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A view of a flag emblazoned with the HBS shield, Winter 2025. Image credit: Nicolas Ng (MBA'27) On belonging at Harvard: Trusting Yyur own pace Author's note: Originally written in April 2025 (RC year) and published in April 2026 (EC year), this piece is an unchanged excerpt from my personal journal dated April 26, 2025. A lot has happened since: classes, retreats, finals, and everything that comes with closing out two unforgettable years. Let’s talk about cliques. Yes, those tight-knit little clusters of people who seem to move through Spangler like an elite social club, brunching together, group-chatting constantly in class, somehow managed to coordinate Halloween costumes, and stayed in the same spring break hotels in Colombia. If you're an international student like me, watching these squads form with lightning speed can feel a little like High School Musical: Harvard edition. Watching them move through campus like a perfectly curated Instagram carousel can feel like everyone else cracked some secret code to friendship while I was still trying to figure out how to set up my HarvardKey. Let’s rewind the tape. How did we get here? It all started with “Yeah! Week” – You Earned A Harvard! Before the first case, before the first cold call, before we even touched foot on campus, there was Yeah! Week. The unofficial, sun-soaked, borderline chaotic “pre-HBS trip” where a bunch of strangers bonded in Croatia and created what looked like lifelong friendships overnight. I wasn’t at Yeah! Week, I was not even aware of Yeah! Week until like a month ago (I didn’t check those Slack channels, but it’s also not like I would have gotten a visa to Croatia that fast!). So I arrived at START Week already feeling like the party had started without me. Then came START Week, with its icebreakers, section reveals, and overly enthusiastic dance parties. And before I could even memorize my professors’ names, we were off to Section Retreats, Field Day, and the ever-glamorous Gatsby Party, where everyone looked like a vintage Vogue spread, and I on the other hand, didn’t read the line about the dress code in the Eventbrite email: “Dress to Impress: Channel your inner Gatsby and bring out your best 1920s fashion. Think flapper dresses, dapper suits, and all the glitz and glamour of the roaring twenties.” It’s been too long, and as I try to recall the details of the chaos that was those early days, I remember that somewhere in that blur of name games, group selfies, and awkward club fair conversations, cliques began to crystallize in front of my eyes. On to the mid-semester “Wait, do I belong?” moment It hit me around October. Maybe November. Mind you, I had been going to all the events such as Friendsgivings, small group dinners, club meetings but something still felt off. Like everyone else has a default crew, a go-to group chat, a table in Spangler that always saves them a seat. And there I was, just hovering with my food, pretending to be on a call with loved ones back home. So why was I, someone who usually finds connection with ease, suddenly struggling to fit in? I remember journaling about it almost every night last semester, trying to make sense of it all. So believe me, I’ve done the fieldwork, I’ve practically turned the HBS social scene into an anthropological case study. What I came to realize is that there are different cultural codes for how friendship forms and shows up. Back home, relationships often unfold slowly, built over time, through consistency, shared experiences, and quiet trust. Here, it felt like connections sparked fast and flourished publicly through group selfies, inside jokes, and weekend getaways happening before midterms. Neither approach is better or worse, just different. But navigating that difference was what was making me feel like I was always one step behind. Like I was still translating the signals while others were already fluent. Then came winter break A natural pause, a trip back home, and a little perspective. Coming back for the second semester, I made a quiet vow to myself: I would put myself out there. No more waiting for the perfect invitation or hoping to be swept into someone else’s plans. I started reaching out to people for coffee. I smiled back in the classroom. I said hello to people whose names I didn’t remember but I had seen them at recruiting events and I genuinely asked my seatmates about their weekend plans. I also got intentional about staying grounded. I made time to update my closest friends from back home about what was going on with me: the highs and lows, the funny classroom moments, the awkward conversations that happen on those long bathroom lines between classes. Just knowing they were in my corner gave me the confidence to be more open here too. Finally, it happened… I found my people. I became part of groups that eat lunch together, spend days in New York for Spring Break, grab drinks on random Wednesdays, have WhatsApp groups with funny names, and even found someone crazy enough to sign up for Monday morning coffee catch-ups at Faro, the cafe in Cambridge. It turns out, those “cliques” that once felt so impenetrable? They’re often just groups of people who invested early, traveled together, shared rooms during Yeah!Week, or sat next to each other in Spangler on Day 1 and never moved. Chances are, they’re not trying to be exclusive. And even if they are, go ahead and start your own clique. After all, you got into HBS because of your amazing ability to connect with people. Your opportunity (promises high ROI!) As I write this, I just got back from the RC Gala (it was giving Met Gala, and this time I remembered to buy a gown). Group chats are full of section-wide selfies and inside jokes. There’s talk of summer plans and EC year course selection. You can almost hear the reflective piano music swelling in the background, like the final scene of a coming-of-age movie where everyone has grown just a little, cried just a bit, and somehow found their way. And in this very moment, I am feeling more settled, more seen; and to be fair, there is still a lot I am yet to figure out. So as you read this, wherever you are in that journey: you’re not alone. Because at the end of the day, belonging at HBS isn’t about cracking the clique code. It’s about being brave enough to connect. Whether you started doing that in Croatia or this winter semester, every Monday at 8 A.M., at Faro, or you just sent your first coffee chat invite to that section-mate you’ve been curious about from the very first day, it counts. It matters. The author (MBA '26) has requested to remain anonymous.

Following Morgan Hewett (MBA ‘26), a builder in the sex-tech space Being an amateur humour writer is a soul-killing job; in lieu of actual brilliance, one tends to pick apart every shred of one’s daily life for the speck of a premise. The AI vibrator began as a product of my somewhat perverse creativity, a tawdry gag “startup idea” I tossed into a parody play on Harvard Business School. Ha ha, let’s add AI to everything, right? That’s what Silicon Valley is all about! That particular joke, like many others I wrote, did not make the final cut of the show, but like a budget Simpsons writer, it would seem life imitates art—a few weeks later (November 2025), my roommate texted me that our batchmate at HBS, Morgan Hewett, had pitched her AI-vibrator startup, Devin Toys, in an entrepreneurship class. I met Morgan in my very first semester of business school, by the happenstance of being in the same section, one of ten in our batch. She had just sold her startup, an AI-powered telehealth platform for treatment-resistant depression, with a good outcome, clouded only by the dilution incurred through the ignorance of being a first-time fundraiser. All that came later; that first day, I remember a flawlessly made-up girl, dressed head-to-toe in pink, looking stunningly out of place at 7 a.m., breezing socially through the crowds as I attempted to hide behind my newly too-short hair and oversized HBS t-shirt. “What does it take?” I wondered, uneasily, scouring the periphery of this new place; I could not voice what for, exactly. About four days into classes, I would conclude that the all-pink outfits were a regular feature. “I love pink. I was FaceTiming my mom when she was in my childhood bedroom, where all the walls were bright pink; I’d forgotten how much I loved it. I thought to myself—wow, before Morgan started doing things for men, what had she loved? I’ve worn pink every day for the six years since.” What is an AI-powered vibrator? In my many conversations on this topic, it always surprises me how coyness defeats the logic and inquisitiveness of professional cross-questioners at business school. What does the AI in Devin Toys do, after all? Two things: it is covered with sensors which measure arousal and adapts the experience to make it more pleasurable, and it offers personalized fantasies communicated to you via earpiece, by either a male or female persona. AI has brought to the spotlight an industry where taboo has translated to issues with advertising, funding and even banking. Lovense, the interactive sex toy brand, debuted AI-powered toys and even a life-sized AI companion doll, Emily, at the 2025 and 2026 Consumer Electronics Show, respectively; just 6 years after Lora DiCarlo was banned from exhibiting their sex toy at the show, after being invited, in 2019, stirring up allegations of sexism. Why go from mental health to building in the sex toy space? A few weeks into school, at the tail-end of a warm September [2024] when it still seemed like the sunny days would last forever, I remember a desultory conversation lounging on the lawns on business school’s favourite topic: dating. In the most older sister fashion, Morgan interspersed affirmations with details on dating standards to adhere to, while I squirmed in my chair, unsure of what to do with the blinding force of her full attention. Sitting with her again for this article, I was reminded of that day; us leaning together conspirationally whispering, feeling less like an interview and more like my hostel days where conversations with girlfriends filled in for the lack of any actual sex education. “The best period of my sex life is now [with my current partner]; the second best period was actually when I was single. I think being single is better than a bad relationship with a man, one that’s detrimental for you, and that should be true for self-pleasure too.” Morgan speaks openly about surviving domestic abuse—her college boyfriend, behind the facade of a good-looking star football player, concealed manipulative tendencies escalating into violent rage. “In our last fight, he completely blacked out; he saw red and beat me up until I was unconscious. In that moment I realized he was truly losing himself; if I stayed, one day he would black out and accidentally kill me,” she shared, on the podcast I Know a Girl. “The fear of leaving him was less than the fear of staying with him and dying.” In the aftermath, she struggled with her mental health. She remained caught between coping with PTSD symptoms and willfully looking past them, not wanting to lose more time to this episode; until her brother, who was battling depression, spoke to her about it. “It wasn’t until [he] started having conversations with me about going on anti-depressants, that I started prioritizing mental health. That began my long journey, which inspired my first startup. Medication really helped when I first started my recovery journey; eventually I was able to taper off it, and I’ve been medication free for many years now.” OptionsMD, Morgan’s first startup, uses AI to predict which treatments and medications individuals with treatment-resistant illnesses are most likely to respond to; inspired by her brother, who tried twelve different treatments before finding one which worked for him. “This is an odd company for an HBS person to start.” Morgan admits, about Devin; “No investor comes to HBS thinking they’re going to find a sex tech brand.” “This isn’t about money for me.” Morgan, who still works with victims of domestic violence, makes no delineation ring-fencing the deeply personal in how she expunges her efforts in life. If OptionsMD arose from her experiences with mental health, Devin Toys comes from the years Morgan spent single, after an abusive relationship, asking herself what the bar for partnership should be, and how to live a fulfilling life alone. “People talk so much about the male loneliness epidemic, but I see something quieter and more interesting happening with women. So many of my friends are single, and successful, in their 30s, 40s or even just getting married later in life, like a mentor of mine who recently tied the knot at 50. I think historically, the institution of marriage did not really benefit women.” “Of course, that means people misinterpret me as being anti-relationship. I’m not! I just think being single is better than a relationship which is holding you back, so we should be less afraid of it.” Marketing a Sex Toy in Behind Your Name May 2025, the end of the first year of the MBA; I was on a school trip, when I was sent a reel on Instagram, with a refrain I would continue to hear socially over the next few months: “Did you see Morgan’s latest video?” Curiosity won over my struggling roaming network connection, as I attempted to watch it in as many pixels as were available. Prior to starting the brand, she was already building up an online presence which was, in itself, not unusual—podcasts, Tiktoks, blogs proliferated around increasingly niche aspects of the business school experience, produced by, and catering to, the transitory student population, and seldom reaching beyond it. The novelty Morgan brought to this oversubscribed space was a whiff of controversy. The video I’d been sent was about being lonely at HBS; an early attempt at the critical honesty which would become a core pillar of her online persona. “I thought it was interesting that none of your marketing materials refer to your product as a vibrator; but as AI-powered women’s wellness.” I’d spent the evening so extensively stalking her Instagram and her website that her assistant Steph reached out to check if I was interested in a vibrator. “Steph’s not a bot,” she laughed “She’s a real person.” “You have a keen eye, noticing that. Instagram and TikTok have advertising restrictions on vibrators; earlier, it used to be enough for just my videos to not mention the word vibrator, but now with AI, if you run ads, they'll also have bots crawl your website. In America, in 2026!” In part to circumvent this, and in part to create more depth to product than just a sex toy, she hopes to create the Xerox or Google of sex tech; to create a product category out of the brand—consumers will be buying “a Devin”, not an AI vibrator of the brand Devin Toys. In aid of this, Morgan had put up a post to hear from her followers on what they thought the device should be called. “So many men responded to that!” she recalled, amused. She often uses social media as a focus group, believing that it gives her engaged viewers a stake in the product—a feeling of co-creation. When asked about how she filtered the feedback she received online, she explained that the people who were interacting with her page enough to see her posts and polls regularly were a part of the community she was trying to build. “Sometimes I do believe in God or a higher power; who puts obstacles in your way to help you. The fact I can’t refer to it as a vibrator forces me to connect with people emotionally. Now it’s not about a vibrator—it’s about a lifestyle; a woman who is selfish in a healthy way, prioritizing her own joy.” “And of course, I ignore all comments on the page from men. They’re not the target audience.” A significant portion of the reels on Morgan’s page, rather than pertaining to her startup specifically, talks about different aspects of women’s romantic relationships and self-love—“Beware of Men who take you for trips”; “Over half of women in relationships regularly fake an orgasm.” She even brings in her own partner as a foil or a contrast to her product: “I’ve been neglecting my boyfriend to build this product for you.” This bipartisan move involving her boyfriend confuses both parties who frequent her page; those who accuse her of subversion of a typical relationship norm, and the single women who are her target audience. “It’s like Nike: I love Nike; I’m wearing Nike right now. There are better shoes, but I appreciate everything that Nike has done for civil rights, for standing by black athletes like Colin Kaepernick.” “In sending a message about women's independence and empowerment, I’m building a brand; people switch products, but stick to brands.” I open up the comments on one of Morgan’s reels; although many are dotted with positive wishes by friends and acquaintances, some attract the negativity faceless internet interactions breed. “The cynical and jaded perspective, the lack of confidence in men… it’s understandable and it’s sad” read a line from a tirade by a self-designated well-wisher, a woman who even opened her comment with “I like you”. “I thought all women knew this, are you only just realizing this?” says another, on a video warning women about men who pay for your trips early on. “Don’t you need to pay people for this?” on one of her customer research reels, asking for sexual fantasy ideas for the AI companion. Beyond positive or negative comments, it was the silence that echoed. I scroll; Morgan is sitting at her dressing table, describing her product as a perfume in a husky, sensual voice. 