A B-School Dean Is Going To Jail
Maria |
March 22, 2022

We are all aware of how significant and important rankings are in the world of b-schools, especially for those in the industry and pursuing an MBA, to the point where someone has committed a fraudulent act by manipulating their rating just to be on top of the game.

In this episode of Business Casual, John, Maria, and Caroline discuss Moshe Parat of Temple University’s Fox School of Business in Philadelphia, who is in his mid-70s and was recently sentenced to prison for data manipulation, as they unravel the story behind how the former dean was busted.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.570] – John

Well, hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co host Caroline Diarte Edwards and Maria Wich Vila are going to talk about an unprecedented event that just occurred. It is the sentencing of a former business school dean for cheating on the rankings. This is the first time a College official of any kind has actually been prosecuted by a federal prosecutor, convicted and now sentenced to jail for lying on the rankings. In this case, the dean was Dean Moshe Parat of Temple University’s Fox School of Business in Philadelphia. If you’ve been following this case and we’ve written many stories about it, you’ll know exactly what happened. And in effect, he basically inflated the percentage of students who were enrolled, who submitted this standardized test and inflated the GMAT score for the entering class. And by doing these and other things, ended up getting a number one ranking for four straight years for their online MBA program in US News. But the school in Parat cheated on a number of rankings in addition to its online MBA ranking. But the big deal was getting at number one list, which of course, attracted a lot of potential students into the program.

 

[00:01:44.160] – John

So Dean Parat was sentenced to 14 months in federal prison, also three years of supervised probation, a quarter of a million dollars fine, and 300 hours of community service. That sounds rather severe, but when you read what the judge said to him at the sentencing, it’s kind of interesting. He said this could be my first case where from start to finish, I was never given one word or gesture to hang my hat on to be able to say that the defendant has had some remorse or that he accepted some responsibility. A constant theme coming from Moshe Parat is that he did nothing wrong, that he was betrayed by his subordinates. Any such assertion, which I’ve overheard in his comments and in his smirking from counsel’s table, is insultingly, silly, and it is contrary to all of the evidence that the court saw and that the jurors based their decision on. So what did he really do? He lied to a magazine. Do you think it’s fair that this guy who is 74 years of age should be going to jail?

 

[00:02:59.570] – Caroline

Well, I think he’s been made an example of right, because it’s not the first case of fiddling the data, quite frankly, but he seems to be extremely blatant about it and unrepentant. So if you play things differently, perhaps he would have got off a bit lighter. But I think the government wanted to send a clear message to schools that this is a serious offense, that people make important decisions.

 

[00:03:27.750] 

Right.

 

[00:03:27.990] – Caroline

Important life decisions based on the information that’s published about schools. And they decide which program to apply to. They may just decide which program to attend based on some of that data. And so it’s misleading people in a way that can have a significant impact on people’s futures. So, yes, it is serious, and I think it sends an important message to schools that honesty is very important here, and it’s not a game. It’s critical information for the market and for their customers, and that they need to understand that the integrity of the data is very important here.

 

[00:04:15.110] – John

Right. And the university itself has already stated that it lost a minimum of $17 million in remediation cost. This occurred through fines. It had to pay lawyers that had to hire settlements with students who filed the class action suit claiming that they were defrauded. So the University had put out a minimum of $17 million already. Maria, what do you think?

 

[00:04:44.020] – Maria

I mean, yeah, I think before we started recording, we were saying, well, is it worth it to go or does it make sense that someone would go to jail simply for lying to a magazine? And I think people lie to magazines all the time, but those things have no real repercussions. For example, if a Hollywood starlet claims that for a fifth birthday in a row that she’s 29, it’s her 29th birthday, or if a certain action star claims to be six foot two when they’re really five foot eight, like, okay, that sort of stuff happens, at least in the Hollywood world all the time, but there are no real consequences. I think in this case, the deception. First of all, it was clearly something that had to be orchestrated. Right. There had to be some sort of premeditated thought to go into this level of deceit. It wasn’t like, oh, I misspoke, and I said I was 29, but I’m really 47. No, it was a very significant amount of effort that went into this level of fraud. And as Caroline pointed out, people make decisions based on this. They chose to go to school.

