MBA Interview Questions
Maria |
February 5, 2025

In the latest episode of Business Casual, John Byrne, Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards, dive into the complexities of the MBA interview process. As Harvard Business School and other top institutions dispatch invitations for second-round interviews, the trio unpacks the diverse and challenging questions posed to candidates. From probing personal insights to understanding candidates’ views on DEI, as seen at schools like UC Berkeley, the conversation sheds light on the nuances of what prospective students can expect during their interviews.

This episode provides a deep dive into the preparation strategies for these interviews, emphasizing the importance of authenticity and thoughtful reflection over rehearsed responses. The hosts discuss how schools like Dartmouth Tuck and MIT Sloan use their questions to assess candidates’ adaptability and self-awareness, underlining the critical nature of the interview in the MBA application process.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:06.960] – John

Hello, everyone. It’s John Byrne with Poets and Quants. Welcome to Business Casual, our weekly podcast with my co-host, Maria Wich-Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. This is interview time. Harvard Business School recently notified second-round applicants who will be invited to interview, if not already rejected. Basically, invitations are all over the place. Business schools all over the world are sending them out to applicants. The big question is, what are applicants going to be asked? Of course, that varies from school to school. We just published, in fact, the 2025 MBA Interview Questions, a school by school list that gets into this from every school, from Chicago Booth to Yale School of Management, and many in between. There are standard questions, of course, that you can expect. Bring me through your resume. Tell me why you want an MBA. Tell me why you want it from our specific school. But then there are questions that you may not expect and will differ from school to school. For example, at California, Berkeley, the first question, and this is a question that’s almost counterintuitive given what’s going on in America today with politics. The question is, what does DEI to you and how will you bring this with you into your HAAS MBA?

[00:01:34.600] – John

Now, that’s a question. It’s coming from a school in California, arguably the most liberal state in the United States. So maybe that’s a question that they will hang on to. I have no idea. Maybe they’ll erase that question for a round to applicants who are invited to interview. But there you have it. Or here’s another question from Berkeley. What is the greatest professional risk you’ve taken and how did you approach it and what was the outcome? Let’s go over to Carnegie Mellon. This is interesting, too. We value diversity at Tepper and pride ourselves on our community. What are you most looking forward to receiving during interactions with your classmates. Caroline, what do you think of these? Do you think we’re going to see a diminishment of DEI questions given the climate in the US right now?

[00:02:28.030] – Caroline

Well, it might vary by score. I don’t think that UC Berkeley is going to raise those questions. I think that they are sticking to their guns as regards their values. At least that’s apparent in their application. I think that they may still ask questions about this at the interview stage because it’s really a core part of their values, and I don’t think that they are running scared. Perhaps other institutions are. But otherwise, there’s lots of great questions in here. I think it’s a really interesting list that you’ve put together. As you say, a lot of the questions are fairly predictable. The schools are looking to dig into your background, go beyond the surface of what you’ve said in your application. You need to be prepared to go into more detail. In a lot of the applications, you can describe your career goals, but you might have quite limited space in which to do that in the written application. You need to be prepared, for example, to go into that in much more detail and explain your plan, explain if you have a plan B, talk about which employers you might be targeting, show that you’ve actually done some research, and your career goal is not just something that you’ve pulled out of thin air for the purposes of your application, but you’ve actually really given it some deep thought over time, and you’ve explored that.

[00:03:48.500] – Caroline

Perhaps you’ve connected with people and networked with people who are in that role and had some discussions, and you have some interesting learnings about that that you can share in your interview. So I think it’s important to think about, given what you’ve said in your application, what might the school want to learn more about and where are they going to probe more deeply and be prepared to go deeper on a lot of different topics in your application.

[00:04:14.400] – John

The other thing, when you look at these questions, what inevitably comes to mind is you can’t rehearse for many of these. You can’t be scripted for these. You have to have some level of confidence to walk in and be able to answer a question like Dartmouth Tuck is asking, Tell me about a time when you got constructive feedback, or, Describe a time when you led something that no one else could have managed as you did, or, Describe a time you experienced failure? Or tell me about a time you wanted to do something and changed your mind. Why did you change your mind? I mean, these are not the kinds of questions that you could easily rehearse and script in front of a mirror. Right, Maria?

