’t think they ‘stood out’ enough in class,” said one RC student. “Welcome to our lives.” Another student added, “I knew things had changed when my professor emailed us asking, ‘Did my cold call technique feel too rehearsed today?’ I got a nice chuckle out of that one.” Administration offers final reassurance: “This isn’t a big deal” In a recent announcement meant to assure faculty, the administration clarified that concerns about the forced curve were “nothing to worry about” and “something that faculty will learn to relish.” “Let’s remember,” the message read, “HBS does not make admissions mistakes. And since we recruit faculty with the same care and rigor as students, we are confident everyone here has the intellectual and psychological resilience to thrive in a forced-ranking environment.” The email ended with a warm reminder: “If anyone finds this stressful, please consult the ‘Mindfulness Under Extreme Competitive Pressure’ module we’ve added to the faculty portal. There will also be emotional support dogs in the faculty lounge every Friday.” Neeraj Koduri (MBA ‘27) is originally from Kansas City. Prior to HBS, he was part of the Corporate Development (M&A and Transactions) team at Eli Lilly and before that, was the Business Development & Strategy Lead at DICE Therapeutics, an immunology focused biotechnology company. He studied Business Administration and Biotechnology at the University of Southern California.

A stranger to the age that made me There’s a strange irony to being born on the cusp of a new millennium. It sounds like it should be significant — like I was destined to be a product of progress, a native to the digital age. And yet, as I look around at this world we’ve collectively built, I often feel like a foreigner in my own time. To be born in the year 1999 is to feel like you’ve stepped into a work already in progress, only to find the plot incomprehensible. It’s not just the sense of dislocation, though that’s part of it. It’s the gnawing feeling that this modern life — so saturated with the promise of progress and self-optimisation — might be missing something vital.  This is more than nostalgia for a personal past; it’s a yearning for a world I’ve never known. A time when life moved at a human pace, when technology served as a tool rather than a master, when the connections between people felt thicker and more real. I catch glimpses of it in books, films, and music. In the crackle of vinyl records, in letters written in fading ink, in films that linger on quiet, unhurried moments. These artifacts whisper of a life unmeasured by algorithms, unburdened by the demand to optimise. They remind me that another way of being once existed — and could exist again.  In his works, Byung-Chul Han speaks to this unease, diagnosing our age as one dominated by the relentless pursuit of productivity and self-improvement. Ours is a society that has turned inward, where the master-slave dynamic of external domination has been replaced by the more insidious tyranny of the self. We are both the taskmaster and the laborer, endlessly extracting more from ourselves in the name of achievement, visibility, and perfection. This compulsion isn’t imposed; it’s internalised. It feels like freedom, but it often tastes like exhaustion. I see it everywhere. In the way every moment must be optimised, every hobby commodified, every experience documented and curated for an audience of strangers. Rest is no longer restorative; it’s an indulgence that must be justified. Even leisure is transformed into a kind of work, a performance of wellness or fulfilment. We are told to become the architects of our lives, to treat ourselves as projects to be perfected. But what does that perfection look like? And who is it for? Han warns that this relentless productivity fetish is eroding something profound — our ability to simply be. In a world obsessed with quantifiable improvement, where does that leave the unmeasurable aspects of life: wonder, mystery, connection? We become alienated not just from one another but from ourselves, estranged from the parts of us that resist commodification. Introspection turns into a KPI. Solitude becomes suspect. Even the search for meaning risks being reduced to another task on an endless to-do list.  