Beyond the Case

Send us Fan Mail Tiz Gambacorta shares his journey from investment banking and institutional fund management into entrepreneurship and later venture investing. He explains why he left a stable finance career in search of greater fulfillment, built a financial media/distribution platform, and eventually transitioned from operator to investor as the business matured. Tiz discusses how he thinks abou...

Send us Fan Mail This episode centers less on business success and more on legacy, urgency, and documenting life lessons for the next generation . Rusty Russell shares his journey from growing up on a farm in rural Australia, leaving school early, becoming a diesel mechanic, traveling and working across the world, and eventually building Double R from a one-man service truck into a multi-location...

Send us Fan Mail Being a woman raised in a traditional family, married young, without completing college or having any work experience and then stepping in to lead a 96-year-old legacy business in the male-dominated shipping industry is an extraordinary challenge. Layer onto that the responsibilities of motherhood, running a household, and eventually navigating succession without a clear heir, and...

Send us Fan Mail Vivek Bhargava's philosophy is that the best entrepreneurial life is built on integrity, optimism, learning, and continuous stretching with happiness as the foundation, not the reward. Vivek is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and author of Happiness is a Muscle . He reflects on his journey from joining his family’s business to building Communicate2, one of India’s leading di...

Send us Fan Mail Sucharita Basu , Managing Partner of Aquilaw , speaks about how leadership systems, KPIs, and lessons from the Harvard Business School OPM program helped her scale a modern law firm from two founders to around 150 professionals across multiple cities. After nearly two decades in practice, Sucharita and her husband Sanjay launched Aquilaw to fill a gap in the market - a modern, mid...

Send us Fan Mail One of the strongest realizations from this conversation is the importance of a family constitution in sustaining a multi-generational business . Many family companies assume alignment will naturally exist because of shared blood and history, but Fernando’s experience shows the opposite—alignment has to be designed intentionally . Their family constitution acts as a living documen...

Send us Fan Mail Daf Dubbelman is a real estate entrepreneur, endurance athlete, and Harvard Business School OPM participant who is completing the program for the second time. Daf shares the mindset that drives both his athletic and business pursuits: start before you feel ready, challenge conventional limits, and always ask, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Through stories of running marathons...

Send us Fan Mail Ankit Gupta, second-generation entrepreneur and leader of the Holistic Group , shares how business coaching played a critical role in sharpening his leadership, focus, and decision-making. While formal learning through Harvard Business School’s OPM strengthened his strategic thinking, Ankit credits business coach Rahul Jain for helping translate global frameworks, especially the P...

Send us Fan Mail Devendra Surana describes his shift from founder-operator to builder of an enduring organization. Early failures (first 2–3 years) forced humility, sharper strategy, and resilience. Over time he leaned into what he’s best at - new product development, expansion planning, and “resource mapping” - and deliberately offloaded daily operations (production/dispatch/collections) to profe...

Send us Fan Mail It’s rare to attend Harvard Business School as a student and even rarer to later become the subject of two HBS case studies. Billy Jaime did both. While enrolled in the Owner/President Management (OPM) program, his work building MIA, a for-profit social enterprise delivering affordable housing at scale stood out so strongly that renowned HBS professor Linda Applegate wrote two cas...

Send us Fan Mail With nearly three decades of entrepreneurial leadership, deep OPM roots, and the humility of a lifelong learner, Daniel Silva brings a rare blend of technical rigor, family-business insight, and reflective wisdom to this conversation. As the co-founder of DMS International , Daniel shares lessons from building and scaling a 29-year family business alongside his wife. Trained as a...

Send us Fan Mail Felix Kues is a serial entrepreneur, deep-tech investor, and Harvard Business School OPM participant. Felix shares his journey from building AI software companies across multiple continents to founding a highly automated venture fund and later launching an AI platform for investors during OPM. He reflects on how global exposure shaped his leadership, the loneliness of entrepreneur...

Send us Fan Mail Sudhakar Kadavasal, a second-generation entrepreneur from Chennai has built and led businesses across IT services, logistics, chemicals, construction, and energy, with operations in India and Dubai. Sudhakar shares how his father’s early entrepreneurial leap created a foundation that enabled him to take bold risks, including returning to India in 1997 and later starting afresh in...