[00:04:59.510] – Maria

Well, I don’t think you should ever try to rehearse and script in front of a mirror for every potential interview question that you might get. That would be not only a way to waste hundreds of hours of your life, but then if you’re overly scripted, then you won’t be able to react on the fly to an unexpected question that comes through. I think, specifically, just to touch upon these Dartmouth Tuck questions that you just asked, they may seem very, very random, but if you look at their admissions criteria, one of their criteria is awareness. They’re looking for people who are self-aware. Some of those questions around what some feedback you’ve gotten that surprised you or talk us through a time you changed your mind. They really are looking for people who are thoughtful and you can articulate their decision-making process, who can articulate their weaknesses. I know that some of the schools like Tuck, and I believe HAAS also has a very, very strong commitment to their defining principles. I believe that the interviewers actually have a checklist to check specifically for is this candidate displaying these core principles that we look for in our program?

[00:06:06.400] – Maria

In terms of which flavor of random questions you might get, look, you can never tell. But if you familiarize yourself with the mission of the school or what they look for, sometimes when they do publish, Okay, here’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for people who are self-aware. We’re looking for people who have confidence without attitude, whatever it might be, then you can at least say to yourself, I might get a question about when was the time that I demonstrated confidence without attitude. It might be worded a little bit differently, but the core is still trying to get to that. This is why I think a lot of us in this space, we advocate what I flippantly refer to as a Swiss Army knife story. If you think about a time that you were on a team It’s very rare that we join a team and everything goes smoothly and flawlessly and nothing bad happens at all. Hooray, rainbows and unicorns. Most processes involving multiple human beings will have snafus, they’ll have delays, they’ll have snags. If you know going in that you might need to talk about a time that either you were the weak link in a team or you had to deal with someone else who was a weak link in a team or you had whatever that scenario might be, think to yourself, Okay, I have this one core experience How can I pull out different facets of that experience, much like I might pull out the different tools on a Swiss army knife to address whatever flavor of question that gets thrown at me?

[00:07:25.250] – Maria

I think that’s a better use of your preparation time than trying to memorize, Here’s 7,000 questions that I might get because that’s, again, a fool’s errand that I believe is ultimately counterproductive.

[00:07:39.830] – John

Yeah, that totally makes sense to me. The range of questions is amazing. MIT Sloan is asking, Tell me about a time you had to convince someone, and what data did you use? Which sounds so much like an MIT Sloan question. Or, Tell me about a time when you were overwhelmed with work? Or tell me about a time someone changed your perspective on something. A lot of tell me questions. Tell me about a time you fixed a misunderstanding or a mistake. All of these questions demand answers that are pretty introspective. Over at INSEAD. Okay, let’s see. How do you see the value of an MBA? How do you evaluate the risk and returns? That’s an interesting question. Caroline, would you have been asking something like that? Are you Head of admissions there?

[00:08:38.540] – Caroline

Well, the school is looking to understand your motivation. They’re looking to evaluate if you’ve really thought through why you want to go to business school, what is it that you’re looking to get out of the program, and then specifically, what is your motivation for INSEAD? It is quite a different program from most other MBA programs out there. So they’re looking to dig into whether you’ve really got your heart set on in Seattle or not. And I think also in that question, when they ask about risks and returns, they are looking to see how you think. And I think a lot of these questions, there’s not necessarily any right answer, but what they’re looking to see is how you structure your thought and also how you respond under pressure, because you will be cold calls in the classroom and you need to be able to think on your feet and think in front of a group. And it can be sometimes a stressful situation, if you’re in a classroom of 80 people and you dozed off and you get to ask a question and you’ve suddenly got to gather your thoughts. So they’re looking to see if you can respond well in that situation.