 

[00:05:43.650] – Maria

They were paying. I believe the tuition for the online program was around $60,000. That’s quite a bit of money to pay for a school that you think you’re getting the number one online program and you’re really getting something that is a far lower quality. So I feel terrible for the school. I almost wonder if the school will now sue, if they haven’t already, if they will sue this person saying, look, we had to pay $17 million because of your individual fraud. And so maybe I think you said it was like 14 months or something, but we want you to give us some more money back because I feel bad for all the hardworking people at that program. I feel bad for the people who went to the school. There’s a lot of collateral damage as a result of this. And it’s pretty sad.

 

[00:06:33.770] – John

Yeah. And it does speak to how serious it was. It was an orchestrated campaign to cheat a statistics professor was actually asked to reverse engineer the rankings to see what would happen if they were able to, or if they simply reported stuff that they didn’t have, and what impact would it actually have on their ranking? And then they falsified a number of metrics to make sure that they were number one. And they were number one in 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018, until they basically were forced were to go back to us due to say, hey, we made a little mistake on their data, never thinking that by admitting a simple mistake, which was not a mistake, it was deliberate, that the whole thing would unravel because then the university called in a law firm to investigate and law firm found outright fraud. And that led to one thing after another. But one of the interesting things in the case is why the US prosecutor decided to go after the Dean. It’s never been done before. And it turns out that the former Dean can blame himself for this. He was so arrogant, so smug that he filed a defamation lawsuit against the University after he was fired from his job.

 

[00:08:03.050] – John

And that suit required a fair number of depositions to be filed and people to be questioned. And the depositions were incredibly damaging to him and revealed the extent of the fraud. More than that, his deposition, which was videotape, caught him in a number of contradictions and outright lies. And it’s those lies and the arrogance that the former Dean showed that basically convinced the prosecutor to go after him. So his own arrogance and his own refusal to accept any responsibility and instead to blame others for this. And then the file lawsuit against the University is actually what caused the prosecutors to go after him, which I think there’s a lesson in this.

 

[00:08:57.750] – Caroline

I was just going to say I’m sorry.

 

[00:08:58.720] – Maria

I thought you were done. I think the lesson is to look up the definition of the word defamation before you sue someone for it, because it’s not defamation. If it’s true, what would be picking. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to drop down. I really thought you were done.

 

[00:09:12.210] – John

No, that’s that he actually did it. It’s kind of unreal. It’s just crazy. He sued the University for $25 million, and it just totally unraveled him and got the US government after him because the prosecutor read his deposition and read the other depositions, and it was clear he was guilty of sin. They went after him. Lord knows what his own defense cost him already. I’m imagining it cost him an awful lot of money because he hired a very high powered attorney in Philadelphia to defend him. And frankly, I think the attorney did a disservice to him. He should have convinced the Dean to basically throw himself at the mercy of the court. And instead of arguing that he was innocent, he should have argued whether or not this is a federal crime. And they could have focused their defense on more technical legal arguments. Instead of pretending that this guy was innocent, when he was clearly not innocent and had no grounds to claim that he knew nothing about this and he himself was betrayed. It’s really remarkable. Now, we do know Incidentally and this has happened before, that different schools cheat on rankings. Even when they don’t cheat, they report numbers in the most favorable possible light by reinterpreting questions that are asked.

 

[00:10:51.210] – John

So when the questions on these surveys are not ironclad and allow room for interpretation, you can bet that the school will interpret the question in a way that allows the school to provide an answer that’s more positive to it. And then there’s also for some of these rankings where they actually survey alumni or students. On a number of occasions, schools have been caught basically lobbying their students to fill out the surveys in the most positive way, which always goes to the point that we’ve made in the past. Rankings are incredibly limited. They’re flawed and perfect, and people pay way too much attention to them. And I think this case, if anything, above and beyond the tragedy that it is for the school and the former Dean, who I said before, 74, actually is 75, and he has a number of illnesses, apparently, and his wife is ill and in a wheelchair, and he is her primary caretaker. So it’s really tragic that this guy’s arrogance led to his total downfall, but it is what it is. And I think it will send the message to other schools. As you point out, Caroline prosecutor wanted to make an example of them.

 

[00:12:11.580] – John

And I think that’s really true. Wouldn’t you think now, Caroline, that any admissions director or Dean who’s tempted to cheat on the rankings would never do it?