What I find so poignant in Han’s reflections is the idea that modernity hasn’t just stolen our time; it’s stolen our sense of place. To belong in the modern world, we are told, is to be constantly improving, constantly striving, constantly connected. But this form of belonging feels hollow. It’s the kind of belonging that demands you shed your humanity — the slow, messy, unmeasurable parts of it — in favour of endless optimisation.  And yet, my longing is not just for escape. It’s not simply that I wish to leave this world behind. What I yearn for is a world that feels more alive. A time when people lived with, rather than against, the flow of life. When the pursuit of meaning wasn’t reduced to a series of productivity hacks or “self-care” rituals sold to us by an influencer class. This isn’t an idealisation of the past, but rather a recognition that the past seems to hold something we have misplaced in our obsession with the new.  I feel this most acutely in moments of silence. When I’m alone, away from the noise of notifications and the constant pull of obligation, I catch fleeting glimpses of the kind of life I yearn for. It’s in the stillness of a sunset, the quiet rhythm of turning pages, the deep, unbroken focus of a long conversation with a friend or lover. These moments remind me of what Han calls the “vita contemplativa” — a contemplative life that resists the tyranny of productivity and embraces the beauty of simply being.  In Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, there’s that pervasive sense of displacement — not just being in a foreign country but being foreign to your own life, your own self. I relate to that. There’s a similar kind of alienation that comes from living in an age of endless possibilities but feeling paralysed by the weight of choice. I worry sometimes that the world has become too big, too fast, too indifferent to the human scale. I find myself searching for moments of quiet, like staring at the seafront near Rye, finding beauty in the stillness amidst chaos. In the same film, there’s a scene where Charlotte, wandering through Tokyo, sits quietly in a temple. There’s no clear purpose to her visit, no productivity to be found in her pause. It’s just a moment of being — a rare and precious reprieve from the incessant demands of modern life. I crave those moments, but they feel increasingly rare, as if the world conspires to fill every silence, to repurpose every stillness into a space for self-improvement. Similarly, Kundera reminds us that this nostalgia is complicated; it is not a true desire to return but a recognition of something we lack. It’s a longing for weight in a world of lightness, for rootedness in a culture that celebrates detachment. Perhaps that’s the question at the heart of my unease: not just where I belong, but how I belong. How to carve out a life that resists the noise, the metrics, the constant demands for more.  This is the paradox of my longing: I yearn for a world I’ve never known, even as I search for ways to make it manifest in the here and now. It’s not a desire to escape but to rediscover. To live a life that resists the unbearable lightness of being by embracing the weight of presence, connection, and meaning. It’s a quiet rebellion, a refusal to drift aimlessly in the currents of progress.  So where does that leave me? Somewhere between optimism and resignation, I suppose. Somewhere between longing for a place I’ve never been and trying to find beauty in where I am. Somewhere between the feeling of being lost and the hope that, one day, I might stumble into being found. Still, the tension remains. I am a product of this age, shaped by its values even as I reject them. How do I reconcile my yearning for a quieter, richer existence with the demands of a world that never stops moving? Perhaps the answer lies not in going back, for the past is irretrievable, but in carrying its lessons forward. In carving out small sanctuaries of stillness in a restless world. Sasha Zaroubin (MBA ‘27) is from London, UK. He studied History and Economics at the University of Durham before working in the Restructuring team at PJT Partners. He then moved to Fundflow, a fintech that helps small companies raise debt.