8 likes, and no comments. I wondered what it felt like to open up about such a vulnerable topic, so regularly, that it might even feel commoditized to your viewers; not driving their engagement. Whether it started feeling rote to yourself, too. “I think sometimes with marketing, you tend to think of people as a group; but if I want to be seen as somebody that matters, I have to see every single person watching that video as someone who matters. So even if the video only got a reach of 20 people, maybe those 20 are really interested in my product; I should be appreciative of that.” Who’s Funding This? [February 2026] Devin Toys. For friends who want to try it (I’ll be making a loss on these): $99; Retail Price: $299; For those who want to support me with a little more!: $399. A three-tier pricing model for Devin Toys' first presales campaign (which has now been replaced by an early-bird price is $184). I switch back from the website to the girl’s group chat where this was shared; I felt unable to rise to the task of discussing the vibrator as a potential purchase. “Did you know Good Vibrations [the sex shop prominently windowed at Harvard Square, next to a popular bagel spot] is on Doordash?” I text back. Candy Heart Dildo Pleasure Works. $69.99. Morgan believed in her community to be able to fund this; she believed if she could do $500K in pre-sales of Devin, she might consider not raising at all. “My first company, I needed the money. It's a tough position to be in because, yes, you're fundraising, but you also kind of feel like you're begging a little bit. I just don't want to be in that position again. It's really anti my whole ethos.” Like many other early-stage investors, Morgan was burned playing the valuation game, with her stake significantly diluted—when she sold, she was shocked by how small her final payout was, despite having driven the business for years. “Everyone else got paid before me,” she said. The sex tech industry struggles with falling on the wrong side of vice clauses, restrictions set by limited partners (typically the large institutional investors like pension funds or university endowments) on where an investor can deploy their money. Despite this, it seems Morgan’s startup is attracting investor interest. In the course Founder’s Launch, HBS’s flagship entrepreneurship workshop, students pitch the investors of week one-on-one; following which their performance is dissected in front of the class. At the time I spoke to Morgan, she’d spoken to 20 investors over the semester. “So basically my experience is that if an investor just sees my deck, they're like no, I'll never invest in this company. If I can get a one-on-one conversation though, they’re often converts.” Morgan reflected. This course culminated in a grand finale, Demo Day, with the battleground of choice upgraded to HBS’s auditorium Klarman Hall, with a full panel of investors, pitching to an audience in the area. I overheard a reference to Morgan’s performance at this finale, at a friend’s backyard event celebrating the first signs of summer—beheading boiled crawfish under the cloudless blue sky. “Investors loved her. She has so much charisma, they were fascinated by the pitch.” my friend said, reflectively peering at the crawfish shell sinking into my now-abandoned beer. “She didn’t use the word vibrator even once though, I wouldn’t have realized what she was talking about had I not known!” Morgan won the Investor Vote, an award for the company investors were most excited about. “Frankly it was because of the traction I received on pre-sales; we’re at $45K of revenue this month just 3 months after starting, without even having launched a product. That’s something investors can’t ignore.” I first interviewed Morgan about this article early March; by April end, she saw her prescient bet on pre-sales pay off, giving her enough leverage to consider raising money. “The confidence around how well I was received by investors led me to launch my pre-seed round, which I did, the night of Demo Day; so now I’m racing to close my round,” she says, on a voice note—unable to make our last rendezvous before the publication of this article, rushing to the airport to make a flight for an investor meeting instead. Is HBS Ready for the Business of Sex? I’m staring at the Partiful for an event titled “The Business of Sex with Ari Kytsya,” a famous OnlyFans creator and internet personality who talks about the negatives of the industry. It was hosted by the Cannabis Business Association of HBS and sponsored by Julie Care, a company selling morning-after pills, offering both pizza and their products to attendees. It seemed almost amusing to me how trite it was for these different avenues of business, which all existed slightly outside conventional conversation to varying degrees, to come together, as though for support. I scroll down and see all 120 seats for this talk filled. Harvard Business School is not new to discussions around reproductive health—Cofertility, which provides egg-freezing services, spoke on campus during the Woman’s Health Conference; a startup to assess the quality of male sperm is being worked on by an HBS student. However Devin Toys might be the first HBS startup in the adjacent sex tech space. There were two anonymous complaints to the HBS Student and Academic Services team about the talk, both focused mainly on concerns that OnlyFans’ business model may be exploitative toward its creators. “I wish I could have invited them for the event, because they would have realized that that’s a big part of what she talks about!” Morgan exclaimed. The event did not happen as planned, victim to a Boston snowstorm; it was rescheduled to April, when 80 people—mostly women—attended. I went to an undergraduate college whose administration believed they had the right to search students’ dorm rooms and dole out disciplinary hearings if they found condoms. Coming from a range of backgrounds, I wondered whether people approached Morgan for debate simply because it fell outside their worldview. “Two of my close friends did speak to me about their concerns about the event, which I thought were valid. Maybe there are more people who aren’t that supportive of me; but given that everyone here is trying to optimize for being liked, no one is going to say anything to my face.” Despite my voyeuristic journalist probing, Morgan maintained her optimistic poise; although several of her videos open with the fiery take “Harvard Business School hates my startup” she remains neutral and understanding about criticism she receives, unwilling to delve into details, redirecting with quiet effectiveness towards more positive threads of discussion. Earlier in our conversation, I had asked her if she received uncomfortable messages on social media. “Oh, totally. It just isn’t personally something I lose sleep over.” she said, dismissing my probing concern confidently, going on to talk about the messages she receives from women in abusive relationships, and how fulfilling it was to help them. I sensed a strict discipline. When your everyday involves sharing the deeply personal, sparking debates usually had in whispers behind closed doors, there is a line. One does not veer into the unproductively personal, a provocateur for no cause; one must only draw as much attention or ire as is necessary. In the earlier days of figuring out her public persona, it is possible that Morgan did not draw this line as clearly. One of her more contentious reels is a response to another girl, discussing how the men of Harvard Business School fall short as dating partners. At 3,500+ likes and 300+ comments, this is her highest engagement reel; with the first comment on the reel being “Does she know she’s a 3.5 on 10?” from a man, as a response to her calling out men at Harvard Business School as 4/10 on looks. I brought up this topic in response to her answer to the question: “What would you like to tell people that you usually don’t get a chance to?” “I think people position me as more anti-man than I am. I’m in a happy relationship, and so many of my male classmates have been supportive and helpful.” Ultimately, I think she’s figured out how to hold her own. I was touched to see a response to the above comment from our classmate, and her close friend: “She’s a 10.” Recently, at one of our last section events, a humorous roast (which is a tradition at the school), Morgan’s startup came up. Warm cheers for her filling the hall, as she posed in front of the meme on a projector. When something enters the realm of good-hearted humour, you can be assured it is favourably cemented in public perception. The Confidence to Keep Showing Up I was lucky to have many readers and critics for this article, pre-publication; I remember a surprising comment I received from one—“She cuts a lone figure.” I’d never thought of her that way; the booming laugh echoing from the centre of a party, the focus of an intense conversation in the breaks between classes. Perhaps the loneliness was in holding on to the conviction, the confidence—to cut into conversation, to make that joke at a party, to endorse what you believe in, without looking left or right for reassurance. It’s the end of our two years at HBS; my hair’s grown out, tempered with a spontaneous dye-job in Lima. I’d found my outlet, writing for our school newsletter throughout—and this is to be my last article. I look over to Morgan, sitting across the table, looking fabulous even under the harsh overhead light. I’d spent the last hour with her, pulling at the ill-defined thread: “What does it take?” “It’s hard work though, girl. It’s really hard work to be so confident that if people diss you, you really are just like, ‘You’re missing out’.” Ramya Vijayram (MBA ‘26) is originally from Chennai, India. She graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Biotechnology. Prior to the Harvard MBA, Ramya worked at Warburg Pincus in Mumbai, India, and McKinsey and Co. in India.

A pensive editorial from 2003 Editor’s Note: This issue’s From the Archives piece originally ran in May 2003. The Class of 2003 witnessed, from the start of their time at HBS to commencement, the terrorist attacks on 9/11, then massive corporate fraud at Enron, then the collapse of the dot com tech bubble, and then the beginning of the Iraq War a month before finals. Crisis has a habit of forcing perspective. Before leaving Allston behind, a member of the class wrote the following editorial for The Harbus. The HBS experience has often whimsically been referred to as “life in a bubble,” where we are protected from the outside world for two blissful years of frolic, cross-dressing and networking. An honest view, however, reveals that to be a tragic myth. Soon after we enrolled we were busy practicing the finer points of the vaunted case method during the breezy, intellectually-lite program known as Foundations. On one of those fanciful Fall mornings, a dozen or so terrorists decided to murder several thousand people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. We lost friends and family, and perhaps our innocence. Our bubble, so to speak, burst. I borrow that line, of course, from the tech crash that dramatically changed our employment landscape, not to mention the economy as a whole. Gone are the days of dot.com dreams and quick millions. And even the investment banks and consulting firms that those who came before us perhaps naively eschewed for Silicon Valley are shrinking their classes if not closing their doors. Then came Enron, and those who came before us (long before us) again weakened our job prospects through their deceitful and HBS brand-damaging shenanigans. As if 9/11 and failures of corporate governance had not done enough to hurt the marketplace for our varied talents, another HBS alum waged a war to free a people, and sent the markets back on their uneasy course. The markets be damned, however. For if we have learned anything at HBS, it is that people matter and that the human spirit perseveres. And lest we be incredibly narcissistic, we must recognize that the events of the last two years affected the world, not simply the HBS Class of 2003. So as we prepare to leave, we should not regret our number of job offers or our looming student loans. Instead we should celebrate our good fortune in having this singular opportunity to be educated and armed with the tools we will need to survive in a world gone mad. We will not only have the opportunity, but the undeniable obligation, to share our blessings with the world. Yes, the world. It may sound trite to speak in such lofty tones, but, and this is not arrogance speaking, graduates of this particular MBA program have been known to find themselves on quite lofty perches. CEO. Head of the World Bank. President of the United States. Parent. Teacher. In each of these roles, the first included, our ability to dramatically and profoundly improve or destroy the lives of others will depend, to quote Dr. King, on the quality of our character. So please, let the lessons, trials and tribulations of the last two years not discourage you, but instead inspire you. There are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who live on less than $2 a day. There are homeless people less than a mile from HBS. There are children on your street who need a mentor. Reach out. Touch. Give. Let the world know that you appreciate this wonderful opportunity and experience that we have shared.