 

[00:12:22.210] – Caroline

I think it’s definitely going to be a case that sets an example and will be taken note of. I’m pleased because when I was an incident, I was responsible for lots of data sufficient for rankings. And frankly, it was the bane of my life because it took a huge amount of time. And it’s often frustrating because we were incredibly scrupulous in the data that we provided, and we had suspicions that some other schools weren’t. And that’s incredibly frustrating. And I think one good thing, for example, about the Financial Times ranking is they do actually go around and audit the data, and they go and store their staff at the schools, and they go through everything. And I think that ensures a certain quality of data, which may not be the case in all rankings.

 

[00:13:20.830] – John

Yeah. Ft is the only major ranking organization that actually does audits every three years of the school’s data, which is admirable. That raises a whole other question. To what extent is US News responsible for ranking the school without auditing any numbers, without the kinds of checks that the Financial Times does? And should US News bear some responsibility for basically creating a system through which a school can manipulate its data and therefore get ranked more highly by US News. Maria, do you think that there’s some culpability here on the part of US News?

 

[00:14:05.470] – Maria

I appreciate the trapped and leading way in which you’re trying.

 

[00:14:11.950] – John

To say.

 

[00:14:12.570] – Maria

Yes, let’s burn them to the ground. No. I mean, look, I think US News at a certain point, you just have to trust that if you’re asking people for their average GMAT scores, that they’re going to give you something honest. I mean, I think the fact that US News itself, as far as I know, was not sued as part of this or if they were, I’m assuming.

 

[00:14:32.000] – John

No, they were not.

 

[00:14:33.060] – Maria

Right. And I think if they would have tried, I think that would have been dismissed. I do think, though, that there is, as we’ve talked about before, the culture of trying to massage the rankings. Right. So I don’t think that necessarily outright fraud may be occurring at other schools. But I definitely think that there may be situations where maybe a candidate with a lower GMAT score. And if you take the GRE that way, we don’t have to include your lower score in our average GMAT. Like, maybe that will be better for you or one of my personal pet peeves. When schools try to really inflate how many people are applying to their school, they’re not lying about how many people are applying to their school, but some of them, I think, are engaging in less than savory practices in terms of making it sound like on their webinars or whatever, like anyone can get in, you can get in and you can get in. And I do think that schools sometimes are a little too they sort of mask how competitive the process is in their quest to get as many applicants as possible and therefore drive down the acceptance rate, knowing that the acceptance rate is seen as sort of a badge of eliteness of the school.

 

[00:15:43.360] – Maria

So I definitely think that whether or not peace schools consciously do it or not, I think they definitely try to do things like this with some rankings in mind. Whereas if the rankings do not exist, I like to think that they would focus on other ways to prove their quality.

 

[00:16:00.070] – John

You know, there’s that old saw about the child who puts his or her hand on the stove and after being burnt once, never does it again. And I do think that this decision and the fact that this former Dean is going to end up behind bars is going to have the same effect. People who are attempted even to massage data make shy away from it, knowing that the consequences of it are that severe, that high before, it was just, okay, well, maybe I’ll get caught, maybe I won’t. What difference does it make? But boy, if you have the federal government after you forget it, you’re not going to take a chance and do something stupid like this. The other thing that Bear is pointing out is while there’s a lot of schools that do this here and there, they never do it to the extent that they get named, number one, that their program is actually at the top of the list. And then when it’s done, it’s often not done for so many years. So this was truly an extraordinary case and one that directly involved the Dean in a few other cases. For example, Tulane’s business school a number of years ago was caught cheating and the Dean was not implicated in the scandal.

 

[00:17:21.220] – John

It was more like the admissions director was who was reporting the data, and he was simply let go quietly. But it didn’t go straight up to the top of the business school like this one did. So it is an extraordinary case. It’s an unusual case. And this poor guy is going to end up in jail. Now as a result, on some level, I actually feel sorry for him, even though let me just tell you, he was a real bully. He was a micromanager. People who worked for him were afraid of him. He’s just not a nice guy. And the prosecutor was seeking up to eleven years in jail and a restitution of something like five and a half million dollars plus the quarter million dollars fine. So they only got 14 months. But I think that’s enough, really, along with the probation, the quarter million dollar fine, and as we pointed out before, the years of community service that he would be required to have. It’s interesting, when you hear what he said to the court generally at these proceedings, you plead for some sort of mercy and you basically say something that’s going to convince the judge to give you a little bit of a break, for goodness sake.

