Why MBA Admissions Is Not The Crapshoot You Think It is + The Year In Review
Maria |
December 21, 2021

We all know how difficult it is to get into business schools. When people hear of applicants being accepted into selective and highly ranked programs but being rejected by others, they often start thinking that admissions decisions are made at random. 

In this episode of Business Casual, John, Maria, and Caroline are going to discuss exactly how arbitrary admissions decisions at the best business schools are. Plus, what are the grounds for an MBA applicant’s acceptance to a much more selective and highly ranked university yet a rejection from a lower-ranked university?

Episode Transcript

[00:00:07.510] – John

Well, happy holiday, everyone. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’re listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast. And I have my co host, Maria Wich Vila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Maria, as you all know, is the founder of Applicant Lab. And Caroline, of course, is the former director of admissions at INSEAD and a cofounder of Fortuna Admissions. So a few things it’s the end of the year and what we wanted to do is to look back on the year and discuss some of the highlights in the area of graduate management education. We also want to look forward a little bit and talk about what some of our resolutions might be as pertains to our business or the business of business goals. But right now, of course, a lot of people are getting their decisions. Some are getting happy decisions, some are getting sad decisions, many are being put on wait list. And a good number are getting kind of decisions from the admissions offices. That leads them to wonder how arbitrary are admission decisions at the best schools? There is one fellow here who mentioned that today he was accepted at Wharton and rejected by Duke Fuqua, and that really surprised him because he thought he was a long shot at Wharton and he thought he was a shoe in at Duke Fuqua.

 

[00:01:34.280] – John

There was another person who joined in on this discussion. This discussion is actually on Reddit who says he was accepted to Chicago booth with a scholarship but dinged at both Dartmouth, Tuck and Fuqua schools that are ranked well below Chicago booth. And it goes on from there. Another person who dined at Michigan Ross and yet got into an M seven school and rightly says admissions is not an exact science. Another person gets a full ride to USC, Marshall, gets $70,000 in discounts or scholarships to UCLA Anderson, and then is waitlisted at the University of Washington in Seattle. And it’s just one thing after another that kind of makes you scratch your head. Caroline, how do you make sense of this when a candidate is accepted to a school that’s much more highly ranked and is more highly selective and then is actually rejected from a small that’s less lower ranked?

 

[00:02:35.340] 

Yeah.

 

[00:02:35.670] – Caroline

I think there is an element of candidates trying much harder and putting much more effort into their applications for schools that are really their dream and their stretch. And it often comes across to file readers if the school is not the dream school. Right. It’s very tricky for candidates because you do have to make each school feel like they are your number one choice, even if they’re not. And even if that feels a little bit artificial. And the schools, of course, know you’re probably applying to multiple schools, so it’s a little bit of a game. But Far readers are very astute. They’re very good at reading between the lines. They understand if a candidate is talking in somewhat generic terms about the school and their sense of fish and their motivation. And the schools can also spot that this candidate is probably a better fit for another school. Right. They may be very well qualified candidate objectively. They may have a lot of wonderful accomplishments and a great profile, but it may not be the best fit for them. There may be other schools that are better options, and schools want to select candidates who are the best fit for them and also who are likely to accept their offer.

 

[00:03:59.120] – Caroline

So if schools are recognizing that it’s not the best option for them, they may be rejecting them. But I do think that often candidates just struggle to put in as much effort to all of their applications, especially applying to multiple schools. That’s very difficult to do. And our readers are very experienced. They recognize that very quickly.

 

[00:04:22.530] – John

Yeah. And the other thing is schools are protective of their yields. That’s a very important statistic that’s looked at, because what it does mean is when you accept the candidate and are rejected, that means they’ve chosen someone else other than your school that can say something about your reputation, say something else about the admissions office inability to close a candidate. That’s a very closely watched metric by the leadership of the school. So it gets managed. Isn’t that right, Maria?

