Should You Use ChatGPT To Draft An MBA Essay?
Maria |
March 29, 2023

The popularity of ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI, has been on the rise among MBA applicants for its remarkable ability to produce persuasive and coherent text. In this episode, John, Maria, and Caroline delve into the advantages and disadvantages of using this technology in the admissions process, while also addressing the potential ethical concerns that may arise.

Our hosts also provide a broader perspective on the changing landscape of MBA admissions, highlighting the role that technology is playing in shaping the future of the industry.

Whether you’re an experienced business professional, a prospective MBA applicant, or simply intrigued by the intersection of technology and education, this episode of Business Casual is a must-listen. Tune in to join an engaging and informative conversation on the use of ChatGPT in MBA admissions.

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.210] – John

Well, hello, everyone. Welcome to Business Casual, a weekly podcast of Poets and Quants. I’m John Byrne, the editor of P and Q. And with me are my co hosts, Maria Wich Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Maria, of course, is the founder of Applicant Lab and Caroline is the board former admissions director of INSEAD and the co founder of Fortuna Admissions. You will have been buried under a rock. If you haven’t heard about ChatGPT, there has been a tremendous number of stories written on this artificial intelligence ChatGPT, and we can tell you, we can do really amazing and incredible things. On a recent visit to Goizueta Business School, I sat down with the admissions director, Melissa Rapp, who, out of curiosity, started typing into ChatGPT the leadership question that Goizueta asked of all its MBA applicants. Her conclusion what came back was pretty good. Sure, it felt a bit canned and there was nothing personalized about it, but it was pretty darn good. It was organized well, it was well written, and it’s going to be a problem, I think, for a lot of admissions officers who have weighed essays in an important way to judge the qualifications of a candidate for business school.

 

[00:01:38.750] – John

So one of the things that we’ve done, we’ve asked Maria and Caroline to play with ChatGPT. I’ve played with it as well, and we’re going to tell you what we discovered. Maria, why don’t you go first? What question did you ask ChatGPT?

 

[00:01:55.050] – Maria

Sure. So I decided to ask it what I think is probably one of the hardest, if not the hardest, essay question in MBA admissions, and that is Stanford’s. What matters most to you and why? Admittedly, I started a bit too philosophical. I asked ChatGPT to tell me what should matter most to me, and it very rightfully pointed out that I am simply an AI. But it actually gave me he’s like it. It actually said, well, here are some ways that some people think about prioritizing things in their lives. And I was like, wow, this is very therapeutic. I think that admissions officers and therapists maybe should start to be concerned about this potential. But so anyway, I then asked it more specifically, okay, how should I write the essay for the Stanford thing? When I first gave it just very vague information, I got back what I would call a cotton candy answer. It was very sweet, but ultimately very empty, so it sure sounded nice. It had a lot of good things. I told it, what if community matters most to me? And so it came back with only let me see if I can find it.

 

[00:03:02.170] – Maria

We are all interconnected when one person suffers, we all suffer when one person thrives. We all benefit. By investing in our communities, we create a ripple effect of positivity. So, hey, look, ripple effects of positivity. Sounds great. The thing is that there were no actual examples there was nothing concrete. Like I said, it was essentially cotton candy. Like it looks sweet from far away and it is at first, but then when you dig into it you’re like, well there’s nothing here, it’s just air. So then I decided to give it more details about me, sort of a hypothetical me. And I created a composite of a sort of a typical applicant to Stanford, someone being raised in a military dictatorship, who worked with the government and protested the government and now is a sustainability expert and has done all this stuff with sustainability. And then I asked it to write the essay around that. What it did. It did some things well and it did some things that obviously it couldn’t possibly do. What it did do well was it took the information that I gave it about myself and it did structure an essay around those things.