 

[00:18:49.330] – John

Instead, this guy just said, hey, I’m not sorry. In fact, I need to help my wife because she’s not well, and so therefore you shouldn’t send me to jail. Not a convincing argument. Not at all. Anyway. Any last words?

 

[00:19:15.310] – Maria

I have a question, actually. So, John, because I actually pulled up the article that you wrote when they first came out at the top of the rankings, and you actually wrote an unlikely winner, claimed the top spot. And so I’m just wondering, I guess you feel sorry for him because of some of his personal circumstances, right? If this guy were like a fit 27 year old who’s single and a bro, maybe you’d be like, whatever, it’s fine. It’s a year in prison. But how did you feel as a journalist when you I mean, didn’t you feel a little bamboozled by this?

 

[00:19:47.950] – John

Yeah, sure. Because while I reported with some skepticism and then got into some of the numbers and showed how they were, when you compare them to other competitors in the field, competitors with bigger brands, greater prestige, better faculty, better students, and his numbers are better than a UNC and Indiana. It just didn’t make any sense. So, yeah, I felt a little bamboozled, too, because even though I pointed that stuff out and was skeptical about some of those metrics, I still didn’t imagine that they actually cheated and just created them out of nothing. So that was pretty amazing. Here’s what Parat said when he addressed the court for the first time. I’m 75 years old, truly in the Twilight of my life and experiencing systemic illnesses. Not only the heart, but the diabetes is very serious, he said. And I am the primary caregiver of my wife, who suffers a myriad of ailments after a tremendous career of helping premature babies. But she cared for and supported me for nearly 52 years. She badly needs my support and I need hers. We have very little time left on God’s Earth to help others and provide some joy to our six young grandchildren.

 

[00:21:18.570] – John

It is my humble request that you will allow me to help Rachel and others less fortunate than us in the community. And that was his statement. No remorse, no responsibility accepted. Rather, he allowed his false claims that others betrayed him and submitted these numbers not on his behalf, but on their own behalf. And he had no knowledge about it. Nothing had nothing to do with it. This is what he said to get mercy from the judge. It obviously didn’t work.

 

[00:21:58.150] – Maria

Yeah, I don’t feel sorry for him at all. Sorry, John. I don’t feel sorry for him at all. Right. This is not a victimless crime. And yeah, you mentioned a second ago, Indiana and UNC, they also suffered because they got pushed down in the rankings unfairly. So it’s not a victimless crime. And if this guy really is in the Twilight of his life and thinks he’s going to meet God soon, all the more reason for him to leave a God-fearing life and use this as a chance to repent. So for him to dig in his heels and be like, I’m in the twilight of my life, buddy, all the more reason to maybe reconsider that whole repentance thing, whatever. I’m just saying different strokes for different folks. But if your wife depends on you, all the more reason to live by the street and narrow and not try to end up in jail.

 

[00:22:46.210] – John

Yes.

 

[00:22:46.850] – Maria

Sorry.

 

[00:22:48.250] – Caroline

I do think that it is surprising that US News doesn’t do more, though, to audit the data because it plays such a significant role in the market.

 

[00:22:58.050] – Maria

Right.

 

[00:22:58.310] – Caroline

Those rankings and perhaps even more so at the undergraduate level. And it plays a huge role in determining where people apply and the market dynamics. And to me, it’s shoddy journalism that they’re not doing more.

 

[00:23:20.990] – John

In fact, because you mentioned the undergraduate rankings in the last couple of weeks, there has been a professor at Columbia University, which was ranked number two by US News overall as a University, not just a business school, but the professor basically says it’s all based on false data. And this is a professor at the university itself who’s making these claims about Columbia University’s rise in the US news ranking. So there you have it. If anything, here’s the takeaway and we’ve said this before, it needs to be said again, treat these rankings with one big grain of salt because whether or not a school cheats, the methodologies of these different rankings hardly get close to measuring the true quality of an education. Yes, there’s some entertainment value if you parse the numbers, you might get some good data to use to help inform your decision about where to go or whether to accept an offer. But don’t just think that because the school is ranked three and another is ranked six and you got into three, you should be going to three. That’s the big takeaway. All right, Caroline and Maria, a pleasure as always. And for all of you out there, good luck on your MBA journey.

 

[00:24:48.830] – John

This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants you’ve been listening to Business Casual.