 

[00:04:56.490] – Maria

Absolutely. And I think, as Caroline said, I think sometimes candidates have a tendency to underestimate the intelligence of the file readers. I mean, these people are pretty astute, right? So if you write an essay that’s like, I like the way that your business schools, a schooling in business is why I want to go to your business school. And it’s like, oh, my gosh. Okay, well, do you really love me? Right. If you’re dating two people and you take one of them to a Michelin starred restaurant and you take the other one to a Burger King off the interstate, you think the second person isn’t going to think to themselves, Maybe I’m not this person’s first choice. I mean, it’s pretty these little hints. And right now you’re like, oh, that’s an exaggerated Maria. Like, I actually put the name of the school in my essay, so I don’t make those mistakes. But little subtle clues like that can absolutely come across. And I think in terms of yield and fit. We were chatting right before we started recording this. I was sharing an anecdote of how after I do HBS mock interviews with folks, I just write little private notes to myself.

 

[00:06:00.150] – Maria

I’m like, what do I think their chances are just to see how good my Spidey sense, how good my six sense is on candidates. And there was one person that I wrote at the end, I wrote, I love this guy. The only way he’s not getting in is if they figure GSB is taking him instead because he’s so good. He’s definitely getting into GSB. And therefore the only way he’s not getting into HBS is if they fail. And sure enough, I got the email in a GSB rejected from HBS. And I’m not saying that that’s the reason. But I was like, boom. I am sure that this person was so strong that they knew he was going to go someplace else. And so why spend the effort and get your heart broken if he’s just not that into you or you know that he’s going to date someone else and take them to the Michelin starred restaurant, why would you even bother with the Burger King date? I just think that I think that’s a really big part of it. And in some cases, I think the schools are actually doing people a favor. Like this person, as much as I love HBS, this person is actually going to be Stanford is going to be a much stronger program for them for very specific reasons that I won’t get into.

 

[00:07:06.150] – Maria

But so I’m like, you know what? I actually think they’re pushing you in the right direction there. So, yeah, I think that’s part of it.

 

[00:07:12.840] – Caroline

And yeah, and at the end of it.

 

[00:07:13.900] – Maria

Some of it also just comes down to luck. Let’s be honest, it is not a quantifiable process. If the schools only had 20 candidates a year, you might say, wow, this is really shocking. But the school says thousands of candidates a year. And in that pool of thousands of candidates, there are dozens, sometimes perhaps even hundreds of copycat resumes. Right. There are only so many investment banking analysts. After a while, they all start to look pretty much the same. And at a certain point, I think you just have to say, well, we can only take one out of these three.

 

[00:07:45.900] – Caroline

Boom.

 

[00:07:46.400] – Maria

And so it’s not necessarily a rejection of you as a person. It’s not necessarily that you were a bad candidate. I sometimes get emails of people saying, well, what went wrong? Especially if they get on the waitlist, I’m on the waitlist. What do you think went wrong? And I’m like, nothing went wrong if something had gone wrong and rejected.

 

[00:08:02.490] – Caroline

Yeah, what the heck?

 

[00:08:04.190] – Maria

So anyway, those are my thoughts on this.

 

[00:08:06.500] – John

Now, let’s face it, admission officers also make mistakes, don’t they?

 

[00:08:12.650] – Maria

Not Caroline. Caroline didn’t.

 

[00:08:15.230] – Caroline

I never did, of course.

 

[00:08:16.520] – Maria

When she was a hot person. Yes. But ever since she left, I do have to say that perhaps a few admissions officers and other lesser schools have perhaps from time to time made mistakes.

 

[00:08:31.350] – Caroline

It’s not a scientific process. Right. And there is an element of luck. You could be the 55th file that the poor reader has plowed through that day and they’re not in a good mood. And you just get shunted aside in a way that you might not have if you’d be on top of the pile that morning. So there is certainly an element of luck. And the interviews also play an important role. And that is you don’t have as much control over how that goes as you have over your written application. Right. So you may have a good report with the interviewer or you may not. And again, your interviewer may be having a bad day, and that can influence the report that they give on. You know, there’s just a lot of variability. Or you could do what my husband did, which is tell his Kellogg interviewer that GSB was his target score.