[00:09:52.800] – Caroline

So I think often schools are asking questions that where they’re looking to unsettle you a bit and get you off your script, right? Especially if candidates do seem overly rehearsed, they’re looking to ask you some questions that, as you say, that you can’t have anticipated. So you have to be able to show that you thought things through on the spur of the moment, and you’re able to marshal your thoughts and deliver something that makes sense. And I would say also candidates should feel free to take their time if they get a question that they haven’t anticipated and they’re not sure what to say. It’s absolutely fine to take a moment to catch your breath and think things through before you dive in. I’ve seen with candidates, both when I was at INSEAD and then doing interview prep with candidates at Fortuna, that big mistake that candidates often make is just diving into a response immediately without really having thought through what they want to say, and they often end up losing their thread or rambling. You want to try to be concise. You want to respect the interviewer’s time. Often these interviewers are volunteers, so you want to respect their time and not be too long-winded because they are giving up part of their day to spend with you.

[00:11:17.800] – Caroline

Then some interviews have a very short format. Hbs, Maria can speak more than I can to the HBS format, but it’s typically 30 minutes. You want to the point quite quickly, but you also want to think carefully about what you say before you say it because you don’t have a lot of time to recover if you mess up your response.

[00:11:41.750] – John

Right. Now, both of you have done a fair number of mock interviews that help prepare candidates for the actual thing. I wonder, Maria, do you have a trick question to try to throw your candidates off to prepare?

[00:11:57.710] – Maria

Specifically for HBS, the questions that are very tailored to each individual person. In terms of a trick question, I think that the general rule of thumb is anything in the written application is fair game. Sometimes I’ll ask something like, Hey, so your sophomore year of college, you took a class on Japanese kabuki theater. Tell me about that. Because people go into their business school interview thinking, naturally and rightfully so, I’m only going to be asked about business things. But to the extent that I want to get to know you as a person, might ask a random question about a hobby that you mentioned or a class that you took that you might not even remember that you took, things like that. But a lot of it is digging into getting details around, Okay, so you wrote in your essay The essays have very, very short word counts. Tell me, how exactly did you convince this person to do this thing? When you say that you want to work in a company in the future that does blah, blah, blah, who do you like in the space? Things like that, just to make sure that everything that was written was authentic, because sometimes there is an understandable tendency to want to self aggrandize or to say what I think they want to hear, even if it’s not really what I’m interested in.

[00:13:13.620] – Maria

For example, if someone from the energy industry who worked in oil and gas, they might think, Oh, I have to put that. I’m going to work in solar panels or renewable energy. But if that’s not really where their heart is, it’s easy. They might write in their career vision, Well, I want to transition into renewable energy. I’m Well, great. Tell me more about solar panels. What’s the biggest bottleneck right now in widespread adoption of solar panels? If they don’t have an actual answer to that, then it does make me question the authenticity of what they wrote. There’s no lists of trick questions. I do think in the past few years, HBS has started getting less, I don’t know, antagonistic isn’t quite the right word, but there has been less of this got you moment I think they used to be a little bit more famous for. My clients, at least, are reporting tough questions, to be sure, but not quite so many like, so what’s the market size for solar panels in Arizona? None of those very, very unexpected questions, which is good.

[00:14:15.860] – John

Caroline, when you were in admissions at INSEAD, did you have any favorite questions to take someone off the script if you felt they were a little too robotic?

[00:14:26.580] – Caroline

Well, I didn’t actually do a lot of the interviews myself because as I I was admissions director. Alumni, you did, yeah. It’s alumni, yeah. I would occasionally do an interview if a candidate, for some reason, hadn’t been able to meet with one of our interviewers. And in those days, the interviews were in person. If they hadn’t had that, if something had happened, then I would interview them virtually. But I think, as Maria said, it’s really about this specific candidate and digging into their background and asking questions that probe underneath the surface of what they’ve presented. I think those questions are quite candidate-specific. Although, there are a few curveball questions in the list of questions that you have here. Well, one of the schools asked, If you could have dinner with anyone living or dead, who would it be and why? Then What would surprise your future classmates about you? As you say, you can’t anticipate all of these questions. So you need to just do your best to think on your feet. And if it does happen that you don’t give the right response and you think afterwards, Damn, I wish I’d said that, and the right example comes to you later, which happens when people are in an anxious situation and they’re perhaps not thinking as clearly as they might be, it’s also fine to take a moment later and say, perhaps at the end of the interview, you asked me about this.