A voluntary hostage situation inside HBS’s most controversial class It’s Wednesday night and I can’t sleep. Tomorrow, I might have to pitch my startup to a live audience at Demo Day, the culmination of three months in HBS’s most controversial class, Founder Launch. I say might because I genuinely don’t know if it will be me. Reza Satchu, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that instead of asking for volunteers, or picking the strongest presenters, or doing literally anything rational, he is going to spin a roulette wheel. Wherever it lands, that person pitches to 400 people: top VCs, classmates, and admitted students deciding between Stanford and Harvard. (A classmate of mine coined “Wheel of Terror.” I am not that funny.) I have stage fright. I have never pitched to a live audience. And this man wants to leave it to chance. Marvelous. His only guidance, delivered with the calm of a man who has sold a company for a billion dollars: “Trust me. When there’s uncertainty, you rise to the challenge.” This is what it’s like to be in Founder Launch. A voluntary hostage situation. Voluntary. Because I did, in fact, sign up for this shit. *** Founder Launch is one of the most competitive courses at HBS. Last year’s inaugural cohort was 33 students out of 91 applicants. This year, 175 people applied for 75 spots. The class has more than doubled in a single year. The inaugural cohort had such a positive impact that it pushed HBS to start interrogating the case method itself. The Harbus wrote a long, glowing profile of it. Completely sanitized with a lot of ass kissing. This is not that article. I warned Reza. His reply: “I trust you.” Are we suffering from collective insanity now? Getting in is unlike getting into any other class at HBS. It comes with a condition: you must sign a contract. In it, you pledge that you will not recruit for a full-time job during the semester. No keeping one foot in the safe world while flirting with entrepreneurship. You are either founding a company, or you are not in this class. Reza frames this not as a sacrifice but as a privilege. The hero’s journey, he calls it. So, you sign. And in that moment, you become, in the most literal, bureaucratic, HR-legible sense of the word, unemployable. At Harvard Business School. The entire machinery of this institution is designed to place you. Obviously, Career & Professional Development hates Reza and his acolytes with the passion of a thousand burning suns. David Fialkow, co-founder of General Catalyst, who attended Demo Day, didn’t hesitate when I asked him about the class: “He has burned the boats. He is ferreting out the people who want to be founders, and the imposters who are just chasing its glamour life.” *** The CliffsNotes of Reza’s ideology: HBS admits the most extraordinary people in the world and watches their slope flatten the day they arrive. Every step of our lives was a leap. Then we get here, miscalibrate, and start playing small. He wants us swinging for the fences. Not trading the right-tail outcome for a return ticket to McKinsey or Blackstone. The odds of me being here (a Latin American woman from Lima, where one year of my HBS tuition is sixteen years of the minimum wage) are already absurd. Why, having beaten those odds, would I stop now? By the end of his fall course, Founder Mindset (the prerequisite where he convinces you to leap), I had dropped every private equity process I was in. Completely brainwashed. *** To be clear: some of Reza’s monologues make me want to roll my eyes so hard they detach from my skull and roll right out of Hawes Hall. Last year’s Harbus article made it sound like every student in Founder Launch worships the ground Reza walks on. That does a disservice to what makes his class work. Yes, I can’t deny the cult allegations. There might be a classmate of mine who has tattooed “commitment” (one of Reza's mantras and the title of his upcoming book) on his arm. And yet. And yet this is the only class at HBS where I really pay attention. Where I don’t check my phone under the desk. Reza doesn't praise or coddle you. He usually ignores you, until you develop a primal need to be seen. Imagine being praised your whole life and then made invisible. So, you fight for his attention. You fight for the opportunities. You fight for the arena. And the arena, you discover, is built to keep you uncomfortable. The mechanics, in shorthand: He cold-calls you to pitch before you are ready. When you fail, he replays it for the class and asks what you missed. He has investors rank you top to bottom and reads the rankings aloud. If you and your co-founder are fighting, he makes you have the fight in front of everyone. When you are irrelevant, he says so. Then there is the Wheel. All of it is the curriculum. David Deming, the Dean of Harvard College and a labor economist who studies higher education, said on Demo Day: “The only way to learn something is for it to be effortful. Most classrooms have settled into a low-effort bargain — I like you, you like me, you’ll get mostly A’s. What Reza has shown is a different way. Even when he has pushed people to be uncomfortable, they show up. Yes, he is a great founder. But he is also a great educator.” *** Every week, Reza invites a few investors into the classroom. They do not yet know they have walked into a trap. In the real world, the founder-investor relationship is a masterclass in performative bullshit. You pitch, they nod, “let’s stay in touch,” and then silence. The power sits with the investor, and the founder is supposed to be grateful for the audience. Founder Launch drops the act. As Reza repeats: “The power dynamic is totally flipped. Capital is plentiful. Great founders are not.” The founders are the prize. Here is how it works: investors meet with founders, both sides fill out surveys, and Reza reads the gaps aloud. Meetings where one side thought it went great and the other thought it went terribly. Investors explain why they wouldn't invest. Founders hand it right back. And because the transparency cuts both ways, you watch investors reveal their doubts, biases, and blind spots in real time. Turns out they are human beings, improvising. Fundraising stops feeling like begging and starts feeling like a conversation between equals on different sides of a table. Look who is flying east. Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, and Khosla (firms that for years treated Boston as a place to recruit out of, not invest into) are sitting in our classroom for hours and showing up for Demo Day. That shift, from supplicant to peer, might be the single most valuable thing I take from my MBA. *** I need to talk about Ajay, because this article would be incomplete and unfair without him. Ajay Agrawal is a professor at the University of Toronto and the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab. Fifteen years ago, he and Reza co-founded Next Canada, a Toronto-based startup accelerator. This spring, they agreed to do it again at HBS, with Ajay flying from Toronto every week. Call it insanity or call it devotion. If Reza is the fire, Ajay is the architect. Reza trains you to barge into any room. Ajay makes sure you've got something worth the entrance. Firas Atoui (MBA ’26, founder of Sawa, a community-native prediction market) put it plainly: “Reza is great at selling. Ajay is great at making sure you have something to sell. He keeps pushing on our business model: are we the disruptor, or are we about to be disrupted?” Every AI founder's nightmare is being a feature. That Anthropic or OpenAI ships an update tomorrow and your entire company becomes a button on someone else's platform. Ajay is the one who makes you confront that fear. Hugo Lieber (MBA '26, founder of a stealth startup) added: “Ajay has a rare ability to cut through complexity and see the forest for the trees. He helps you see how a point solution can evolve into a system-level shift that reshapes an industry.” Ajay's one flaw is that he is too kind. He is our biggest fan, and he should tell us more often when an idea is bad. (Ajay, if you're reading this: some of us need a skeptic.) But that kindness is also the source of his gravity. He believes in us. He holds the vision before we do. You need both. Reza to make you a fighter. Ajay to make you a thinker. A note, in case someone at HBS makes it this far (shocking!): Ajay is not confirmed to return next year. Whatever he is asking for, give it to him. *** What this class teaches, beneath everything else: if you are not uncomfortable, you are not learning. Every week you are pushed into a room you do not feel ready for, sure you can't do it. And every week, you walk out having done it anyway. Ella Rubin and Katie Pfleger (both MBA ’26) are building TRACE, the first AI-native presale marketplace. They learned the lesson faster than most. Ella: “We met with more investors than anyone else in the class, and that was never a strategy. We just understood that you cannot wait. The learning is in going before you’re ready.” Katie: “I have always cared what people think. It’s very hard not to. But once you shed it — that has been my biggest growth. The class makes you raw. You feel like an idiot the next day, and you still have to force yourself back out there. Eventually it trains you.” What I have learned is this: you will never be ready enough. That is the point. What the class trains is the judgment to act without perfect information, and the willingness to do it anyway. *** Widen the frame: what is this class doing to the institution behind it? When I asked an investor what success looks like for Founder Launch, he said: “Does the institution change? Does it keep building this?” Early signs say yes. A Harvard venture fund was announced at Demo Day. The case method is being interrogated. The school is, uncharacteristically, moving fast. The numbers reflect the shift. Last year's inaugural cohort raised over $70M. This year, by April (before most have even launched), roughly 38 ventures of the new cohort had already raised commitments totaling more than $32M. Reza expects this year's cohort to clear $100M by December. Here is the question that is going to get this article killed. If HBS is the best business school in the world, why isn't it the best place to start a company? For years it has produced far fewer founders than it should, given the size and the talent of its student body. Right now, the correction is one course and two people. And it exists only because Reza decided to care disproportionately. He had no obligation. He has no equity. The change is real, but it is happening slowly, and the institution is not the one driving it. So, the question for the school: does this remain a Reza project, or does it become a pedagogy? Valerie Chen (MBA '26, building Celery, a competitive and social screen time management app) put it bluntly: "First-person learning is the best. Watching another founder live through it is second best. The case method is third. Maybe last." Editor’s Note: The claim that HBS underperforms on founder output is more complicated than is suggested. HBS has produced more unicorn founders than any other business school in absolute terms. On a per-capita basis, Stanford GSB is either competitive or leads. Yet the deeper question raised is a separate and open one: whether the business school is structurally the best environment to found a company at all. Most of America’s top companies—measured by either valuation or revenue in every decade of the last century, ours included—were not founded by business school graduates, though most are led by MBAs. The answer depends on the benchmark. *** Reza talks about where he came from. A lot. The facts: he was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1969. His family moved to Toronto in 1976, when he was seven. They settled in a two-bedroom apartment in Scarborough. The reason he keeps showing us the photo of his first apartment building in Canada is not nostalgia. It is the underwriting case for the entire curriculum: if I could leap, you can leap. I'll admit I've been an asshole about this. I was tired of the repetition. The Scarborough story again. It took a phone call from a classmate to understand it wasn't aimed at me. “People like me who have lived that life hear him and think: wait a minute, someone took my path, and it worked. The broader audience thinks it's a story they've heard before. But seeing someone from that background do it gave me, and others like me, the courage to want to be an entrepreneur.” That is what representation does in its least sentimental form. But the numbers tell a different story. There are seventy-five of us in Founder Launch. Four come from genuinely lower-income backgrounds. Four. The rest of us, myself included, have a safety net, a different risk profile, a family that can absorb a bad year. Tearing up the recruiting contract is not an equal act of courage. Ask Asif Satchu, Reza's younger brother, founder of MRC, the studio behind House of Cards and Ozark. Twenty-five years ago, Asif went to Dean Kim Clark's office before graduation to ask for a tuition deferral. He had put every dollar of his tuition money into his company, one of only two HBS startups that year. Dean Clark's reply: “We're a business school, Asif. We're in a business. So, you must pay your tuition.” Cut to now: Harvard is announcing a venture fund. The specifics are yet to be defined. But done right, it could lower the barrier to who gets to be a founder. *** Strip away the mechanics, the investors, the institution. What is left is seventy-five people in a room. The MBA is, at its core, a social experience. (Most expensive social experience in your twenties.) But the Founder Launch community might be unique. These are people who signed a contract and gave up the safe career. There is no balance: there is the company, there is class, there is sleep, and you pick two. That shared sacrifice creates something closer to soldiers in boot camp than a professional network, except the drill sergeant is a Canadian millionaire with a philosophical commitment to making you uncomfortable. What comes out of that is honesty. In a world curated by social media, where everyone shares only the wins, it is refreshing to have peers who share the failures too. That makes this different from the rest of HBS, where the culture rewards performance over honesty. Anisha Agarwal (MBA '26, founder of Lighthouse, an emotional development platform for Indian adolescents): “Founding a company is the loneliest thing I've done. Seventy-four people in this class are doing the same lonely thing at the same time. It stops being a weight you hold alone and becomes something the room carries with you. You don't stop because they don't stop. Every small win, every big loss, you don't have to explain why it matters. They already know.” *** So, back to the Wheel of Fame (formerly Terror). Which spun, eventually. Thirty-two of us were selected at random. Some were brilliant. Some froze. It did not matter. When they faltered, their eyes would flick to our corner, and a ripple of applause would come back. After spending three months learning how to fail, we also learned how to hold each other up. The Wheel didn’t land on me. I thought I would feel relief. I didn’t. I felt something closer to being cheated out of a fight I’d spent three months training for. That, more than anything else, is how I knew the class had worked. On Wednesday night I could not sleep. On Thursday afternoon I was disappointed it wasn’t me. There was a $1M term sheet on the table, written on the spot at the end of the day. Lizzie Speed (MBA '26, founder of Greenlight Robotics, building collision-avoidance AI for buses and light rail) won it. Andre Charoo of Maple VC, explaining why: “Likely the biggest ambition in the batch: making public transit autonomous. The tailwinds are there. The perfect venture-scale bet.” *** The Wheel produced a winner. The class produced something harder to name. I have fought this feeling for 3,000 words and seriously considered drowning in the Charles before surrendering my pride: I am incredibly grateful for such a terrifying, beautiful experience. “I wish everybody in this class learned something enduring. Some businesses will succeed. Some will fail. But the most enduring thing is that everybody, when they look back on this in five, ten, twenty years, thinks this was a transformational period in their life.”—Ajay Agrawal. Dana Chiabra (MBA ’26) is a second-year MBA student at HBS, originally from Lima, Peru. Previously at Advent International, now unemployable, she can be found outside of class turning every minor inconvenience or life event into a long-form essay on her Substack.