 

[00:09:32.070] – Maria

Did he get into Kellogg?

 

[00:09:33.950] – Caroline

So his interviewer, apparently his jaw completely dropped. Can quite believe what he’d said. Poor guy. He’s just very honest. Right. He’s very honest. And no, he got rejected by Kellogg. Of course he did.

 

[00:09:50.680] – Maria

That’s a good thing. He actually got into Stanford because otherwise. Yikes. Yeah.

 

[00:09:55.500] – John

That’s so funny.

 

[00:10:00.190] – Caroline

Yeah.

 

[00:10:00.740] – Maria

Anyone listening? Don’t do that in your interview.

 

[00:10:03.160] – Caroline

Exactly. Yeah.

 

[00:10:07.430] – John

Oh, my goodness. That was gutsy. Because obviously he didn’t have a Stanford except in his pocket yet.

 

[00:10:16.500] – Caroline

Yeah. I’m not sure he thought it through very carefully, being brutally honest, which he generally is something that I’ve learned to live with.

 

[00:10:30.050] – Maria

I love this story.

 

[00:10:33.710] – John

That is a riot. Now, this just tells me, look, it’s really important to apply to a range of schools, not just one or two, because any kind of thing can, in fact, happen. I mean, you could get at the bottom of the pile and you’re the 55th read that a reader has, and they’re just not in a great mood and they’ve seen too many like you, or you are naturally a better fit for another school, given your background and your career aspirations. So I think it’s important to let every school know they are your first choice, number one. And number two, to apply to a number of schools just in case. Because in the event that you draw a bad straw, it might be very helpful to have other options, right?

 

[00:11:27.430] – Maria

Yes. And one more thing I would say. One thing that we were chatting about before was you had said that someone on the Reddit Post had said, oh, I had totally I nailed this one schools interview and I didn’t get in. And the other interview, I had a fever of 107, and I got in there. I don’t understand. I find that candidates are often very bad at judging their own performance in the interview, not because of any lack of critical thinking on their part, but because in the interview, your adrenaline is going 100 miles an hour. And so your memory or your emotions are heightened. And I just feel that people walk out of interviews sometimes feeling like they nailed it. And sometimes or they walk out and like.

 

[00:12:01.540] – Caroline

Oh, she hated me.

 

[00:12:03.410] – Maria

And I just think there’s just so much emotional variability. Caroline pointed out that there’s a lot of variability in what you will do in the interview, what kind of interviewer you will get. But I also think that sometimes my message here is, do not read too much into the interview. I have so many people even like, oh, I just bombed it. And I’m like, you don’t know that yet. Maybe they were being tough with you because they actually respect you. Or my interview was too easy. My interviewer was too hard on me. That means I bombed it. My interviewer was too easy on me. That means I bombed it. And I’m like, just don’t. Or Conversely, like, I nailed it, man. She loves me.

 

[00:12:36.040] – Caroline

And I’m like, maybe not.

 

[00:12:38.730] – Maria

So that’s the other thing I would say is just do as best as you can in the interview. But please do not torture yourself over it or get too cocky.

 

[00:12:47.350] – John

Yeah. So the general conclusion here is that admissions really isn’t the crapshoot that it sometimes appears to be. It really isn’t as arbitrary as it can seem. Right? Is that what the bottom line is?

 

[00:13:00.080] – Caroline

There is an element of luck. But as a candidate, you don’t have the full picture.

 

[00:13:05.540] – Maria

Right.

