Beyond the Case

Send us Fan Mail 47 litigations. That’s how deep the hole got after Geetanjali “Gee” AlamShah’s airline bet went sideways and it’s also the most hopeful part of this conversation: she climbed out. Not by pretending it didn’t hurt, but by getting disciplined, getting help, staying intentional, and refusing to lose hope. Gee is a first-generation entrepreneur who scaled a travel business, then made...

Send us Fan Mail Imagine waking up every day knowing your job is to suffer on purpose because that’s the price of building something that can dominate a category . Brad Cowdrey (OPM 49) explains why startups aren’t glamorous, why GenAI changes what “coding” even means, and how his company eveoy aims to let brands “fill stores with people” on demand. Brad describes himself as a deeply hands-on ange...

Send us Fan Mail K. Sudarshan is a veteran executive search leader and Managing Partner at EMA Partners across India, Singapore, and the UAE. Sudarshan shares his journey from an accidental recruiter to building and listing one of India’s largest executive search firms. Drawing from 25+ years of experience working with founders, boards, and CEOs, he offers deep insights into leadership, talent dec...

Send us Fan Mail Alejandro Diez Barroso explains how bootstrapping two early e-commerce businesses in Mexico taught him the real constraint in many markets: access to growth capital. He sold not because he wanted to, but because scaling required funding and institutional readiness. That experience shaped DILA ’s mission of investing across the Spanish-speaking world and helping founders build vent...

Send us Fan Mail If your business outlives you, have you clearly written what you want it to mean and how decisions should be made when you’re no longer there to make them? For business owners, Trusts are powerful tools, but their effectiveness often hinges on one document that gets far less attention: the Letter of Wishes . Juan Carlos Almanza emphasizes that many successful entrepreneurs approac...

Send us Fan Mail This conversation is less about legal theory and more about the emotional weight of being a lawyer. Through Felipe Barreto Veiga’s story, we see a profession defined by responsibility, sacrifice, and quiet loyalty. Being a lawyer, in his telling, means carrying the client’s anxiety as your own, standing beside them in moments of uncertainty, and showing up fully even when it costs...

Send us Fan Mail A single sentence from his mother " If you go to the US, you may never come back… and it may be too late” rerouted Pramod Maheshwari’s life. In that moment, ambition met responsibility. He stayed back in Kota, not with a grand plan, but with a quiet resolve to honor relationships and make his choice worth it . What followed is a story of turning uncertainty into purpose and a...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 fo...

Send us Fan Mail 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 men...

Send us Fan Mail 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 tha...

Send us Fan Mail 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 pa...

Send us Fan Mail “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 reward...

Send us Fan Mail “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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 developm...

Send us Fan Mail “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 th...

Send us Fan Mail 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 ver...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 indus...

Send us Fan Mail 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 burnou...

Send us Fan Mail 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 th...

Send us Fan Mail 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’ entreprene...