On transformation, leadership, and building for the long term Editor’s Note: The Harbus is continuing its Leadership series, featuring conversations with leaders across business and society. We sat down with Lila Snyder, CEO of Bose, to discuss her path to the top, what makes Bose distinctive, how she thinks about transformation, and what she looks for in leaders. Pranav Bharadwaj: You took a somewhat unconventional path to the CEO role. You have a PhD, you spent years at McKinsey, and then moved into operating roles. Looking back, what most helped you get to where you are? Lila Snyder: I don’t think there was any one thing. The most consistent thread across my career has been curiosity: the desire to learn new things and to understand how things work. As an engineer, that started with how products work. At McKinsey, it became how businesses work and how leaders work. That kind of insatiable curiosity stayed with me the whole time, and it has served me really well. PB: At what point do you decide to specialize? A lot of people talk about eventually becoming a certain kind of CEO: a finance CEO, a growth CEO, a turnaround CEO. Did you ever think about it that way? LS: Not explicitly. I did not set out thinking I wanted to be a transformation CEO. But I was always drawn to change. I found it really interesting to ask: how do you take something that has been great, where the world around it has changed, and bring it into a new era without losing what made it special in the first place? That was the kind of work I gravitated toward at McKinsey. And, ultimately, that is why I am at Bose. Not because I spent my whole career in consumer electronics or audio, but because Bose was at one of those moments where it needed to transform, and that was the right skill set at the right time. PB: You must have had opportunities to leave McKinsey earlier. What made you say no, until the right one came along? LS: I was enjoying the work and learning a lot, so the bar to leave was high. At McKinsey, I had the chance to see and be part of many different situations. Joining any one company often seemed interesting in the moment, but it was not always clear where it would lead after a year or two. Until the end, nothing really competed with what I was already doing. PB: If you had to pick what makes Bose stand out, would it be sound quality, engineering, product design, or brand? LS: If I can only pick one, it is technology. Bose is built from science up. We research, develop, and create technology that delivers really amazing human experiences. The point is not just to have cool technology. It is to create something magical for the person on the other side of it. That goes all the way back to our founding. If I had to choose one thing, that is the one. The other thing I would add is the brand. We are fortunate to be one of the top brands in the world, and that is a very powerful place to be. So we want to keep investing in both the technology and the brand. PB: Bose is recognized around the world. Which market is especially exciting to you right now? LS: It is a somewhat difficult time around the world for consumers, so that is a tricky question. But from a technology standpoint, it is hard not to be excited by what is happening in China. The pace of innovation there, and the ability to try things quickly, is extraordinary. As a technology company, that is very exciting for us, and our team there is doing some really interesting work. PB: Do you see Bose always staying anchored in audio, or could the company move into adjacent consumer technologies over time? LS: I am sure that, at some point, we will expand further. But right now, our focus is on bringing great audio to many more places. In the past, our technology was reserved almost exclusively for Bose products. Today, we see that sound plays an important role across many industries and markets where Bose does not need to compete directly, but where our technology can still make a real difference. So there is a lot of opportunity in consumer audio, automotive audio, and also in areas like health and wellness, mobile, enterprise, and industrial markets. There is so much room ahead of us in audio that, for now, it remains our singular focus. PB: Bose is privately held, with a very distinctive ownership structure. How does that shape the way you run the company? LS: It is a unique structure, and like any structure, it has pros and cons. We cannot go raise equity to fund big ideas, so we have to live within what is available to us. But it also means we can make decisions for the long term. If we see something in the middle of the year that we want to invest in, we can pivot more easily than a public company can. That only works if leadership and the board set high enough aspirations. We do not have an external shareholder creating that pressure for us, so that has to come from within. But if you can maintain that discipline, there are huge benefits. We are willing to make bets that take years. The hearing aid we just launched with our partner Orka leverages years of technology and research we’ve been doing in this space. In many ownership structures, there would have been enormous pressure to shut that down long before launch. At Bose, we could keep our heads down and stay with it because we believed in the need, the technology, and the long-term value. PB: You became the first female CEO of Bose. Did that shape how you approached the role? LS: I was more focused on coming in as an outsider. That is its own challenge. When you come in externally, you have to understand what makes the company special, what the magic is, and what absolutely should not be changed. At the same time, you have to help the organization move forward, because Bose needed to transform. So I was very focused on listening, learning, and trying to take the company on a journey with me, rather than arriving and saying, “This is where we are going, come or do not come.” And more broadly, I believe deeply in meritocracy. I do not want to be a great female CEO. I want to be a great CEO. PB: You are now five years into the role. How has the job changed over time? LS: It is definitely different. I believe Bose will be in transformation forever, because that is the pace of the world now. In the first chapter of our transformation, the work was more nuts and bolts: get the product portfolio right, focus on the right markets, improve operations, and strengthen the brand. Reaching younger audiences was a big part of that. What is exciting now is that we have shifted into the growth phase of the transformation. We have a stronger, more focused base, and now we are much more oriented toward executing on the future growth strategy. That is a really fun shift. PB: When you hire senior leaders, what do you look for? And what are the red flags? LS: Functional competence is the baseline. That is the bar. If I am hiring a chief marketing officer or a product leader, I assume they can do the job from a capability standpoint. Beyond that, it is mostly about culture and fit. Will this person fit on the leadership team? Will they add something? Will they work well inside the Bose culture? Companies have their own cultures, and some people fit and some do not. If someone is not a good cultural fit, you are not going to change that. They may have been very effective elsewhere, but if they do not fit the culture, they may not be able to create change here. PB: How do you actually test for cultural fit in a hiring process? LS: You have to invest the time. First, you spend time with the person yourself. And as you get further along, it helps to spend time in a more relaxed setting, over dinner or lunch, where you are really getting to know them as a human being rather than just conducting an interview. Second, we deliberately have candidates meet a lot of people. Probably more than they would always like. But that helps us crowdsource the judgment. If someone meets ten people at Bose, we have a much better chance of understanding whether they are a cultural fit than if they meet only three. It also works in the other direction. I always tell candidates that they should be interviewing us too. This is their chance to understand whether Bose is a culture they want to be part of and whether this is a team they want to join. PB: Once leaders are in the door, how do you coach them? Do you want them to lead the way you lead? LS: There are certain leadership behaviors you want to reinforce, of course. But I also want leaders to be authentic. So the coaching is usually less about changing someone’s leadership style and more about helping them become their best self inside the Bose culture. It is about putting them in the right situations early, giving them the right support, and helping their style land well here. PB: How do you balance coaching people and developing them versus bringing in outside talent? LS: It is one of the most important decisions you make as a leader. You have to assess your talent and figure out what matters most in each role. Some things are coachable and some are not. Sometimes someone is doing good work, but they are not the right fit for what the business needs next. Sometimes they are simply in the wrong role and belong somewhere else. So you have to consider all of those possibilities. Can this person grow into what is needed? Is there a better role for them elsewhere in the organization? Or do you need to bring in someone from outside? It is always a judgment call. PB: Having advised so many CEOs earlier in your career, how has your view changed now that you are in the seat yourself? LS: I think about it differently now. I talk to a lot of CEOs, and it is a great community of people trying to help each other. These are hard jobs, and there are parts of them that nobody else fully experiences. So your best source of advice is often your peers. I have a long list of CEOs I can call if I am facing a challenge, and I have found that to be very reciprocal. If another CEO reaches out and wants to talk through something, I will always take that call. PB: Has the job been harder than you expected? LS: Some days, yes. It is hard to answer because it is also more spectacular than I expected. There are days when I think, “Wow, this is much harder than I thought it would be.” And there are other days when I think, “This is more amazing than I imagined, and I am having more fun than I ever thought I would.” It is a roller coaster. Often, both things happen on the same day. PB: Last question: what is next? LS: I think Bose is right on the edge of a very exciting chapter. If you look at our growth strategy, our market position, and the technology developing in our labs, I believe Bose has a pretty great run ahead. I am excited to be part of it. Lila Snyder is the Chief Executive Officer of Bose and a member of its Board of Directors. She leads the company’s portfolio of consumer audio brands and the automotive and audio technology businesses. Before joining Bose in 2020, she was President of Commerce Services at Pitney Bowes, and earlier spent 15 years at McKinsey & Company advising technology, media, and communications clients. She holds bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD degrees in mechanical engineering. Pranav Bharadwaj (MBA '27) is from London, UK and the current CEO of the Harbus News Corporation.

The flowers are passing. White and pink litter the ground so that green can suffuse the sky; in this way we know the end of an era and the opening of another is upon us. Can we know? Every past year, the changing of the colors has heralded the opening of the gate and the procession. We drew ever closer to our own ceremony, but it was so far away, we thought, that it might never come; but here you are, where you must now stand at attention. Half of us you leave here, to join the many fractions of the 90,000 strong beyond Soldiers Field. What is the song that sends you off? Is it the steely trill of the fife and drum, the triumphant shout of the trumpet and its band, the choir that mourns your requiem to the worlds left behind? Many of you will be sad to march but look forward with an earnest eye. Some of you will cast a dirty look behind at the last moment. Still some others carry nothing in the heart, passing through this place as routine a stop as any other. It is not my decision to judge. It is only mine to write the elegy of your time. 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.