Underneath the tweed and ivy, what else remains? Before HBS, I existed in sleek west coast tech cities humming with technology and geodesic daydreams, where one can curate a soul the way one could curate a digital gallery. Arriving at Harvard to symmetrical, ivy-covered brick buildings constructed in the 1700s, it was hard not to romanticize and aestheticize what feels like a different world. In this new (old) world, it is easy to arrive as a cliché archetype: the influencer with the leather Moleskin, for whom books are used less for reading and more as props for performing intellectual glamour. Influencers do not read to commune, to challenge, to be unmade. They read to be photographed, to masquerade a critique they lifted from ChatGPT as their own. This is Dark Academia stripped of its heart. It's the aestheticization of the ivory tower without any willingness to climb its treacherous, rotting stairwell. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History serves as the foundation for academic aestheticization without heart. Tartt seduces us and Richard Papen with the dizzying perfume of Hampden College— twilight Greek seminars, the heady romance of exclusivity, the sharp cut of a tweed blazer, and ever-so-elegant despair. Yet just as we settle into this romance, Tartt deliberately pulls it apart, exposing both the literal and figurative corpse at the heart of her idyllic world. Tartt reveals that nihilism masquerades as philosophy and privilege acts as a moral solvent. The “institution” and everything it represents facilitates the students’ downfall with cultivated apathy. Although many online communities view The Secret History as a dark academia how-to-guide, it actually represents the tragedy of what happens when the library becomes a backdrop, and the pursuit of beauty severs you from basic humanity. Academia’s gilded carcass is critiqued in other contemporary literature as well. R.F. Kuang’s Babel argues that the very pinnacles of Western intellectualism are not merely complicit in empire and colonialism but serve as its primary engine. The beauty of language and the exquisite pain of etymology are all tools to extract and oppress. Similarly, Mona Awad’s Bunny plunges us into the pastel-colored, cult-like horror of a prestigious MFA program, where the desire for belonging and creative validation curdles into a deranged collective aesthetic. The “Bunnies” consume art and one another in a feedback loop of empty, sugary phrases, exposing the institution not as a crucible of genius but as a factory for parasitic, groupthink monstrosities. In Lila Shapiro’s Vulture article “Gluttons for Punishment,” Penn professor Justin McDaniel outlines his infamous “monk class,” an experiment intended to restore students’ capacity for sustained reading through extreme disciplinary control. To that end, the course “dictates how these students dress and what they eat, forbids them from caffeine or alcohol . . . [and] bans the use of all technology besides electric lights and most social contact outside classroom hours, including phone calls home and sex” (Shapiro). The opinion is split over McDaniel’s methods—some insisting it’s what we need in the age of brain rot and TikTok algorithms to achieve critical thought, while others argue that it’s a parodic, institutionally-sanctioned cult bound to end in the tragedy depicted by its fictional counterparts. Despite these criticisms, ignoring the value academic institutions offer is also deeply flawed. Tara Westover’s memoir Educated provides the starkest testimony. Here, the university is not aesthetically curated; it is a terrifying and exhilarating escape to a better life after being isolated and deprived of an education in rural Idaho. Westover’s struggle is not to adopt the aesthetic of a scholar. The value of the institution, for Westover, is its capacity to arm her with the knowledge and tools to deconstruct and reconstruct her world. To dismiss the academy entirely as a nest of murderers, colonizers, and Bunnies is to commit a profound act of intellectual poverty, to relinquish the very tools—critical thinking, historical analysis, philosophical debate—that allow us to critique it. Conversely, to simply play dress-up in its aesthetic is to become a hollow curator of a museum one does not understand. A classmate described Harvard Business School as light academia. The gothic gloom of dark academia is absent—the vast, celestial optimism of Klarman Hall’s glass-and-steel atrium saw to that. Still, some kind of academic aesthetic persists, albeit a more corporate, clean-lined iteration. One could easily play the part of the protagonist in a prestige narrative, where the case method is a stage and the network a plot device, not yet compelled to read its troubling chapters on power and consequence. To me, the true value of HBS, or of any rigorous institution, lies in the unsettling friction of collective human perspective. Here, the classmate—whether a physician, musician, veteran, banker, or engineer—is not a supporting character in a private narrative of intellectual superiority, but a co-author of understanding. Understanding compels me to dismantle my own cultural and intellectual assumptions, to recognize the medium in which I have been swimming. Learning ceases to be an act of aesthetic accumulation and becomes instead a fluid, analytical collaboration forged in the heat of difference. Perhaps, the true intellectual project is not the rejection of academic aestheticization, but its reckoning. It is a conscious molt. We must shed the institution’s toxic nostalgias, its inherited hierarchies, and its devotion to style over justice—fallacies exposed by Tartt, Kuang, and Awad. What remains after that shedding is not emptiness. We can still love the ivory tower, but only if we are willing to study its rotting staircase in addition to its beauty, accepting that real scholarship is less about atmosphere than about knowledge and connection. 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 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.