 

[00:04:06.000] – Maria

It actually put together a few connections that even I had not told it to make. So for example, one of the things I told it was that I had led protests against the government when I was in college, but I didn’t say any, and that I risked getting arrested for doing so, but I didn’t say anything else. And then ChatGPT filled in the details of I knew that silence would only perpetuate the problems that plagued my community and through this I inspired others to join the fight for change. So I had not said anything in my prompt about inspiring others and silence was not an answer, but it somehow was able to make that conclusion on its own and I thought that was actually really impressive. And the other thing was that the details I gave it, the original thing I said to it was what matters most to me is my community. But then the details I gave it were more aligned with someone who is committed to a career in sustainability. And then at the end what it did is it very smartly tied together those two things, that creating positive change in my community is what matters most to me.

 

[00:05:16.840] – Maria

And the way I think I should do this is through sustainability because without the environment, whatever the environment is really important for all of us. And so I thought that was really smart. Now obviously what it couldn’t do is it didn’t provide any deeper information beyond what I had given it. The other thing I will say, so that’s sort of a downside. But the other thing I will say also is that when I asked it just to just rewrite it and rewrite it and rewrite it every time it said the same things, but it was able to phrase it in slightly different ways. So I thought that that was really interesting, that it’s very fluent with taking a concept and writing one sentence that expresses that concept well and then writing a completely different sentence that also expresses that same concept well, just with rearranging words and choosing synonyms and what have you. So overall I actually think it’s a very good tool for actually writing something out. Where I think it fails is it doesn’t really provide any inner, deeper insight into someone’s thought process or their values or anything like that. But of course it can only work with what it’s given.

 

[00:06:32.990] – John

Nonetheless, were you surprised at how good it was or disappointed?

 

[00:06:39.970] – Maria

I have been surprised. I’ve been playing with it for a couple of weeks and the first time I used it for something I thought, oh wow, within moments it comes back with a fully fleshed out, grammatically correct, well worded essay.

 

[00:07:00.150] – John

You wonder if an admissions official who spends I guess the average time spent in a first read is only like, I think twelve minutes or so. So an admissions official with a pile of application essays in front of them, having to get through, all of them rushing through. If you provide enough answers and background to ChatGPT, would that person really be able to tell that it was created by a ChatGPT, do you think?

 

[00:07:31.170] – Maria

I mean, I think the thing it definitely lacked was sort of a personal or personality or a voice, so it was pretty dry. So I do think that applicants going forward should try to even harder to incorporate some aspects of their personality into it because it was a little bit sort of academic in its writing. I don’t know if an admissions officer will be able to tell. I think this is why the interviews are so important and I think it’s a shame that the new GMAT is getting rid of the analytical writing assessment because I just feel like when you actually see how someone writes under a time pressure you’re going to get a much better sense of who they actually are. Whether or not the admissions officer can tell or not, I don’t know. But I also think that it’s not, as you yourself have quoted, Dee Leopold, the former head of admissions for Harvard has said, and we’ve all repeated amongst ourselves many times, it’s not an essay writing contest. The admission does not go to the person who writes the most beautiful prose. The admission goes to the person who has accomplished the most impressive things in the best way.

 

[00:08:39.820] – Maria

So whether or not we can tell if it’s written by the person or written by their cousin or written by ChatGPT, at the end of the day I think it’s going to be what they’ve accomplished that’s going to matter most in terms of making that assessment.

 

[00:08:53.910] – John

Yeah, very true. Now Caroline, you fed it one of the INSEAD questions, right?

 

[00:08:58.990] – Caroline

Yes, I did. So I fed it the candid description essay from INSEAD. So the school asks the candidate to give a candid description of yourself, stressing the personal characteristics you feel to be your strengths and weaknesses and the main factors which have influenced your personal development. So what I found is very similar experience to Maria, so I only got a sensible response once I started giving it more and more details. Right. So you have to have figured out what are the key elements of your story and what are the key points you want to get across before it’s able to draft anything that is usable. So the point where I found it most useful was when I took a rough draft, fed that in, and asked it to improve the style and reduce the word count. And then it spat something out that had INSEAD had a smoother style and it had reduced the word count, and it did that very quickly. I also found that the style was very bland, as you’ve both said. So definitely it read like something that lacked the individual personality. And so that’s not something that I would want to submit to a school by any means.