Bringing Deep Tech to HBS “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke At the RC startup bootcamp info session, the presenter was explaining the program's parameters: well-suited for early prototypes; probably not for, say, "launching a satellite." I (Michelle) had just come back from watching rocket launches at Cape Canaveral and raised my hand. “If anyone’s interested in launching satellites, let’s talk after!” Soon, I found myself surrounded by an enthusiastic group. Some had engineering backgrounds. Some, like me, didn’t. That was the genesis of a WhatsApp chat called "HBS Deep-Tech Enthusiasts," whose members would regularly meet at Grafton for beers. It was immediately clear this was a special group of the tinkerers—the curious, the ones who dared to believe in “magic.” But it was equally clear that this group was fragmented and underserved. We were, at best, split across different clubs; at worst, entire fields like robotics or biochemistry had no natural home at HBS, making it harder to find others who might’ve been interested. I (Sanchit) suggested we needed a larger tent. Months later, we made the Automation & Deep Tech Club an official club with critical support from MS/MBA faculty, the GRID, and the Tough Tech Ventures professors. The club spans areas including quantum, climate, advanced manufacturing, robotics, autonomous vehicles, AI/ML, material science, and biotech. What we couldn’t have anticipated was the groundswell of latent interest we had actually tapped into. What Deep Tech Actually Is Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In a world where we most often hear about repackaging existing technologies or building faster, cheaper apps, deep tech strikes a different tune. It starts from a genuine scientific breakthrough and asks: what does the world look like when yesterday’s magic becomes tomorrow’s reality? HBS trains the muscle of critique, teaching us how to question assumptions and make arguments that withstand probing. It's a tremendously valuable skill. Yet how can you analytically critique something that’s never been done before—something like “magic?” There's a tremendous power and privilege in choosing to be optimistic about scientific breakthroughs, in choosing to believe before proof, in choosing to make possible what previously was impossible. The Automation & Deep Tech Club is our answer to that gap, bringing together a community of HBS students who dare to believe in “magic” while using HBS’s classic critical frameworks to make these technologies viable and real. Michelle, Sanchit, and Otto Salmi (CFO, HBS ‘26) pitching to HBS MBA clubs to start Automation and Deep Tech Club in April 2025 It turns out this community grew faster than any of us would have guessed. We now have over 200 members, with notably higher interest among RCs, with 18 members stepping up to help on the leadership team. It's been clear from the beginning: you don't need an engineering degree—or any technical background at all—to find your place here. Club member backgrounds range from engineers and PMs at SpaceX, Tesla, NVIDIA, Apple, and Boston Dynamics, to founders of sustainable materials startups and early biotech companies, to public equity analysts, infrastructure investors, venture capitalists, and consultants. This diversity is one of the strengths of this club. We’re able to tackle the very real challenge of commercialization from many angles. All you need is genuine curiosity about how deep science gets scaled. Touching the Magic Here's what we've both learned from the journey: proximity changes everything. You can read about metalenses, optical layers thinner than a human hair consisting of millions of nanoscale pillars positioned on a flat surface (which can be found in optical devices from phone cameras to satellite instruments), and appreciate it intellectually. But walking through Professor Federico Capasso's lab at the Harvard School of Engineering with research scientist Dr. Paul Chevalier in a visit organized by club member Daniel Trieff (MBA ‘26), we saw the colors dancing through the lenses—and appreciated the beauty behind the science while endeavoring to understand it. At the Wyss Institute, we saw organs-on-a-chip: microfluidic devices lined with living human cells designed to replicate the function of actual human organs. The implications for drug testing and personalized medicine are staggering. Holding a living organ on a chip in our hands, we felt like we were looking into the future. Image source: Harvard Wyss Institute Website From Lab to Market The magic is already becoming real. It’s actually all around us here in Boston. Capasso's metalens research has spun out into Metalenz, a venture-backed company; the Wyss Institute has launched dozens of startups from its research. The question the Deep Tech Club keeps asking is: what does it actually take to get there? Many of our EC members are taking Tough Tech Ventures with Professors Josh Krieger and Jim Matheson, digging into the financing structures and go-to-market strategies that deep science startups require, for the playbook for tough tech looks nothing like the playbook for SaaS. We've hosted conversations about new financing mechanisms for capital-intensive ventures, about what it takes for an MBA and a PhD co-founder to build something together, stories from alumni deep tech founders, and how quantum sensing or electric aviation or biomaterials goes from lab result to scalable product. Equally valuable has been sharing each of our own deep tech experiences and insights to learn from each other about what’s possible. Part of why I (Sanchit) came to HBS was because I was lucky to see robotics become commercially real at Boston Dynamics in my last role. It was extra special to see the club visit Boston Dynamics so that they too could marvel at and dream about the latest in robotics. And this was just one of countless examples where Boston’s rich deep tech ecosystem invited us in with open arms to show us that the promise of deep tech is real. If the lab visits and company visits are about seeing magic born, the factory visits are about understanding what it takes to deliver it at scale. At Tesla's Fremont factory, club member Riva Kapoor walked us through the floor the size of 92 football fields, where raw materials become cars at a pace, scale, and level of automation that’s genuinely eye-opening. Watching a Cybertruck roll off the line, and then getting to drive one, made abstract concepts like supply chain, vertical integration, and unit economics feel very physical. Though scaling is a business problem, engineering problem, and design problem all at once, it’s ultimately a belief problem: someone had to decide this was possible before it was. You Don't Need Permission We are two very different people who ended up building this together: one who grew up watching a city transform overnight, who worked in finance in New York but dreamed of going to space; one who spent years actually building the robots that once felt like science fiction. We think that's the point. We live in a moment thick with reasons for pessimism. But our club members—and the scientists and engineers we've spent the past year talking to—aren't pessimistic. They're heads-down building things most people haven't imagined yet, sustained by a stubborn belief that the gap between "indistinguishable from magic" and "commercially real" is worth solving for. And just like deep tech itself, believing that you can be additive to the gap might not be obvious at first, but you just need to be willing to believe first and figure out your role later. It’s been a privilege getting to start this club and see the community blossom, but this is just the beginning. We’ve recently elected the next generation of Co-Presidents: Tyler Mangini and Gurshaan Madan, and CFO Shiham Alam (all MBA ’27). We’re excited to see just how much an HBS community of tinkerers and people who dare to dream can truly do. Come find us: ADTC@studentclubs.hbs.edu With Thanks The Automation & Deep Tech Club is grateful for the support of the individuals and organizations who helped make this community possible: Otto Salmi (our third cofounder and CFO), our leadership team, Prof. Josh Krieger, Prof. Tom Clay, Prof. Jim Matheson, Prof. Alan MacCormack, Paul Hayre and the Harvard GRID, Moira Doherty (HBS ‘15), Ira Renfrew (HBS ‘14), Alex Zannos (HBS ‘25), Christine Keung (HBS ‘20) of J2 Ventures, Nina Butler of Pillar VC, and the MBA Clubs Committee. Michelle Chen (MBA ‘26) and Sanchit Bhattacharjee (HBS ‘26) are the Co-Founders & Co-Presidents of the HBS Automation & Deep Tech Club. Michelle studied Mathematics, Economics, and Comparative Literature with a focus in French at Columbia University and worked in infrastructure investing at Blackstone before HBS. She enjoys learning physics in her spare time and dreams of going to space someday. Sanchit studied Computer Science and Mathematics with a focus on AI and Robotics at MIT. He went on to work at Boston Dynamics helping commercialize Spot before joining the MS/MBA program at HBS to help shape how robots enter our world. Outside of work, he cares for his pet axolotl and occasionally finds himself performing at concerts.

And other things I believe absolutely Note: all em dashes in this piece are mine and mine alone. HBS’s commitment to perfection permeates the campus experience. Before winter’s first snowflake hits the ground, legions of snow ploughs are deployed across all 40 acres to tidy up the grounds. As one legendary Section Chair put it, even the squirrels are shampooed for fundraising events. They say rats that cross the Charles River turn into adorable bunnies as soon as they set foot on campus. Not a single blade of grass is allowed out of place. Oh, to pursue ETA and acquire Cambridge Landscape Co.! But I digress… The beating pulse of the institution—the Aldrich classroom—is engineered to the lumen. Seventy-two bulbs and three kinds of lighting adorn the ceiling, illuminating every last pore. Made-to-measure Herman Millers. White oak walls and tiered rows create an academic amphitheater. Pressure-washed boards between sessions. All part of the symphony of staff whose choreography you are not supposed to notice. HBS attends to every last detail. The question is, what for? At the back of every classroom, emblazoned on every screen, the crest of Harvard Business School displays three short syllables spread across three open books: VE-RI-TAS. Not wisdom. Not power. Truth. The motto is not decoration. It is an ontological claim about the school’s telos. Veritas presupposes that capital-T Truth exists, that pursuing it is worth the friction, and that doing so requires the courage to say a thing is right and another thing is wrong. We have lost our taste for all three. Every physical surface of this school is optimized around the pursuit of Truth, while the intellectual substrate has abandoned it entirely. If, as one classmate noted, “You are buying the brand,” what exactly did we purchase? A pristine amphitheater for moral cowardice? I. The Devil’s Advocate Wears Patagonia In June 1978, a fifty-nine-year-old Russian stood at a Harvard commencement lectern in the rain. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn had survived the Gulag. He had been stripped of Soviet citizenship, deported, and was living in a farmhouse in Vermont. The West had, in a sense, claimed him. He was the dissident who had exposed the Soviet system from the inside, and he had come, presumably, to thank his hosts. The audience expected a tribute. A celebration of the free world that had taken him in. What they got instead was a diagnosis. "A decline in courage," he said, "may be the most striking feature which an outside observer notices in the West in our days." He named the symptoms: the timidity, the pursuit of comfort, the preference for legal reasoning over moral reasoning, the intellectuals who had lost their nerve. His secretary had translated the speech the night before and wept. "He will not be forgiven for this," she told his wife. She was right. The audience booed. The New York Times called him arrogant. Harvard moved on. The speech was called A World Split Apart. Its central claim was that the civilization Solzhenitsyn had risked his life to reach was losing the moral nerve that had made it worth reaching. Pursuing Truth, he argued, is not primarily an act of intellect; it is an act of courage. It is the willingness to say that a thing is right and another is wrong, and to pay the price when it is unwelcome. That was forty-seven years ago. Here is how that warning aged. For three years running, Harvard scored last or near-last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) national free-speech rankings. The university responded with the president’s Building Bridges Fund—an initiative supporting projects that “aim to break down campus divisions.” HBS’s version, christened “Across the Aisle,” attempts to bring classmates together “openly, rather than through debate or persuasion.” The nomenclature is a Freudian slip, an admission that our dialogue has devolved into political tribalism. But the fatal flaw is methodological: they explicitly named the two prerequisites for pursuing Truth and promised to avoid them. Why avoid debate? Because persuasion risks friction, and friction is socially expensive. The evidence is the daily dance in Aldrich. A student with a contrarian insight will inevitably neuter their own point before making it: "I don't necessarily believe this, but just to play devil's advocate..." We are terrified of being caught holding an unpopular bag. This student timidity is met with an equally conflict-averse faculty. When a professor asks a binary question about unit economics and receives a soliloquy about an unrelated brand initiative, a callback to a point made twenty minutes prior, or a deeply personal but entirely irrelevant anecdote, they are often simply too nice to say, 'That is incorrect.' They politely ignore the absurdity, admirably bending over backwards to reformulate the question so the non-sequitur feels validated. Courage is the virtue that makes all others possible. Without it, Truth escapes us. II. The Cirque du Moral Relativism When the foundational claim of an institution is hollowed out, the institution does not collapse. It continues to operate, perfectly lit and immaculately landscaped. But when it loses its moral nerve, it requires an intellectual alibi to justify its retreat from objective reality. On this campus, the abandonment of truth-seeking has spawned a parasite. It is the blight of moral relativism. This retreat is not a localized phenomenon. Last month, Yale released a 50-page Report on Trust in Higher Education. After a year of deliberation, they concluded that plummeting public trust could be solved with device-free classroom policies and new grading percentiles. They completely ignored the actual bullet wound: a decades-long academic project, broadly termed "deconstruction," aimed at dismantling the central commitments of Western civilization—chiefly, the pursuit of objective Truth. But here we encounter a massive, expensive contradiction. If the system is just a narrative of power, and Truth is just a cultural construct, why are we paying a quarter-million dollars for the privilege of sitting in these seats? Because we know the brand matters. We derive immense value from the halo effect of Harvard. But we conveniently ignore that this brand was built over centuries by a rigorous, unapologetic commitment to the exact thing we are now taught to deconstruct. We are liquidating the reputational capital of Veritas to fund our own optionality, destroying the foundation while admiring the house. To survive that cognitive dissonance, we need the alibi. Formally, moral relativism is the philosophical premise that objective Truth does not exist—that right and wrong are merely byproducts of cultural consensus, historical context, or personal preference. In HBS terms, it is the unspoken classroom rule that no answer is inherently more true than any other, no judgment more grounded than the next, and the only sin worth naming is the sin of being too sure. It is the mechanism that automatically demotes