[00:16:07.110] – Caroline

I just wanted to address that again because I’ve had a chance to think about it and I wanted to share this other example It’s absolutely fine to do that. You shouldn’t be nervous about doing that. We do see candidates, and I have colleagues at Fortuna who have done a lot of interviews, for example, as alumni volunteers for Stanford. They often see that candidates are literally trembling at the start of the interview. It’s fine to be nervous. Most candidates are nervous, but just take your time, take a deep breath and focus on, if you can, enjoying the conversation. Then I think if you really focus on trying to engage with the interviewer and getting the most out of that discussion, it helps candidates to relax. So don’t feel bad if you think that you have perhaps fluffed a question or you came across as too nervous to start with. It’s often the case. Interviewers do see that a lot.

[00:17:12.850] – John

Yeah, and you mentioned Stanford, and the questions here are pretty interesting. Describe a time when you noticed a problem before others did and worked to fix it. That’s interesting. Tell me about a time you helped someone else develop a skill, or tell me about a time you were blocked from achieving Those are questions that can yield pretty deep answers, I would think, and really bring out some fascinating stories. Now, do you have some favorite questions among the list here, Maria?

[00:17:43.830] – Maria

I actually do love that Stanford question. I’ve seen that one reported several times of what was the time that you identified an opportunity? It’s a flavor of when did you see something that other people didn’t? Step one. Then ideally, step two, okay, once you had that insight, how did you actually get other people to go along with it? When you think back, again, let’s look at Stanford’s, their tagline, their mission statement or whatever is change lives, change organizations, change the world. It’s hard to change lives, change organizations, and change the world if you’re not the person who comes up with innovative new ideas, or if you do come up with those ideas, but then you’re not able to get anyone else to come along for the ride and you’re not able to persuade them, you’re not really going to change organizations around the world. I think that’s why Stanford asks that question so perennially, because they are looking for people for whom that is in their DNA. That actually is one of my favorite questions.

[00:18:41.290] – John

Yeah. Actually, I think Actually, some of these questions would be great questions for an employer interview. Never mind for an admissions interview. I think there’s some really good questions in here. If you’re in a hiring situation and you I want to probe deeply the character, the values, the thinking style of an applicant for a job. Some of these questions are sensational for that, I would think. How helpful is it? You made the point before Maria that you can’t really prepare for all these questions. What you want is a couple of stories that you can multi-purpose based on what the questions are. But yet you do mock interviews, and Caroline and her colleagues at Fortunado mock interviews. What do you hope to achieve by doing a mock interview with a professional? Caroline?

[00:19:41.630] – Caroline

Well, I think it’s a really useful exercise to practice For any situation that you’re going to be in where it’s going to be, whether you’re doing a presentation or you’re doing something for the first time, practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect, but it definitely helps. It’s useful to have someone put you through your paces. I think there’s lots of prep that you can do by yourself as well. It’s great to look through this article with a sample questions and think through what response you might give to some of these different questions. As Maria said, figure out some of those Swiss Army knife stories that you can use as that could be a rich source for responses to multiple questions. You can do a lot of that prep yourself, but it’s still useful to have somebody putting you on the spot and simulating the experience of sitting down with someone and having to respond to those questions in a structured format. So I don’t think you need to do millions of mock interviews, but definitely we do see candidates who go through that experience and then sometimes are surprised at how they struggle with certain questions, or they don’t realize necessarily how they’re coming across.

[00:20:58.880] – Caroline

And so we’re able to them feedback that helps them to adjust. We’ll often record the mock interview so that they can see it themselves afterwards, and we’ll give them feedback and they can observe what they did, and perhaps we’ll do a mock interview again later with another coach so that they can have another experience and have taken on board the feedback that we’ve given them. The interview is, as we’ve said, often a stressful experience. It’s not like the written application where you can do it in your own time and you can take your time doing it. You’re really being put on the spot. It’s a very time-limited exercise, and it’s quite a high-stakes exercise. It can make the difference between being admitted and not admitted. It’s not the only factor that schools will take into account. Sometimes candidates think that if they ace the interview, then they are automatically getting into the school. It’s not the case because the admissions committee will look at the interview, but they will also look at the entire application, and they’re taking into account a lot of different factors when they’re taking that final decision. But nevertheless, it is a critical point in your path, and so it can make a big difference.