 

[00:13:05.940] – Caroline

Because you don’t have access to the pool, you don’t know who you’re being compared to. You don’t have the feedback that your interviewers have given. So even though you feel that you have a strong sense of how things went and where you should get in and where your chances are more tricky, you don’t have that full picture that the admissions office has. So as you say, you need to therefore hedge your bet.

 

[00:13:36.010] – Maria

And that’s the benefit that people like Caroline and I bring. Not to Pat myself on the back publicly on this forum, but that’s the part of the benefit of hiring someone with a lot of experiences that we do see. You might be like, I’m the only person out of my group of ten friends who’s applying to Booth, and I’m the strongest out of all ten of us. And it’s like, yeah, but there’s like a thousand other people you start seeing pattern matching. So I think earlier, before we started reporting, John, when you were reading out some of these very flummoxyen and confusing results, I think Caroline and I were like, oh, but it could have been this or it could have been that. So I think it’s a lot. Once you start pattern matching, you start seeing that there is an element of luck. Absolutely. But it’s not as random or crazy as I think it seems.

 

[00:14:22.790] – John

Yeah, absolutely. All right. So 2021, I think pretty much all of us are kind of happy. It’s coming to a close, just as we were with 2020, given the lingering aspects of the pandemic and this new Daunting variant that seems to be exploding around the world, that’s leaving us entering 2022 with tremendous amounts of uncertainty and some anxiety. What do you think this past year for our business, the business of business schools? What has it been like, Caroline?

 

[00:15:04.730] – Caroline

Well, it’s been as crazy than 2020 as you said. I do wonder how things are going to evolve over the next year and we say, oh, we’re glad this year is behind us.

 

[00:15:16.000] – Maria

I wonder if we stay the same thing.

 

[00:15:19.250] – Caroline

Right, we’re not out of the woods yet. The good thing is that schools have learned to deal with the uncertainty. And whilst it was just an incredible scramble and a total nightmare for the administration to deal with when things changed overnight in 2020, things have continued to change fairly rapidly this year. But the schools have just got much better have developed systems for being more flexible. So that will be a great asset to the schools going forward, because frankly, we don’t know how things are going to evolve and when this will finish, if it ever does finish. So that experience of juggling things and having the capability of just delivering so much more in a virtual format or in a blended format is a great ability for the schools to have, and they may well need to draw on that again in the future. Who knows how things are going to go?

 

[00:16:22.190] – John

Yeah, that’s true. And you’re right. I think that schools have more or less learn how to have in person classes with a backup of hybrid models and ready to go if there is in fact a problem of any kind. And given all the testing, the vaccines, most schools have kind of learned to live through it. Meantime, the demand for the degree seems to be holding strong. As we know, during the peak of the pandemic applications exploded, they still seem to be very strong and the quality of the entering classes also remains very high. So it’s not like the degree is being viewed as less useful, less valuable. If anything, it’s more valuable than ever. And the compensation packages that have been reported by the schools for this past year are in most cases, record numbers on pay, as well as on sign on bonus in record placement rates, extremely high success rate on job offers and job acceptances in many cases also at record levels. So on one level, the MBA seems alive and very well, even in the uncertainty of time, when the pandemic still lingers, when there’s still a lot of test optional admissions processes going on, and the number of people taking the GMAT has declined significantly.

 

[00:18:04.380] – John

Maria, what’s your take on the year?

 

[00:18:07.170] – Maria

It’s funny, I think this time last year we were a bit more optimistic about 2021 than we are now. At the end of 2021, there was news of like a vaccine was on the way, it was being tested, and I was like, Hallelujah, this will all be behind us by May. And it’s funny, I think one of my favorite tweets that I saw during this past year was, guys, I’m starting to suspect that 2021 is just three 2020s in a trench coat. In 2020 we were like, 2021, man is going to be the year when everyone’s going to get vaccinated. And so I just think, oh, my gosh. As Caroline was saying, things are still in the dumpster fire, but we’ve all gotten really good at adapting to the dumpster fire. It’s easier from that perspective. Like my son’s school. They’re like, yeah, we had two covert cases in the 6th grade, so we’re shutting down for a week, and it was like virtual classes. There was nobody back. And it was just like, oh, yeah, okay, fine. Clear the kitchen table. We’ve been through the drill already for a year and a half, and so I think the business schools are in the same boat and as our students.