any definitive moral claim into "just one perspective among many." It arrives dressed as kindness, as humility, as the gentle posture of the enlightened student who would never presume to judge. Live your truth. Who am I to say? The two most repeated words in Allston: It depends. Beneath the costume, relativism is not the humble, tolerant worldview it pretends to be. In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom warned of the closed-mindedness that elite institutions foster. By championing a very specific kind of “openness”—a moral relativism where all values are equally valid—this forced receptivity paradoxically produces a completely closed mind. If all truths are relative, there is no imperative to seek the objective one. The pursuit of Veritas is officially canceled. If we take the philosophy seriously for a moment, the entire concept of an HBS case discussion is a farce. If there is no shared objective reality, we aren’t actually debating; we are just ninety people in a horseshoe concurrently talking to ourselves. When a classmate raises their hand and says, "I #respectfullydisagree," what they are structurally forced to mean under relativism is, "My chemically induced brain-state prefers a different flavor of mouth-noise than yours." Our analytical frameworks are remarkably elastic. The moment a claim gets uncomfortably close to something definitive, the room defaults to something tantamount to: The logic contorts itself to protect the room's political consensus. The framework of objective Truth is tolerated only when it is convenient. What does this alibi look like in practice? Picture a Tuesday morning in Aldrich discussing the Wells Fargo case. The executives have just overseen the systemic creation of millions of fraudulent bank accounts. The professor pauses, chalk poised, and asks the section for the primary takeaway. In a sane world, the answer is: "This is coordinated, objective theft." At HBS, a hand shoots up from the skydeck: "It’s a fascinating study in aggressive sales culture, but they really mismanaged the compensation levers." We nod gravely. The professor writes Misaligned Incentives on the board. We have just successfully sanitized objective larceny into an organizational behavior diagram. The relativist position refutes itself the moment it opens its mouth. To state that "there is no absolute truth" is, itself, an absolute truth-claim. The relativist cuts down the branch they are sitting on and is still surprised when they hit the ground. They are operating inside a worldview that cannot be coherently stated; it can only be assumed. Worse, this forced tolerance breeds a profound intolerance of anyone who softly suggests otherwise. Karl Popper diagnosed this as the "Paradox of Tolerance": if an institution is tolerant without limit, its ability to be tolerant will eventually be seized or destroyed by the intolerant. In the HBS classroom, the dogma has become: no dogma. The orthodoxy becomes: no orthodoxy. And the person who softly suggests otherwise is told, politely, that they are the problem. And when the costume slips—when a student actually grounds an argument in objective right and wrong—relativism reaches for its favorite weapon: “Why do you care so much?” It is the classic dismissal. Its function is to move the conversation from what is true to why you are the kind of person who brings it up. Once that move has been made, the original argument is dead. The person who can make you answer for caring has already won, without ever having to state whether they actually think you are right or wrong. That is the philosophy. The reason most people hold it has nothing to do with philosophical rigor. They hold it because of what it allows them to get away with. It is adopted because of the specific, comforting promises it makes about how they can live their lives. III. The Hidden Cost of a Hedged Life I, for one, am no arbiter of Truth. This piece is merely my humble appeal (#MyTruth) to HBS to remember that Truth exists. And an attempt to show that moral relativism is not the humble, tolerant worldview it pretends to be. Veritas is, after all, the very foundation upon which this institution was built. Relativism promises you that your life is your own. It delivers a life with no story. Under any coherent account of a human life, you are the protagonist of a narrative. It is the architecture every great story follows—what Reza Joseph Campbell dubbed the Hero's Journey. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, don’t worry, it’s coming. They are right, though: actions move you toward heroism or away from it. But what is rarely said out loud in these hallowed halls is that the Hero's Journey cannot survive inside a relativist universe. It requires a destination, a transformation, and a standard of heroism that exists outside the hero. It requires an antagonist whose project is actually wrong—not differently valid, actually wrong. Strip the standard away, and the journey collapses into a wander. The dragon is just a misunderstood stakeholder. Heroism becomes a genre preference. You have traded a story for a mood. If you push a relativist on this, they will retreat to the final defense: "If it makes me happy and harms no one, what business is it of yours?" Notice what this presupposes: that the self making the choice is an island, that harm is a thing visible only in the moment of action, and that the costs of a private decision stay private. But the market responds with perfect, ruthless logic to what the philosophy rewards. If the point of life is frictionless self-realization, and there is no objective moral standard to govern capital allocation, the results are entirely predictable. This is why our campus culture eagerly welcomes executives to discuss the “growth metrics” of the business of infidelity. It is why, while already staving off any sort of long-term commitment, we seek advice on how to turn the vow of marriage into a hedged derivatives contract. Are we capable of committing to anything at all? We don't have to normalize everything, you know. When you abandon the pursuit of Veritas, the only standard left is margin. We are not pushing boundaries; we are simply watching the logical conclusion of a framework that has no vocabulary left for the word "sacred." Yet, the facade is fragile. Consider how this exact same classroom responds when someone mentions Jeffrey Epstein. It is one of those rare moments where the room achieves total unanimity. Professor, students, scribe. Nobody hedges. Nobody says, “Well, from his point of view…” . Nobody asks the skydeck to steelman the take. Eighty-seven type-A personalities (Section X had departed for the weekend)—normally so careful to attribute every claim to an elastic framework—agree instantly and totally. It is a recognition of the kind of wrong that does not depend on the tribe of the perpetrator, the zip code of the victim, or the political quarter currently claiming offense. It passes in four seconds. We move on. But for those four seconds, the room stops performing relativism and tells the truth about itself. There is a moral substrate every single one of us shares. We believe some things are actually wrong—not wrong-for-me, but wrong. If moral relativism were an accurate description of reality, then we are all just self-contained units of preference. The rational move would be atomization: minimize obligations, maximize optionality, and exit anything that constrains you. But this is not what we do. It is certainly not what HBS students do. The Section experience, for all its choreographed camaraderie, reveals something the philosophy refuses to admit: we are thirsty for connection, for continuity, for the kind of relational commitment the relativist worldview says we should be fleeing. We plan the weddings. We send the group-chat memes. We will (I hope) show up to the funerals. We fly across the country to have dinner with someone we met eighteen months ago at ASW. If the philosophy were right, all of this would be a mistake—a sentimental detour from the rational pursuit of self-realization. The reason we keep showing up for each other is that, beneath the costume and the frameworks, we know the alibi is a lie. We know the Truth exists, and we know we are starving for it. IV. Your Honor, I’ve Been Framed Most HBS students take Negotiation. The prime directive of the discipline, buried beneath the vocabulary of ZOPAs and BATNAs, is this: whoever sets the frame wins. By the time the negotiation begins, the person who defined the terms of the conversation has already, invisibly, done most of the work. Writing and teaching business cases is a brutally difficult job. But the case method goes undefeated in Aldrich because it decides in advance what is and what is not on the table. Pedagogically, this makes sense; guardrails preserve the eighty-minute exercise. But what if the frame is incomplete, inaccurate, or simply biased? Take colonialism. Every case touching it opens with the same pre-loaded framing: colonialism is an unambiguous evil, The End, now let us analyze how firms should respond to its lingering effects. As a Mexican, I am well aware it is a loaded topic; our politicians still routinely demand formal apologies from Spain as a form of political theater. But beyond the posturing, it is a rich, complex history that holds intrinsic value. Yet the case provides an entire ZOPA set without negotiation. Defensible historical literature on the complexities of the era is framed out. A few weeks later, China's Belt and Road Initiative comes up. Coercive infrastructure financing is suddenly framed as "strategic patience." The same action, seven decades apart, is assigned opposite moral weights by the framing of the case. Thus spoke ZOPAthustra. This is not really about the case method. Aldrich is just a container. The case method rehearses, in miniature, what the modern world will do to you in full. Every idea you encounter—in an algorithmically curated feed, or a corporate meeting where the consultant has already decided what the question is—has been framed before it reaches you. Somebody chose what was on the table. Somebody chose the name of the problem, and by naming it, determined what you would accept as the solution. Like David Foster Wallace’s proverbial fish asking "What the hell is water?", we are swimming in downstream consequences of frames other people built. The measurable symptom of this intellectual surrender lives across the river. Harvard's Dean of Undergraduate Education recently called the College's grading system "failing," with 85% of grades now in the A-range. HBS is not the College, but the underlying disease is identical. The case method only works if students believe there is an objectively better answer. Grade inflation is what happens when a faculty, exhausted by the friction of defending objective standards, wearily concedes that there isn't. V. The Score Beneath the Noise If relativism is wrong, what is Truth? Let me start with what it is not. Truth is not a single framework crushing all the others. Truth is not the claim that your angle on a problem is worthless because mine is complete. Truth is not what the relativist fears it is. The classical view—the view this school was built on—has always made room for multiple legitimate formulations. Imagine I describe two creatures to you. The first is small enough to fit in a handbag, weighs a pound and a half soaking wet, has the bone structure of a sparrow, and yips at sounds only dogs and dolphins can hear. The second weighs a hundred and fifty pounds, stands waist-high to a full-grown man, was bred to take down boars, and yanks her owner, Luis Penichet (MBA ‘26), across campus. Two animals. Different sizes, different shapes, different temperaments, different jobs. By any naïve count of features, they share almost nothing. And yet you knew, before I told you, that both are dogs. The Class of 2026’s Mr. Personality & Justice Where does this concept dog live? Not in the Chihuahua. The Chihuahua is just a Chihuahua. Not in the Great Dane. The Great Dane is just a Great Dane. And yet the category is real. You can pick a dog out of a lineup of cats and wolves and badgers without consulting a dictionary. The form is doing work the parts cannot account for. It is doing work the parts require. This is what Truth looks like when you take it seriously. The relativist points at the Chihuahua and the Great Dane and concludes: look, no shared essence, the category is a fiction we project for our own convenience. The classical view replies: yes, the variation is real, and yes, both creatures are fully themselves — and your ability to know they belong on the same side of a line that separates them from cats and wolves is the proof that the line exists. Truth, on this view, is symphonic. Many parts, one composition. That a thing can be approached from many angles does not mean there is no thing to be approached. It means the thing is rich enough to deserve many approaches. This is what LEAD is supposed to be teaching us in its better moments. Not that every leadership style is equally good in a vacuum. It teaches that different styles can each be fully themselves and point, together, at something the organization objectively needs. The finance professor, the marketing professor, and the ops professor disagree because the firm is complex enough to require all of them. They are not proving there is no firm. They are proving there is. We have confused pluralism with cacophony. Pluralism is many disciplines playing one score. Cacophony is the orchestra pretending there is no score while the conductor quietly rewrites the sheet music based on the political consensus of the audience. One is truth-seeking. The other is the frictionless theater this essay has been ranting on for eons. When you abandon the score, the only metric left is power. This is why most of what passes for controversy on this campus is not, in the end, about Truth; it is about political valence. The question of whether Truth exists is upstream of every political debate, and its disappearance has made those debates poisonous. The fight in Aldrich is rarely over whose argument is more accurate; it is a battle over whose tribe gets to impose its preference. As G.K. Chesterton observed: the object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to close it again on something solid. A mind that never closes on anything is not open. It is empty. VI. Heavy Lifting In 1987, John Shad gave HBS $30 million to fund an ethics curriculum. He was tired of watching Baker Scholars turn into felons. Dean John McArthur accepted the gift with a caveat: the school was not designed "to take 26- or 27-year-old moral cripples and deal with that." McArthur misdiagnosed the future. We are not moral cripples by nature. We have been made into moral cowards by training. Today, when an HBS student says "Shad," they do not mean the ethics curriculum. They mean the gym. We walk in every morning to track macros and break PRs, hyper-optimizing our physical metrics while the exact muscle Shad paid $30 million to cultivate atrophies. That muscle is courage. Nearly half a century ago, Solzhenitsyn told us this was coming. But Cassandras always get written off. We forgot that honesty without courage is only honesty until it costs you something. In a few months, we will walk across a stage to “become leaders who make a difference in the world.” If we carry the relativist alibi with us, we will be perfectly equipped to sanitize the next disaster, but entirely incapable of preventing it. Veritas is not a decorative crest. Recovering our belief in objective Truth—and enduring the friction of defending it—is the single most contrarian bet a graduate can make. It is built steadily, in the thousand small choices where speaking the truth has a cost. The building carries Shad's name. The shield carries Harvard's promise. But the muscle carries nothing, until you choose to bear the weight. Santiago Gil Gallardo (MBA ‘26) is originally from Mexico City. He graduated from Tecnológico de Monterrey with a degree in Industrial and Systems Engineering. Before HBS, he worked in venture capital at IGNIA and investment banking at a boutique firm in Mexico City.

