Send us a text What if you could hear, firsthand, from an international sportsperson about the emotional journey that follows a loss? Not loss as failure, but loss as a teacher: the kind that strips away ego, demands honesty, and forces you to confront your preparation, your mindset, and your emotional control. Hari Kiran has lived this cycle—on the badminton court, on global stages, and in the unforgiving world of regulated industries and entrepreneurship. As an international sportsman, Hari...
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Send us a text What if you could hear, firsthand, from an international sportsperson about the emotional journey that follows a loss? Not loss as failure, but loss as a teacher: the kind that strips away ego, demands honesty, and forces you to confront your preparation, your mindset, and your emotional control. Hari Kiran has lived this cycle—on the badminton court, on global stages, and in the unforgiving world of regulated industries and entrepreneurship. As an international sportsman, Hari...
Send us a text What if you could hear, firsthand, from an international sportsperson about the emotional journey that follows a loss? Not loss as failure, but loss as a teacher: the kind that strips away ego, demands honesty, and forces you to confront your preparation, your mindset, and your emotional control. Hari Kiran has lived this cycle—on the badminton court, on global stages, and in the unforgiving world of regulated industries and entrepreneurship. As an international sportsman, Hari...
Send us a text Jeff Cronkshaw doesn’t talk about leadership in theory — he talks about it 40 meters underwater, in zero visibility, when failure isn’t abstract and panic kills. Across this conversation, Jeff draws a powerful parallel between scuba diving and entrepreneurship: both place you in inherently risky environments where control is an illusion, preparation is everything, and calm is a leadership obligation. You don’t discover your limits by staying safe. You only find the boundary by ...
Send us a text Optimism isn’t just a personality trait in this episode - it’s a discipline. Gustavo Reichmann frames life as forward motion: the future should feel bigger than the past, even as you age. He credits that mindset to watching his 95-year-old grandmother still think about what’s ahead, and to the kind of “dream big” mentality that shaped his career. It’s a reflective throughline for everything else he shares: reinventing himself after 20 years as an executive, choosing partners in...
Send us a text Hoffman Media, a founder-led niche media company, raised private equity capital in the mid-2000s to fund acquisitions and organic growth. The firm entered the 2008 financial crisis with a PE partner holding a large minority stake (~40%+) and remained investor-backed for eight years. By 2012, the typical PE-backed outcome would have been a full sale or recapitalization allowing founders to take liquidity and move on. Market precedent favored exits, particularly after a long hold...
Send us a text Vishwajeet Vishnu’s journey isn’t built on privilege, pedigree, or perfect timing. It’s built on persistence. Forced to drop out of college after 12th grade due to financial hardship, Vishwajeet entered the workforce early and educated himself the hard way through books, workshops, lived experience, and relentless curiosity. Over the years, he read hundreds of books and sought mentors to avoid mistakes he couldn’t afford to make. Before finding his true calling, he tried and fa...
Send us a text He wasn’t supposed to be an entrepreneur—at least not by design. Sameer Jain never set out with a business plan or the intention to build a company. After experimenting with the early internet in India he quietly bootstrapped Net Solutions into a global services firm. Sameer shares how HBS OPM reshaped the way he thinks about data, decisions, and growth—and why he now believes that success, more than failure, can be the most dangerous teacher. Here are the Top 10 Takeaways from...
Send us a text Orit Pollak is a second-generation industrial leader based in Peru and a participant in Harvard Business School’s OPM 67 program. She leads her family’s manufacturing group, including Rayemsa, one of Peru’s main manufacturers of 200-liter steel drums, and a second factory focused on natural colors, ingredients, and spray-dried powder products. Born in Peru to Eastern European parents who survived World War II and communism, Orit grew up immersed in stories of resilience, educat...
Send us a text “You don’t have to ask a hero where she comes from—you have to understand how she thinks.” Carolyn Deng’s journey is shaped less by titles or geography and more by the evolution of her judgment. Raised in China’s highly disciplined education system, she developed rigor, endurance, and respect for structure. At Harvard, she encountered a different intellectual model—one that rewarded independent thinking, pattern recognition, and questioning authority. Together, these forces for...
Send us a text “The best feedback a parent can ever get is when a child says: I want to be like my mom or dad.” Shailu Tipparaju says this knowing his sons still tease him for being “boring” and overly philosophical — yet they’re inspired enough that their friends follow the same values they see lived at home. That tension between teasing and imitation defines how Shailu thinks about leadership: people don’t follow what you say, they follow what you are. Over the past two decades, Shailu has ...