 

[00:10:14.150] – Caroline

So I think it can be useful tool at a certain point in the process. But until AI can stare into your soul and tap into your memories and your life experience, it’s not going to be able to tell you. What are the things that you should be telling Business School and what is relevant about your past experience and what are the key achievements that Harvard Business School or INSEAD are going to be particularly interested in. And that’s one of the things that, as coaches, we spent a lot of time on, is understanding a candidate’s background and delving into that and helping them understand what are their key strengths, what are their weaknesses, how do they showcase their strengths, and how can they effectively mitigate their weaknesses. And once you have that understanding yes. Then maybe this can play a role in helping you develop some of those drafts. And it could be useful in that process. But I still think garbage in, garbage out, right? You have to know what you’re doing, and there has to be some intelligence in the prompt, I think, that you’re giving it. And you have to understand the context of what sort of response you’re looking for, because there are all sorts of disclaimers on this tool.

 

[00:11:35.760] – Caroline

Right. There’s no guarantee that what it’s generating is accurate, or there could be all sorts of issues with it. You’ve got to bring your own intelligence to it, especially if the stakes are high, which they are when you’re preparing your application for business school.

 

[00:11:58.490] – John

Very true. I’m interested in the difference that you pointed out between editing and writing. So when you asked it to improve an existing draft, you thought it did a pretty decent job.

 

[00:12:12.170] – Caroline

Yes, I did. Although it was good at cutting down the word count, it made some awkward phrases less awkward. It had some nice turns of phrase. So I did find that useful, I think, particularly for a non native English speaker, that could be quite useful in the process. But then again, it did read the word that came to mind when I read it was bland. Right?

 

[00:12:42.770] – John

Yeah, exactly.

 

[00:12:44.630] – Caroline

And as Maria said, it’s not an essay writing competition. So the admissions officer and if you’re not a native English speaker and you make the occasional grammar mistake, or you have a turn of phrase that is not perfect, that’s fine. As Maria said, what they’re concerned about is your track record and your potential. Right. And they’re less concerned about whether you are able to write a sparkling essay. And so I don’t think people should get too hung up on the expression of how that’s put down on the paper. The key thing is what are the important elements of your story that you want to get across to business school and how do you want to convey that?

 

[00:13:27.970] – John

Now, since you have read, I would guess, tens of thousands of essays, both as the director of admissions at INSEAD and as a consultant, I wonder if you put your admissions director hat back on. Do you think you could be fooled by ChatGPT?

 

[00:13:47.130] – Caroline

Well, the application has various elements. Right. And that’s one of the reasons why schools have not just essays, but they also have interviews and now they have video questions, and there’s the GMAT and other recommendations. And one of the reasons they have these different elements is they are like pieces of puzzle that come together, and there needs to be some coherence in that. And so if the essays are perfectly written, but then the verbal GMAT is poor, very poor. Right. Or there are concerns expressed by the interviewer, or there is a video response that isn’t fantastic, they will be looking at how that cross checks. It may be feasible that, as you say right. You cited the admissions director from Emory and how it was able to spew out pretty impressive career goals. So it could be that for some element of the application, it would be able to come up with something that would be a useful addition to your application, but it can’t fake the whole thing, I think. And there are cross checks in that process that I think will still be valuable. Having said that, I think the schools are struggling to figure out how to deal with this.

 

[00:15:07.940] – Caroline

And we’ve reached out to a number of schools and they’ve said, we’ll figure it out. We’ll get back to you later. I think they’re all not quite sure how this is going to play out right now, so we’ll wait and see how they respond. But I think there is a lot of concern about this, and I don’t think they have figured out their policies yet.