Where, when, with whom does judgment start? As so often, it is in the company of the dead, of a particular dead. They have lived far enough behind the living as to escape some accusation of bias by virtue of being distant enough from the urgent, colorful now for evaluation, though not enough from the kinship of heritage or intellect. Evidence declares itself on the tombstone, where the character of both powerless and powerful is engraved. In that study one has countless inscriptions to mine for story and philosophy, and they have been told and retold. Much already has been written about the power of the small in a world of bigs. We naturally rally to the power of the powerless against the powerful, to the strength of the downtrodden against the heel. So it takes a sympathetic mind to archive power’s weakness. Common sense disdains this research. It is niche. More importantly, it is dangerous. Though curiosity is drawn to danger, its digging is prone to slipping and falling into a pity of power’s irresponsibility. With the new fact, intellectual compassion deceives the mind into excusing power’s sin. This is the genuine fault of not only the reporter and the historian but also and especially the leader. Always the vessel of power is tempted to justify power’s poor exercise by appealing to false necessities of its own making. Though in these traditions I make no exception for my own judgment, I try to sample in the right direction before the rule tempts me the other way. History’ sense of dry irony has men falling over themselves to foretell the world their lot in life. In a small town square in 1838 Illinois, in front of a few dozens of Springfield’s youth, a frontier lawyer portended his measure at twenty-eight: “Towering genius disdains a beaten path…It thirsts and burns for distinction; and, if possible, it will have it, whether at the expense of emancipating slaves, or enslaving freemen.” Five years and two-ten thousand li apart, another of similar ambition, completely unaware of the other, walked over a bridge to Beijing, looked back, and composed his own epitaph: “A true man wields the Wu hook with one hand, His spirit soars higher than a tower a hundred feet tall. Who has written history for ten thousand years? …Laughing, I point to the road by the side of the Lugou Bridge, Someone from here will reach the Isle of Immortals.” The path to the summit is long and uncertain; power looks too far away for him to claim through pure action alone. Even as the man chooses to climb, he peers to the side and sees the carcasses of those who strived buried in abyss. Anxious, he reacts by reaching for the light and grandeur. He rebels against history and tradition with the self-conscious declaration. Atop the shoulders of silent giants, he taunts them with the audacity only language can provide. Here I am! he shouts into the echoing canyons of time that will not speak back; I will go forth! The self of power rarely finds itself so cleanly expressed, even when it is dressed as warning to the self. Once a path to power through action emerges, the voice is silenced. Only later does it surface, and then with all the layered dirt of circumstance, with nuance, yes, but without the relative purity of youth. Its remembrance is then cast in the cause of the blood that flows from the body in the last hour—Abraham Lincoln’s for a republic, Li Hongzhang’s for an empire. The graveyards are full of indispensable men, as a newspaper put it long ago. Why not make an example of Bonaparte over Lincoln, Bismarck over Li? Do we not prefer the Augustus, the Roosevelt, the Alexander, the so-called Great Men? Their agency always grew toward the sky, and either intertwined luckily with fate’s trellis or fell. Every challenge set forth to the Great Man is not a diktat but rather a constraint for his will to break free from—until it cannot. For most of those who reach the stratosphere of ambition do not know it exists even when it suffocates them. The very few who do perceive a truth about the nature of what they hold: power is not theirs. And here, in the narrowing of this select cast, I admit that interrogating the limit of power is not an academic exercise. Feelings played some role, and mine are roused by tragedy. It is hard to trace precisely what about tragedy makes me feel, the same way there is little science in how a reporter chooses his feature, a painter her subject, a child his hero. This is a judgment of caution, as I said before, but also of gravitational draw. What little I can say of this is some deep compulsion to bear honest witness. Called to the stand, now those two have become seemingly nothing less than powerful: civilizational, summit people. Lincoln redeemed the republic; he died for its original sin. He is at once moral savant and wartime arbiter, a full claimant of Washington and Cincinnatus’ lineage. China remembers Li differently. The Qing’s minister is the architect of its century of humiliation—the man who signed away Taiwan, Manchuria, sovereignty, pride itself to foreign powers, he who broke the last dynasty and Chinese dignity with harsher reparations, tael for mark, than ever were imposed on Germany at Versailles. Thereby the identity of nations rests on their shoulders. Enormous consequence is attributed to these men, so enormous must have been their supposed power to cause effect. Here the popular account is as a ledger of outcomes, in which assets accumulate for Lincoln and liabilities accrue against Li. The interpretation of history through the great individual finds solace in this accounting. It should not. Lincoln and Li are power’s rawest entries of its powerlessness. In their late encounter with the paradox, hemispheres apart, Circumstance cruelly impressed upon them that power—nominally theirs through title, authority, and prestige—was hers alone. For the lonely act in response to the hell set forth for them, she rewarded Lincoln and punished Li. Across Virginia, Pennsylvania, Georgia, bodies piled on steadfast lines. The months of 1864 rolled through a battlefield impasse that belied any attempt to rally the Northern war-weary to the fight. McClellan, fired and disgruntled commanding general, mounted a pro-peace campaign against his erstwhile chief. As rumors swirled, Republican allies in Congress and the Cabinet grew convinced the nation would sink in the storm. Resigning to fate, Lincoln committed himself to the end of the Union. He wrote and had his Cabinet sign the following, blind: “This morning, as for some days past, it seems exceedingly probable that this Administration will not be re-elected. Then it will be my duty to so co-operate with the President elect, as to save the Union between the election and the inauguration; as he will have secured his election on such ground that he can not possibly save it afterwards.” How many thousands suffered death in vain? How many more millions would he yoke to enslavement? There was scarcely any way out, but was the way left still just? It could not be. The president lowered the Union’s head alongside his own under the guillotine, without complaint or appeal. Such stoicism is but little cold comfort. There was no other choice—there was a quality in the act—these do not deflect judgment’s morality. Lincoln forfeited first the rights of many and second his own legacy. For this provocation Justice would have put thumb on scale and drawn her blade against him, had Circumstance not robbed her of the blindfold. We, who stand in for Justice, are thus blinkered by outcome in our weighing of an act. Our instinct does not help. We tend to color every fact of a life with the strength of its character if but the life was consequential. We argue there must be something beyond, or within, and recalibrate the scales. Thus—though Lincoln was rescued from this moment by Circumstance—by Sherman’s taking of Atlanta, by the Democrats’ publication of an anti-war platform even McClellan could not fully endorse—I still read the sealed writing with sympathy. I still resonate with a man’s values under impossible duress. I find it hard to reason against my heart that power’s terrible decision was not made more acceptable by there being no better alternative. In this feeling all the argument is lost in viscerality, the only arena that matters. Lincoln was assassinated while in the right. The warmth of martyrdom overwhelms. So we look to where Justice served her execution in full, where the head that goes rolling wears the pained expression. There is, in those eyes, no thousand-yard stare. They rivet on her blade; the body stumbles toward Justice, collapses before her feet. He who would write history for ten thousand years, who spent the better part of life struggling to contend as witness, later as defendant—first the war against opium burying his countrymen’s minds, then civil war caking the plains with blood of friend and foe and twenty million dead, then war over sea against Japan, then war on land against the world’s pantheon of great powers, these wars which he did not want to wage but led and lost, these wars who demanded each their own altar upon which he would cut China’s wrist in desperate, ritual sacrifice, when no other would, when no other could. Who but Li? September 1901 saw the foreign minister drag himself against his doctor’s orders back to the negotiating table for the last time. The prior round of war negotiations, with Japan, had earned him the public’s scorn and an assassin’s bullet to the head. Now, after the sacking of Beijing by eight nations aligned against the Boxers, he was called to do it again—to sign away China’s fate not once, but twice, and every day in between and after to prop up the only crooked stability he had ever known. Traitor, his countrymen shout then and through the decades. You have given up our pride and sovereignty, for what? You have refused revolution, for what? To pacify the West and to breathe new life into the dead lips of a dynasty that serves only the imperial court, where you enrich yourself. There was no comfort for Li, for he had climbed to his position within the dynasty atop a deft ability to manage court politics while staying abreast of his sovereign. He knew this well. Yet from youth he also knew the ravages of civil war. He would act to hold the country together no matter its cost to its people, its treasury, or his reputation. A little over a week before death granted freedom, the paces ran through him. Out of bed he rose and went once more to the Russian legation, to debate the terms of their influence in Manchuria. That evening he stumbled and vomited a bowl of blood into the dark. One may imagine what exhaustion had settled into Li’s bones from a tenure so long spent in service of chosen tragedy. He died in his burial clothes, eyes open and in view of his disasters stretching out before him. Four thousand years of tradition fell less than a decade later. Yet again, I find myself tempted by the heart. Unbearably, I must reason against it. Circumstance will suffer the sensibilities of neither East nor West in the terrible decision she offers. Li earned—chose—his fate. History would not only largely forget him, but in its memory remember him as powerless, remember him as villain, remember him as the man who signed away what was not his to sign. Lincoln knew something of this. Li knew it more completely. His fate was but Lincoln’s if the sealed memorandum had been forced open. Towering ambition hopes it can soar with wings unclipped. But to have risen so high through decisions that so narrow its horizon, through the innumerable choices known only to God that made each the only man who could stand where he stood, is to have foreclosed all ability to escape Circumstance. The rock does not ask whether Sisyphus consents. He will, because by the time he understands what he carries, he has already climbed too far to set it down. This leader is without the happy mercy of eternity that Camus grants the myth. The rock teeters, then falls; this leader struggles in its way, for a moment, only as the vehicle of necessity, and is crushed. Tragedy is not only that Circumstance breaks power’s vessel, for so too did it break Caesar on the Ides of March and Napoleon at Waterloo, but also that the vessel knew, at some point, perhaps since youth, and climbed anyway. And what small dignity in choosing the lesser of two evils there is, there is only externally in the witness, not he who is crushed. Li has no deed to it. Neither does Lincoln. Our condition cannot fashion a peak out of every valley, nor order out of every chaos, nor agency over that which has already been determined. In this observation I struggle with the past told through great individuals against the past told through great tectonic movements. The reading yields no comfort to the reader’s belief in agency. It cares not whether that agency is in the powerless, the powerful, or even neither at all. Our observation, though, is worth a thing. We do our duty by Justice, however unfair, and come to the jury stand. We witness neither the moral lesson nor the principle of power but rather, its condition: that to choose damnation is power’s most unsparing burden; that to own damnation is power’s scarcest quality. 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.