 

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
A B-School Dean Is Going To Jail
Maria |
March 22, 2022

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] John Byrne: Hello, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants. We have a really cool story to relate to you today. Me and my co host, Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards, are going to talk about the most disruptive MBA startups of the year. Every year, Poets& Quants invites the top schools all over the world.

To submit nominations for ventures with what we call the greatest potential for lasting beyond business school. So what we want to do is acknowledge MBAs who have launched really cool companies that are paving the way for the future. And this year, we have 41 student startups that we have honored in what is the sixth annual list of the most disruptive MBA startups.

And they come from all over. We got nominations from Stanford, Wharton, Kellogg, MIT, INSEAD, London Business School and others. And, uh, I think what the basic list shows is that entrepreneurship is alive and well in business schools are a lot of great ideas. A lot of them are powered by AI. No surprise there.

They involve every imaginable industry. There’s a good number of these in the business of health as well as in beverages, consumer products and things like that. And I wonder, Caroline, if you have a favorite among this group, and I bet you it’s going to be an INSEAD startup.

[00:01:30] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah, I have a few favorites, and definitely INSEAD is on my list, although I’m going to start with a London Business School one.

Um, and there were a few international ones that I thought were really interesting. I like the story from kiro, which is a fintech startup, coming out of London Business School, founded by LBS student Alicia Chowdhury. she secured 200, 000 in funding, and it’s the first AI powered financial coach, which is designed to help,

Gen Zed, as I would say, or Gen Z, as you would say. and young adults, get personalized financial guidance. So that’s something that jumped out to me, given that I now have a young adult among my children and trying to teach her financial literacy is somewhat challenging, so I can definitely see the need for that. And she tells a really interesting story about how financial literacy was something that she had struggled with and realized that there was a gap in the market, right? There’s a lot of great financial information out there, but it’s not necessarily tailored and communicated well to young people. And she ended up working in finance before business school.

she doesn’t have a tech background, but she did. Teach herself the fundamentals of AI and machine learning, and she assembled a technical team to work with her. And I thought it was really interesting as well, how she leveraged the LBS resources. And I think a lot of the stories that you have in this article really tell a great deal about the power of business school experience in helping people launch a company. And of course, there’s often a lot of criticism about the value of going to business school. And if you want to be an entrepreneur, there’s no point going to business school. And I think that this article really debunks that. so for example, this is how she benefited from LBS.

She was a finalist in the LBS Launchpad. She completed the LBS Entrepreneurship Summer School. She joined the LBS Incubator. She led the LBS Entrepreneurship Club. And then, of course, she benefited greatly from a lot of the courses that she took at LBS. I got a lot of great advice from LBS faculty, as well as the Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital.

I think a wonderful story about how a student had a vision of something that she wanted to do and saw a gap in the market and really went after it, leveraging that wonderful ecosystem that you get at business school and she’s got a VC group backing her. So that’s one of her investors and Aviva Group is a huge financial company.

I think it sounds very promising. So congratulations to Alicia.

[00:04:11] John Byrne: Yeah, you’re right. One of the things that comes through here is the support that students get from the schools. And their classmates and their professors, it’s a real terrific thing.

As you said before, a lot of people say, hey, if you want to start a company, instead of paying a school tuition, just use that as your seed capital and you’re going to be better off, but the truth is that a business school you’re surrounded by really smart colleagues and people who’ve been through this before and mentorship from professors and seed money from the many venture challenges that occur at different schools can make a very big difference and shift the odds in your favor of success. Maria, do you have a favorite?

[00:04:53] Maria Wich-Vila: Yeah, my favorite.

startup was Cell Mind, which is out of the Johns Hopkins business school. This one really hit home for me personally. What they are trying to do is they are trying to maximize access to a type of cancer therapy called “Car T”. And I have indirectly lived this. We have a good friend from business school who has been battling cancer for several years, and last year there was a complete rollercoaster around  this car T therapy. And I apologize to any doctors if I’m butchering this. But basically, my understanding is that if it works for you, it essentially can cure your cancer or cause it to go into remission. But, if for whatever reason, if your body is too weak at the time that you receive it, it can actually kill you. Unfortunately, it can cause something called a cytokine storm, I think.

And so, the decision of whether to go or no go is obviously one that is very fraught with a lot of, emotion and risk. And so, we actually had a friend who last year was approved for CAR T. But then in the weeks right before they were going to give it to her, they then disapproved her because she had gotten weaker … it was this whole roller coaster.