 

[00:15:29.520] – John

Yeah. And Melissa Rapid quizueta said that of course they’re going to still look at essays and count them, but she is inclined to put more weight than has been put in the past on the face to face interview and their verbal essay question, which has to be answered on the spot in 1 minute, in front of a camera, where obviously ChatGPT can play no role at all. I assume. Although one would think you could just type the darn question in and out. You could read it off the screen in another window. But clearly I think that would also run into the same problem that we’ve been talking about. You’re going to get a bland cotton candy kind of answer that’s not very personalized and as soon as someone recognized that it’s that canned, it’s going to get your application tossed in the waste basket pretty quickly. Now, just like Caroline and Maria did, I picked an essay question as well to see what would happen and I decided I wasn’t going to give the ChatGPT any information about me and I was going to ask it my favorite MBA application essay question, which is Duke’s Fuqua’s goal of Business 750 Word question.

 

[00:16:55.910] – John

Share with us important life experiences, your hobbies, achievements, fun facts or anything that helps us understand what makes you who you are and list them in 25 different bullet points. So what was kind of interesting is ChatGPT just instead of refusing to answer and saying I don’t know enough about you to answer the question properly, it made stuff up. It created an entirely fictional portrait of who I am. And I have to say I kind of admired this person. I’m going to read some of the things that it wrote. Growing up in a multicultural household, I learned to appreciate and respect different cultures and ways of life. Now that’s really right up the alley and business school admissions these days. Another one. One of my biggest hobbies is hiking. I enjoy exploring new trails and pushing myself physically. Or how about this one? I have a strong interest in sustainability and have worked on several projects to promote eco friendly practices in my community. Or this one I am a certified scuba diver and love exploring the underwater world. Now of course, if anyone submitted something like this without having given ChatGPT any information about yourself and your interest, I think that you would pretty quickly be discovered as a fake.

 

[00:18:33.330] – John

There are so many incredible things here like I am a licensed pilot and enjoy flying small planes in my spare time where I am fluent in three languages english, Spanish and Mandarin. I imagine if you submitted that and then you showed up and were admitted, it would be pretty damn embarrassing, wouldn’t it?

 

[00:18:54.330] – Maria

Especially when that plane is starting to crash and everyone turns to you to save them and you can’t do it.

 

[00:19:03.150] – John

The other thing to consider here is that this is really like the first iteration of this ChatGPT. There is a competitive race now going on among Google, Microsoft. The company that obviously put this out will be Facebook as well, and other players. And that competitive race will likely result in fairly dramatic and quick improvement in what a ChatGPT can produce. And so I wonder a year from now, while we may be thinking that these essays answers are bland and cotton candy and kind of boring and almost academic, I wonder a year from now if you include just a few sentences about yourself, how well they might be structured and portrayed. And I wonder if, frankly, some of them could be quite compelling. It doesn’t mean we’re not endorsing the view that a candidate should use this for applying to business school. I think that would be a huge mistake, but it is surprising how good it is already and I think it’s only going to get better. And then the issue is, what impact will it have on admissions long term? Caroline, what do you think? Do you agree with Melissa that schools are going to not eliminate essays, but maybe weigh them a little bit less and maybe over index things like the face to face interview video questions, which may become more apparent and more common across the board, instead of just a few schools leaning on your recommendations more your undergraduate transcript, your work experience, and just putting a little less weight on this.

 

[00:20:58.180] – John

Or do you think it’s not going to make a difference?

 

[00:21:00.770] – Caroline

I think that the video questions could become more widespread. I think the schools that use those already find them very useful and we’ve discussed that in the past, that they give a wonderful glimpse into the candidate and how they think and how they communicate, and that’s difficult to fake for the time being. So I wouldn’t be surprised if those become more widespread. Perhaps we will see fewer essays in the future. I mean, many of the schools don’t have that many essays already in Sierra has quite a few essays, but it’s one of the outliers. So the schools already are relying on multiple elements to assess candidates, so I think that they will continue to do that. They’ll just have to be very conscious that they need to cross check things. And it’s a very interesting point that Maria made about how perhaps in the context of ChatGPT and so on, it’s a shame that the GMAT has dropped the essay element, because that could have been a very useful cross check as well for the schools.