“The machines handle the math, and the humans handle the magic.” This Between Two Classes editor came out of retirement for the distinct pleasure of interviewing Mitch Glazier, Chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). Mitch leads the trade organization representing the three major recorded music companies—and, by extension, an $11 billion American industry that shapes culture in the U.S. and abroad. Before stepping into the top role, Mitch spent two decades at the RIAA shaping music policy; before that, he served as Chief Counsel to the House subcommittee overseeing intellectual property law. On April 9, Mitch visited HBS for a talk to students from HBS, Harvard College, and Berklee, followed by a student dinner. Our conversation spans the RIAA’s ongoing lawsuit against Suno, the “authenticity backlash” Mitch sees coming, why investing in a musician is fundamentally different from greenlighting a film, and why—despite all the noise around AI—fans still give him hope. Let’s start at the top. Looking at the AI landscape today, what do you see as the most urgent policy issue facing the music industry? Glazier: There are really four buckets. The first—and the biggest one—is the training of AI models. This is the Suno issue. This is why we’re in litigation against Suno. Our argument is that Suno scraped the internet, made reproductions of recorded music owned by the companies we represent, and didn’t ask permission. You’re not supposed to have the right to make a copy if you don’t have permission. That’s why it’s called copyright. Their argument back is fair use—that they’ve transformed the input into something new. But the fair use analysis includes a factor the courts consider most important: you cannot make a copy that has a negative impact on the potential market for the underlying work. When you upload hundreds of thousands of AI tracks onto Spotify, which pays artists out of a single pooled revenue stream, and those tracks get incorporated into the recommendation algorithm, by definition you are reducing the pool for every human artist whose work was used to train the model. In the Napster era, public opinion was something like 70-30 against the industry. Today, it seems closer to 90-10 in your favor. What flipped? Glazier: AI is fundamentally different from previous technologies so we’re sorting out how to deal with it even as the technology rapidly moves—it isn’t just disrupting the music industry, it’s disrupting every industry. And it isn’t just affecting people on the factory lines like other automation has. It’s affecting white-collar workers–lawyers, politicians, people whose job it is to create guardrails and protect labor. People don’t want to put the genie back in the bottle, but they also realize that only this much of the genie is out. Maybe it’s time to actually try to prevent the bad things from happening before the whole thing is out. And don’t underestimate how important art is to people. There are two things you talk about at the kitchen table: politics and entertainment. When you take what people view as part of their identity and you threaten it, they react. Part of the argument for moving fast on AI is the race with China. How do you respond to that framing? Glazier: We’ve analyzed a lot of data, because it’s the same question a lot of people in the administration are asking. Do you want to win in the short term or in the long term? If you look at the data going back, countries that have continually protected intellectual property are the only ones who have won in the long run. Any country that has granted broad exemptions to property rights for short-term gain has lost out. These machines need food. If people stop creating the food, the machines can’t eat. You end up with synthetic content training on synthetic content, and that leads to model collapse. There’s also a trade argument. American music is by far the largest music export in the world—we’re a bigger music exporter than the next six biggest exporters combined. If we create an exception to copyright, China will follow suit. The difference is we won’t be sucking up any Chinese music, but they’ll be sucking up all American music. Singapore has already done a version of this. Chile has tried. We’re working very hard to prevent it from catching fire elsewhere. You’ve described artist engagement as your “super weapon.” Can you talk about how the Elvis Act in Tennessee grew into the federal No Fakes Act? Glazier: Weirdly, in the U.S. you don’t have a federal right to yourself. You don’t have a right to your own voice. You don’t have a right to your own image. Most state laws around name, image, and likeness are geared toward commercial purposes—you can’t put Elvis on a T-shirt, you can’t put Michael Jordan on a Wheaties box—but the general construct is that anybody can take anybody else’s voice for a non-commercial purpose and do whatever they want. We went to Tennessee, which happens to like musicians very much, and passed the Elvis Act—the first state law to extend that right of publicity into a generalized right to your own voice and likeness, tailored to AI. That made the tech companies very nervous, because suddenly they had to deal with fifty different state laws, and it got them to the table in Washington. Two years later, we’ve locked in the negotiated text of the No Fakes Act, which will create the first federal IP right in your voice and likeness. Artist engagement is what got us there. Natalie Grant testified in front of a Tennessee state representative who was against us. She said, “I believe I was created in the image of God. So if you steal my image….” We got his vote. Film studios seem to have a much bigger appetite for using AI to cut costs, even shaving $50 million off a $200 million VFX budget. Is music headed the same way? Glazier: Film and music are fundamentally different industries. In film, you don’t invest in a person—you invest in a film. Every film is its own corporation. The director delivers the final product. In music, you’re partnering with and investing in a person. The artist is the director and the actor. You invest in them because you like their original creativity, and your job is to help them make commercial and creative decisions while keeping them authentic—because authenticity is the reason you invested in them in the first place. There’s a guy in Hollywood who does massive audience testing for new releases. When I asked him about AI, he said, “You either connect with an audience, or you don’t.” When you efficiency-gain your way to a movie that has no resonance, you don’t know it until it premieres. You’ve talked about an “authenticity backlash” coming. How does that interact with how labels should be making bets today? Glazier: There will be a waterfall of AI-generated slop on streaming services, because it’s efficient and because there’s always a gold rush toward anything new. But fans will seek out authenticity. What you can monetize forever now is the catalog. In the old days, the term was two weeks of sales at Tower Records, followed by return CDs ending up in a warehouse. Now streaming makes the catalog evergreen—you can earn money on Bruce Springsteen thirty or forty years from now. That’s why Goldman Sachs and the venture capital firms are getting into music. Would you rather have pennies forever, or five dollars only today? From an investor’s perspective, it’s pennies forever. That changes the calculation for labels, for artists, and for what kind of music gets made. Last one. What gives you optimism? Glazier: Fans. I truly trust fans. For all the stuff we do, all the games we play, all the strategies we come up with—at the end of the day, I think there’s something magic that happens between an artist and their fans. If something breaks through on a long-term basis, it’s because of a human connection. I don’t think AI is a novelty. It’s here to stay, and it will be used in a lot of ways. But if a fan doesn’t feel there’s an authentic connection between the person who is the artist and the music coming out, I just don’t think it’s a long-term viable money maker—not for the artist, not for the industry, not for anybody. So, to take a quote from the Hypebot poll of musicians: “the machines handle the math, and the humans handle the magic.” Peter Sykes (MBA ’26) graduated from Georgetown University in 2015 with a degree in Economics. Prior to HBS, he worked in strategic operations at Reservoir Media, a publicly traded indie music company. Prior to that, Peter held positions at Morgan Stanley, working in both capital markets and at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital.

The true weight of leadership is lost on us. It won’t be felt until we leave this place where, because everybody is a leader, nobody is One of the first lessons of RC is that when HBS optimizes for something, it does so remarkably well. RC year is carefully engineered to bond sections and cultivate a deep sense of institutional loyalty. The better a job HBS does at instilling gratitude for this experience and all that flows from it, the more returns it sees in the form of future donations (that 50% of enrolled students receive financial aid from alumni is just one metric for alumni satisfaction). HBS’s championing of its case method, which favors a specific mode of inquiry as the definitive way to learn business, has shaped curriculum globally and contributed significantly to both the school’s relevancy and its bottom line. More recently, HBS undertook a campaign to instill the value of entrepreneurial thinking in its students, elevating “founder” as a venerable post-MBA career alongside its traditional consultant and PE routes, convincing a significant number of people that I know to abandon more traditional career tracks entirely. Producing ethical leaders, though, is not what HBS optimizes for. HBS has always been in the business of morality, explains Michel Anteby in Manufacturing Morals. Where once producing economic value was framed as a moral undertaking in itself, most would agree that in the year 2026 HBS attempts to teach a morality that extends beyond shareholders and gestures towards individual and societal impacts. HBS teaches with what Anteby terms “vocal silence.” Moral boundaries are expected to naturally emerge under Socratic conditions, proposed by classmates rather than the professor (who can only ask that we discuss a scenario through “an ethical lens” and challenge the positions we take). The vast majority of normative instruction is teaching legal boundaries. Because unlike an undergraduate institution full of malleable, pre-career young adults, Anteby observed that here, where the median age is 27, “the possibility of changing students’ values, deemed possibly too utopian, is replaced by the more attainable and gradual goal of raising their aspirations.” HBS doesn’t fail to support those who think deeply about the social implications of their careers. The resources to pursue a career in “social impact” are all there, even if a few pages deeper on the career center website. Where HBS does fail is in instilling any sense of responsibility about the tools that it gives us. The institution sees its primary role as empowering us to succeed as leaders no matter our objective. In the case method, as long as it is legally permissible, the successful pursuit of an “opportunity” is celebrated; its broader outcome and the societal value it does or does not generate is a secondary consideration, received with respect if a student raises a concern. The result is that “impact” – I’ll use that word again – has become its own career category, rather than a question that every leader should reckon with regardless of domain. It makes sense. We’re not at Harvard Kennedy School. We don’t need to understand or even think about systems and contexts in order to succeed. Instead, HBS reminds us breathlessly that we are future leaders. It gestures towards positive examples of moral leadership with the same hand that it invites us to experiment with entrepreneurship. Doing good, whether that’s measured by interpersonal or societal impact, is modeled with the same optionality as any other career choice. And unsurprisingly, for all of HBS’ gentle invitations to consider the broader impact of what we do, the “success” of an HBS-led business and the alumni who draw the biggest crowds when they return to campus are ultimately assessed in financial terms. At a moment when corporations exercise more influence over public life than at perhaps any other point in history, I do not believe this is enough. For all the reminders of the leaders we will become, the true weight of leadership and the lives we will affect is lost on us. It won’t be felt until we leave this place where, because everybody is a leader, nobody is. With every decade that passes, the tools HBS gives us affect the world more potently. The institution’s relationship to that power has not kept pace. Unlike the other values that HBS optimizes for – prestige, loyalty, entrepreneurial thinking – the non-material impacts of the lives we lead will never generate a financial return for the institution. For fear of estranging many of its most powerful alumni, HBS refuses to endorse or condemn examples of “good” or “bad” impact in the world. This is not, I’d argue, because it doesn’t want to produce “good” leaders. It’s that HBS doesn’t want to take a stance on what “good” entails. It’s why, despite alumni petition, HBS has retained its motto that “we educate leaders who make a difference in the world” without ever qualifying that difference as positive. I don't want HBS to tell me what it means to do good. Nor do I think its job is to send all of us into social impact careers. Instead I’m asking that, as it hands these tools to us, HBS does more to ensure that we feel their weight. On that front, I make three recommendations: Retire “impact” as a separate lens and make responsibility and legacy a default mode of examination. The vast majority of cases treat business problems as morally neutral as far as they are legal. Concerns of societal value and collateral are received with respect, but the burden remains with students to raise them. I propose inverting this assumption. For instance: the first TEM case of RC commends a founder for seizing the opportunity to produce cheap, disposable electric toothbrushes. The legacy of this product – short-term profit, long-term e-waste – went unexamined. There will always be people who believe that their responsibility reaches no further than successful execution; rather than treating this as the default, let them argue for it, the way those who raise concerns of societal value must raise their hands to do so every day. More moments of soberness. Many of my peers have commented that HBS so often feels like a high school classroom. It’s difficult to imagine yourself as a “future leader” when you get checked for using the bathroom too often. Consequently, on the rare occasions HBS asks us to consider the gravity of what lies ahead, the stakes are hard to fathom. FRC has most effectively challenged this: my classmates still cite its “fraud triangle” months later, and despite “A Letter from Prison’s” mugshots being received with nervous laughter, it was one of the few times I remember being asked to sit with the reality of certain alumni outcomes. LCA’s “Rajat Gupta” landed similarly: a lifetime of genuine good undone by a single borderline decision. Based on the conversations I’ve had though, few have taken these as an invitation to expect more of themselves, instead resigning prematurely to the complications of morality. This is important: none of us should be assured of our own virtue. But if HBS is going to empower us to “make a difference,” it’s also responsible for holding us to a higher standard. Cross the river. HBS is physically and culturally disconnected from Boston and the greater Harvard community. Engagement outside of our bubble, as far as it exists, is driven entirely by individuals. Service – one of the tenets of leadership – is not expected of our time here. This is a missed opportunity that compounds a larger problem, which is that we’re rarely required to consider the contexts and impact of our work. At a minimum, HBS should require a school-wide day of service that reminds us our education extends beyond the walls of Aldrich, and that looking beyond ourselves is a practice. Instead we are given a handshake. “We hope you’ll do the right thing, but most of all we hope we’ll see you here again in 25 years.” Meg Shriber (MBA ‘27) graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 2022 with a degree in literature, and the University of Cambridge in 2024, where she wrote her MPhil dissertation on AI and creativity. Her first article, “Death of an Author, Birth of a Medium: Collaboration, Control, and Creativity in Machine-Generated Text” is forthcoming in Poetics Today. Meg is also a painter.

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