Send us a text India’s business ecosystem is undergoing a profound reset. Failure is no longer viewed as a lasting stigma for entrepreneurs, private equity has firmly entered the capital stack, and regulatory reforms have steadily improved the ease of doing business. At the same time, public sector banks remain cautious, politically sensitive “hot potatoes,” limiting risk-taking and the development of a deep restructuring market. Against this backdrop, Deepak Narayanan (OPM 62), founder and C...
Send us a text “Rumi says you have to live life like it’s rigged in your favor.” For Faisal Charania, that mindset is inseparable from his belief that small business in America is the best business in the world. As he puts it, small businesses generate ~70% of U.S. GDP, a level of economic diversification that every other country is trying—and failing—to replicate. This episode explores how that conviction shaped Faisal’s journey from tax and M&A law back into the “holy game” of small bu...
Send us a text After 19 episodes of Beyond the Case, it finally happened - someone from OPM 67 actually said “BATNA” out loud. (Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement) More importantly, this conversation is crucial listening for young entrepreneurs and business owners who rarely get early exposure to the mindset behind selling a business. Most founders focus on building and scaling, but very few are taught how to think about exits before they are forced into one. This episode surfaces the...
Send us a text Grant Collard, Founder and CEO of Redstone Residential, shares his unconventional journey into entrepreneurship and real estate. Raised in a non-entrepreneurial environment, Grant initially pursued pre-med before realizing his true interests lay in building, finance, and independence. He entered real estate just before the 2008 financial crisis, experienced job loss, and started Redstone in 2009 while broke, living in his in-laws’ basement, and welcoming his first child. Redsto...
Send us a text Iman Mutlaq is a self-made, belief-driven, high-agency leader whose identity was forged by early responsibility, sustained by discipline, and expressed through fearless execution - without waiting for permission from culture, circumstance, or convention. What makes Iman especially rare is not just that she built a global business, but that she is now choosing to disrupt it from a position of strength. After returning from Harvard’s OPM and an elite mastermind, she came back wit...
Send us a text What happens when a founder steps away early and the next generation is handed responsibility without a roadmap? Jaber Abdul Wahab, Group CEO of the diversified Bridgeway Group, talks about leading a global family business not as a traditional second-generation heir, but as a “1.5-generation leader.” Founded in 1974 as a trading company, Bridgeway expanded across unrelated industries— logistics, education, real estate, automobile distribution, agriculture, and specialized medic...
Send us a text This episode opens with an unfiltered conversation about entrepreneurial burnout, mental health, and the deep loneliness of building companies—a place nearly every entrepreneur has found themselves at some point, even if few speak about it openly. Michael Jang Parker, founder and CEO of Illumen, shares how the relentless pressure of entrepreneurship pushed him into severe burnout and hospitalization, forcing him to confront a reality many founders quietly live with. Michael ref...
Send us a text One important question didn’t make it into the conversation: why do doctors have such bad handwriting? After hearing Ritika’s journey, the best explanation seems to be that when someone spends their life healing faces as a maxillofacial surgeon, building hospitals, raising a family, and leading thousands of people, perfect handwriting simply isn’t high on the priority list. In this episode of Beyond the Case, Ritika Khanna, an OPM participant at Harvard Business School and owne...
Send us a text Sam Patel, founder of Astra Culture & Looped shares that storytelling isn’t marketing fluff - it’s how people emotionally decide to buy. He is a Chicago-based MD/MBA who built and scaled multiple medical clinics (eventually reaching 12 locations) before shifting toward consulting and healthcare software. Patel traces his “builder” identity to his immigrant parents’ entrepreneurship and emphasizes that real learning comes from doing rather than books alone. He shares h...
Send us a text Born and educated in China, MiuMiu Miao's university major, computer science was assigned by the Chinese government, not chosen by her. By her second year, she realized it wasn’t her path, dropped out, and discovered her true calling through an internship in international trade. That decision set her on a journey to build Baobabtrees - a multi-million-dollar, cross-border supply chain business spanning Africa, Europe, and the Americas. MiuMiu Miao shares how she founded an end-...
Send us a text From powder to purpose: how one founder turned niche know-how and crisis moments into a durable company. Rafael “Rafa” Sierra, founder of EPSA Mexico, a specialist in automating powder handling for industries like food, chemicals, paint, and steel explains how EPSA launched during the 2008–10 downturn by offering alternative, budget-friendly automation options in an under-taught engineering niche. He shares early hiring struggles, how “human touch” and a clear purpose (improvi...
Send us a text What if you could hear, firsthand, from an international sportsperson about the emotional journey that follows a loss? Not loss as failure, but loss as a teacher: the kind that strips away ego, demands honesty, and forces you to confront your preparation, your mindset, and your emotional control. Hari Kiran has lived this cycle—on the badminton court, on global stages, and in the unforgiving world of regulated industries and entrepreneurship. As an international sportsman, Hari...