 

[00:19:14.750] – Maria

So I don’t know, man, this is ridiculous. The politicization.

 

[00:19:21.170] 

Wow.

 

[00:19:21.450] – Maria

I can’t speak. The whole fact that people don’t believe in science is driving me crazy.

 

[00:19:26.450] – John

That’s really true. And you’re right. I think at the end of last year, we thought, oh, boy, isn’t it wonderful that it’s come to an end? It’s got to be better in 2022, and it was better in 2022. I think just the emergence of the Omnikron variant in this last month has led many to be much more wary than we were for most of the year. And concerning because at Cornell University completely shut down its campus cases of coping in the past. But even there there’s some positive sense of this because by all estimations, you know, the people who get COVID more often than not get very moderate cases of it. Far fewer go to the hospital and far fewer die from it, largely as a result of vaccines. It may be a different story for the unvaccinated, but we’re not necessarily talking about them because most people on a graduate business school campus are vaccinated for sure. And in fact, in many places you cannot go if you’re not vaccinated. So that’s a bit of a different story. I think for the new year we might wonder if the MBA will remain strong. My guess is that it will in part because the economy is continuing to recover and in part because there is a labor shortage worldwide that has led to these extremely high, often record placement rates in the past year.

 

[00:20:56.990] – John

There also is no shortage of major challenges facing businesses all over the world, whether it’s global supply chain, whether it’s the climate change concerns, and how that’s going to affect business in the future, both positive and negative, whether it’s the need for analytical skills to better make use of massive sets of data for decision making. All of these trends bode well for the value of the degree and the value of applicants and candidates who are seeking the degree. Do you all agree?

 

[00:21:35.990] – Caroline

Yeah, absolutely. I think applications will remain strongly over the next year. I think, as you said, the demand will continue whilst they will continue also to be new options that increase and gain market share. So Masters in Finance, Masters in Management, Masters in Data Analytics, Online Programs. I think all of those will continue to gain importance in the market. But certainly I don’t see much change over the next year in the demand for an MBA from one of the top business schools.

 

[00:22:14.460] – John

Yes, totally. Maria, last words.

 

[00:22:18.170] – Maria

I think that if anything, a world full of constant volatility is just evidence that a general management education is more necessary than ever in order for you to be nimble, to adapt to whatever the world throws at you. And so I continue to be optimistic about the fate of the degree. Even if these other specialized Masters programs do come out, even if some of them do cannibalize from the MBA, I don’t necessarily think I think that it’s not going to take away from the MBA. I think it’s just going to be a great rowing pie of people that will just be getting some form of management education, whether it be data analytics, marketing, automation, you name it. There may be some cannibalization, but I don’t think that the MBA is in trouble here.

 

[00:23:04.960] – John

We are all unabashed advocates of the MBA, for sure and for very good reasons as well. Well, hey, it’s been a wonderful year. Despite the pandemic and despite the fact that we haven’t seen each other in person, but only on Zoom, and sometimes not even on Zoom, because my technical problems often require me to shut my camera off as I am off right now. But, hey, it is what it is, right? So for all of you out there and for Caroline and Marie, I wish you the best over these holidays and a really wonderful and fulfilled and healthy and safe New Year for all of you out there, the New year is a good one for you. This is John Byrne with Poets and Quants. You’ve been listening to Business Casual, our weekly podcast.

 

The Economist Dis on MBAs: Is the Degree Still Worth It?
Business School News | General | P&Q Podcast "Business Casual"
Why MBA Admissions Is Not The Crapshoot You Think It is + The Year In Review
Maria |
December 21, 2021

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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