And so any sort of startup that is doing something to figure out, which patients actually are likely to do well with this therapy? Can we expand our doctors being perhaps understandably a little too cautious because they’re concerned about the negative side effects, perhaps being worse than the.than the cancer itself.

Anything that can help expand access to this is why they were number one in my book. And as you guys were just talking about. Because Johns Hopkins is one of the best, if not the best medical school in the world, this is a great example of a business school student or group of business school students leveraging the resources and the expertise at that overarching institution, trying to find ways to commercialize it, and just make the most of those resources.

I really loved that story.

[00:06:40] John Byrne: Yeah, and that’s what you increasingly find. it’s not a bunch of MBA students doing their thing. It’s reaching out and having these really entrepreneurial collisions with students from other departments, other schools where they have deep expertise in computer science or engineering or medicine or law or public policy or environmental sciences teaming up with MBAs to launch things. which really give them extra power.

One of my favorites comes out of, uh, Chicago Booth. And, it’s sort

a really interesting idea where, first off, it’s called Encore, and it’s a marketplace for high end collectibles. Now, you think, how could that really be a cool thing? What they’ve done is they’ve combined TikTok style videos. With the traditional eBay auction format, to create a really engaging experience for people who want to shop for these collectibles. But what’scool is the MBA who’s behind this. His name is Will Enema, at first thought he shouldn’t apply to Chicago Booth, new venture challenge, because he had already raised a pre seed round and thought that Encore might not be good for that traditional, giving money out kind of program. But, he entered it after he was urged to by a number of professors at Booth. The idea placed second in the competition. He won $350, 000 to help launch his company, but here’s the real kicker:

Within two weeks of that competition, a venture capitalist who participated in the judging agreed to lead their seed round. So it just shows you how, incredible things can happen, in the environment of a business school.

Now, Caroline, I’m sure you have others that you really thought were really cool. Name another one.

[00:08:29] Caroline Diarte Edwards: Yeah. So my second one is of course, an INSEAD startup and it’s called faceflow. ai. And I really liked this one because it’s an AI powered skincare platform. So again, relating it to my personal experience of having four daughters who are constantly clamoring for the. latest ridiculous beauty product that they’ve seen on Instagram.

I think this is a fantastic idea.

What it does is it actually gives you scientifically based product recommendations, right? So they have for the two founders, Daniel Patel and Simon Zhang, Patel had previously founded a marketplace for international skincare brands. So he knew the skin, the beauty industry, skincare products.

And then his partner, Simon, is an experienced AI engineer, and so they’ve combined their expertise to bring AI to skincare recommendations. And it’s underway. I checked out their website. I have signed up already. The product is not yet available, but I’m looking forward to when it comes through.

And they won the INSEAD French competition and, talk about how they’ve benefited from the very entrepreneurial environment at INSEAD,

I really enjoyed reading about their experience and I’m excited to learn more about their products.

[00:09:49] John Byrne: Yeah, absolutely. And now

Maria, I know there are 2 Harvard startups on the list from your alma mater. did you pick 1 of them as your 2nd choice?

[00:10:00] Maria Wich-Vila: It was not necessarily my 2nd choice, but there was 1 called Vulcan Investments. This is a little bit out of my, Wheelhouse. So I think we all tend to gravitate towards something we know or something we have experience with, but it’s trying to figure out how to solve the rare earth magnet problem. Right now. A lot of these rare earth materials that are powering modern technologies are coming from China, which poses several challenges, especially should relations with that country not go well in the future. So this is trying to solve for that issue. I think that was a really interesting one.

But actually, my second choice was one that again, I have indirect personal experience with, albeit in a different way. It was called Yogger. What they’re trying to do is, I believe it’s taking your phone to watch you as you perform exercise then give you feedback on, your gait, your form, et cetera.

And this was really interesting to me, not so much because of exercise, although I wish it were (ha ha) (though: side note, my dad was a track and cross country coach for decades and I totally forgot about that in the moment, but I should have mentioned that!!! D’oh!!!), but who knows, maybe this will motivate me to jog more (har har har).