 

[00:22:10.650] – John

Yeah, true. And I bet you at the time that the new test is being created, there was no ChatGPT and this was not an issue, and now suddenly it can be an issue.

 

[00:22:24.320] – Caroline

Yeah.

 

[00:22:25.060] – John

Maria, what’s your takeaway on this and how ultimately admission directors will evaluate candidates?

 

[00:22:32.190] – Maria

Yeah, I agree with Caroline. I have long been a champion of the video essays. I mean, even if you do type into ChatGPT, like, oh, quick, I’ve just been out, I have to give a 32nd answer about a teamwork thing. It’s probably not going to know enough details about you to come up with a good answer in time. And also most people, unless they’ve had significant theater training, I mean, if there’s a ChatGPT answer right in front of them and their webcam, they are reading it, it’s going to be pretty obvious. You can see their eyeballs moving across the page from side to side. And so it’s really obvious when someone is reading something on screen, right? Again, unless they have had a lot of training with theatrical script memorization and performance. So I actually think I would almost advise people right now to almost avoid the temptation to use this because let’s say you are a non native English speaker and you submit a perfectly flawless ChatGPT polished essay, it’s going to look fake. And so, on the contrary, I would almost think that admissions officers might give some points for genuine authenticity if the essay really does reflect what this person communicates like in real life.

 

[00:23:47.150] – Maria

And so I would actually avoid it, I think, because my worry is that it’s just everyone’s going to sound so sanitized that it will at least at best you might sound bland, but at worst it might be sort of suspicious, like, wait a minute, is this person cheating by using something like ChatGPT? Because like Caroline said, their verbal score on the GMAT wasn’t that high or they only took a few classes in English in college and they didn’t get very good grades or things like that. So I don’t know, I would actually avoid the temptation to use it even for editing.

 

[00:24:26.470] – John

Yeah, interesting. One of the other things that I did here was to ask the Harvard Business School question, because that’s pretty tricky question in the sense that they’re only asking you for more information that’s not already in your application. And I only gave it a little detail. I said I was an entrepreneur of a digital media company and that’s all I said. And it’s kind of interesting. It even had a salutation it’s a Dear Admissions committee on the answer. And after that it said, I am thrilled to submit my application for the Harvard Business School MBA program and I appreciate the opportunity to elaborate on what I believe makes me a strong candidate for the program. And then it goes on and it says, one of the most formative experiences of my life was growing up in a family of entrepreneurs. From a young age, I was exposed to the challenges and rewards of running a business, and I was inspired by the dedication and hard work that my family put into their work, blah, blah, blah. So it just extrapolated that from me telling that I was an entrepreneur of a digital media company and that I wanted to apply to Harvard and then gave Harvard’s question.

 

[00:25:54.770] – John

It’s a worrisome tool. You’re right. It’s bland, it’s canned, it’s cotton candy. But the more information you give it, the more specific it tends to get. And I would think that other iterations are going to make essays a very difficult thing to evaluate by admission committees and admission directors in schools. I totally agree with Maria. Don’t use it. It will probably ruin the spontaneity and the genuineness of what you do want to write, so you might want to play with it for other reasons, like tell me what I should eat tonight, or give me a recipe that you’ll think I’ll enjoy or where should I travel on my next vacation. But don’t ask it to answer an essay question where your answer could determine whether or not you actually get into your dream school. Maria and Caroline, you both agree with that?

 

[00:26:54.470] – Caroline

Sounds good.

 

[00:26:56.210] – John

And we should ask it okay. If you’re interested in going to business school, what podcast should you listen to? I hope it says Business Casual. All right, everybody. Thanks for listening. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You have been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

 

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Should You Use ChatGPT To Draft An MBA Essay?
Maria |
March 29, 2023

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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