Send us Fan Mail What began as a $2,000 experiment at age 13 has grown into one of Brazil’s most influential independent platforms, bootstrapped to over $40M in cumulative revenue, 800,000+ paying subscribers, and 30M annual viewers. This conversation goes beyond the mechanics of building a media company. It explores how belief systems, values, and shared identity can become a lasting competitive...

Send us Fan Mail This conversation is a powerful reminder that entrepreneurs must consciously evolve from being hands-on operators to becoming true leaders. In the early stages, control feels necessary. Every decision, review, and execution flows through the founder. But scale, sustainability, and sanity only come when the entrepreneur shifts focus to building systems, senior leadership, culture,...

Send us Fan Mail Third-generation entrepreneurship isn’t about inheriting a business. It’s about inheriting a promise and upgrading it for the next era. In this episode, Portuguese pharmacist and OPM 67 participant Antonio Liberal shares how his family’s retail pharmacy business founded by his grandfather in 1942, survived loss, regulation, and economic shocks, and still found ways to grow. After...

Send us Fan Mail Build adjacencies before you chase scale. Enduring companies don’t grow by random diversification. They expand by moving one thoughtful step outward from their core DNA, solving the next customer pain that naturally sits beside what they already do well. Abhijit Vaish’s journey with InstaPower is a story of patient, adjacency-led growth rooted in engineering depth. From early expo...

Send us Fan Mail He sold his company to OpenAI last month and the story behind it is a masterclass in patient entrepreneurship, long-term bets, and knowing when to start. Tomasz Kulakowski didn’t start his entrepreneurial journey fresh out of college. He started after losing a job, being told he was “overqualified,” and asking himself a simple but dangerous question: If I’m overqualified to join,...

Send us Fan Mail Vinay Pasricha shares his unfiltered and potentially controversial observations from 25 years as a serial entrepreneur in India. He ran an education training company that scaled to 200,000 students across 40 cities before winding it down. Five years ago, he pivoted to AI, building talent acquisition automation that reduced recruitment time from 6 weeks to 24 hours and costs from ₹...

Send us Fan Mail Elite endurance fitness demands structure, early mornings, repetition, and the ability to keep going when your brain wants to stop. Mohamed Mahlab uses that same “choose the hard thing” mindset to challenge himself as a leader: he sets public commitments, builds disciplined routines, and carries responsibility for thousands of livelihoods.  Starting sport at 38 - overweight, out o...

Send us Fan Mail This talk is really about rewiring what “success” means. From chasing validation, money, and outcomes to building with reflection, detachment, discipline, and community, while protecting your inner life (mental health, spirituality, relationships, and creative practice). Somdutta Singh shares how she broke away from a “doctors and scholars” family expectation to pursue entrepreneu...

Send us Fan Mail How do you go about scaling in an unorganized industry that’s mid-disruption—while commodity prices swing wildly and brand “differences” can feel paper-thin? You stop trying to sell a product and start engineering trust, systems, and culture that compound over decades. Akshay Verma is a third-generation leader of Verma Jewelers in Himachal Pradesh, India, about modernizing a legac...

Send us Fan Mail Restaurants don’t win on food alone, they win on feel . Radu Dumitrescu, founder & CEO of Stadio Hospitality Concepts , lays out a leadership philosophy built on culture, principles, and a relentless focus on the guest experience. A lifelong entrepreneur who started his first business at 18 and later sold a major printing operation, he entered hospitality almost accidentally....

Send us Fan Mail From a $1B market-cap market darling to a wipeout , this conversation traces how Pujit Aggarwal - former MD & CEO of Orbit Corporation , a Mumbai-based luxury real estate developer that went public via an IPO - thinks about ambition, decision-making, and rebuilding after a steep reversal. Orbit, once a listed company, was ordered to be wound up by the Bombay High Court in Apri...

Send us Fan Mail If you had to write your obituary today, what would you want it to say - how many lives you lifted, or how perfectly you avoided failure? Rajan Shah’s story argues that the legacy worth leaving demands risk, learning, and the courage to fail early because resilience, impact, and integrity are built in the messy middle, not in a spotless record. Rajan Shah, founder and CEO of Capwe...