In the interview with the entrepreneur. he talked about how you can do things like a gait analysis right now, in other words, tracking how your legs move when you are running or jogging, and then providing an analysis, but these sorts of things are very difficult to get to. It’s expensive. You need to be set up with, they put a whole bunch of sensors on all of your joints. and I have a friend who has a child with cerebral palsy and they’ve had to do these, go to actually Hopkins (this is not a Hopkins based startup, it’s from Tuck, Dartmouth Tuck), but they’ve (my friends, I mean) had to go to Hopkins and actually have these, it’s a day long thing to set up your child with the different sensors. And so the thought of using something as simple as an iPhone app, perhaps, machine learning, et cetera. all that good stuff to analyze your gait and make this accessible. It’s not only I think useful for casual exercise enthusiasts, but I think it could also have ramifications and uses even in other areas. For example, kids with special needs. So I was really excited about this one.

John Byrne:

MIT Sloan has three startups on our list this year.

That’s more than any other school. And one of the really cool ones is called Vertical Horizons. This is an incredibly ambitious startup. It’s all about commercializing high density, high efficiency power supplies for AI computing. Essentially, it’s a semiconductor company. and you might not think that an MBA would be involved in actually creating a semiconductor company.

But it’s founded by Cynthia Allen, an MBA in the class of 2024 at Sloan and one of her professors. So it’s a good example of where university develop some sort of new technology or new insights. And then needs to commercialize it. And in this case, you have an MBA coming along, who has a great interest in this, and is helping to commercialize it. The actual idea of it has 4 million in research grant funding to develop the technology. So there’s a good amount of money behind this very ambitious idea.

I think, stepping away from the individual startups, what I think this says about, the ability of people who want to go to business school and use that experience as an incubator to launch a startup, it’s alive and well, it’s a great way to launch a company because it does take a lot of risk off the table and these startups, these 41 startups that these different business schools really give you a great insight into what different people are doing.

Caroline, I’m sure, and Maria as well, you probably meet a number of people in your practices, that want to use an MBA to do a startup. Do you think they’re ready to take full advantage of these experiences?

Caroline Diarte Edwards:

Yeah, I certainly hear from a lot of candidates who are hoping to launch a venture. Some of them want to do it as soon as they graduate and for some of them it’s more of a longer term ambition because of course financing can be a challenge.

Especially if you’ve invested a lot in taking on a lot of debt with your MBA and a lot of the themes that I hear, candidates are interested in come through in your article as well. So it’s noticeable that there are quite a few startups in your list that address, healthcare issues as Maria highlighted, also education, environmental challenges. And I think those are three areas that I hear a lot about from candidates in terms of where they would really like to have an impact.

And I think, something else that is noticeable is that a lot of them are really trying to have a positive impact on the world as well. They’re really trying to address,  fundamental societal challenges, many of them, which I think is wonderful from health care, mental health issues, pollution. et cetera. There’s a lot of really interesting, and important issues that are being addressed by some of these startups. and, I think it’s wonderful that we have this young generation, going through business school who are ready tackle these challenges that that they have inherited from our generation.

John Byrne:

Yeah. And these ideas are going way beyond, some of the earlier ideas of five, 10 years ago, hookup apps and match.com, uh, wannabes and things like that. some of these ideas are remarkably sophisticated and elegant as well.

Maria, last words.

Maria Wich-Vila:

I think that this article not only is very optimistic in terms of these amazing ideas that are out there, but I also like that it shows that there are so many different paths to entrepreneurship through the MBA that first of all, number one, the NBA is valuable for entrepreneurship, which, as you noted a second ago, is often a stereotype that that exists that, oh, I don’t need this. but also there are so many different MBA programs out there. Look at the range of schools that are creating these amazing startups. Look at the fact, one of the, Stanford ones, the student was not an MBA student. They were an MSx student.

Sometimes I’ll meet people who are a little bit on the older side who are applying and they’re like, I have to do the two year program and I’m like, no, you can… you just need to get your foot in the door and even if it’s that MSxs program, it’s one year versus two years. For example, you can, you just need to get to a university that’s going to teach you the things you need and give you the resources and then you can take it from there.

So I, the other thing I really appreciate about this article is showing the breadth of programs and the breadth of students and the breadth of backgrounds of these students who are creating incredible new companies.

[00:16:37] John Byrne: Yeah, check it out. It’s called most disruptive MBA startups of 2025, and it’s on the Poets& Quants website.

If you are interested in doing a startup, I think you’ll learn a lot about how business school can help you make it a reality. This is John Byrne with Poets& Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

Maria

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