[00:22:13.030] – Caroline

It’s worth investing a bit of time an effort in preparing well.

[00:22:16.780] – John

I’m thinking the biggest takeaway from mock interviews and rehearsals is a level of comfort or confidence that allows you to be more effective in an interview. Maria, do you think that’s the I think that’s a huge benefit of it.

[00:22:34.410] – Maria

To Caroline’s point, I do think that it’s one thing to read a list of questions and then in your head say, Well, here’s how I think I’d answer that question, and then you mentally move on to the next question that you’re preparing for. But once you actually hear yourself speaking, it can be some people don’t provide any details that are relevant. Some people provide too many details, many of which are irrelevant. Some people babble, some people freeze. I think that level of confidence comes from the emulation of as close to as possible of the interview experience. You have basically a stranger, effectively. On the other side, your admissions consultant doing the interview being usually pretty stone-based about whether or not your responses are good or bad. The one thing I think people tend to underestimate a lot between what they think in their head the interview is going to go like and how actually goes is the role that adrenaline plays. If you’re just relaxing at home and you’re recording yourself on your phone and you’re saying, Well, let me walk you through my resume, it’s very different when you are sitting there in your suit You’re probably…

[00:23:45.750] – Maria

Your heart is pounding, you’re probably sweating, and your stomach’s going in all different directions. I think that the mock interview not only gives you feedback on the answers themselves, which is extremely valuable, but also that emulation of being in the hot seat It really helps you prepare for that actual experience so that you don’t start to spiral in your own head in the moment of, Oh, my gosh, can they tell I’m nervous? They can totally tell that I am bombing this. Oh, no. Then you get in your own head because I think that that’s the number one thing where someone would have done very well and then they actually don’t do well, it’s when they underestimated, how do I control my adrenaline in that moment? How do I control the fact that I’ve got these butterflies in my stomach? I do think that… I think Mach These are incredibly valuable, but I think that’s one of the key ones, and Caroline did touch upon that. I just wanted to reiterate that.

[00:24:37.000] – John

We’re a strong underarm deodorant.

[00:24:40.010] – Maria

Indeed. You know what? Honestly, if you’re doing a mock interview, if you’re planning on wearing a certain outfit to the interview itself, wear it for your mock because you might not realize that, Hey, actually, the shoulders are a little tight in this jacket, or, I’m not actually very comfortable. This is a scratchy sweater, or whatever it might be. That’s the last thing you want on the day of that you put on your fresh brand new suit and you realize, Oh, this is not comfortable. It’s a minor point, but you’d be surprised.

[00:25:07.910] – John

Or you do a mock with Caroline and you wear your uniform, your corporate uniform for your interview, and Caroline says to you, Where in the world did you buy that? What?

[00:25:20.390] – Maria

He would never. You don’t want to wear something where what you’re wearing is a topic of conversation.

[00:25:27.700] – Caroline

Exactly.

[00:25:27.920] – John

That That is really the most important thing, right? You don’t want to stand out because standing out, more often than not, standing out with your clothes could be a real problem.

[00:25:41.430] – Caroline

That’s a very good thing.

[00:25:43.170] – John

That’s really true. All right, so there you go, round two interview people. Check our story out. 2025 MBA Interview questions, a school by school list. We have a sample of questions at each of the schools that are being asked candidates right now. While, yeah, you’re right, you can’t prepare canned answers to these. There are too many of them, and you’ll only trip yourself up and waste a lot of time. But just to have an idea of what different schools are asking, how they’re asking it, and getting yourself into a level of comfort and confidence that allows you not to openly sweat and stutter your way through an interview probably is really good thing. For all of you out there, good luck on these interviews. They do matter, and we’re hoping that you do well in them. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual with my co-host, Maria Wichvilla and Caroline Diorkey Edwards. Thanks for tuning in..

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
MBA Interview Questions
Maria |
February 5, 2025

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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