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MBA Voices
MBA Voices
I’ve always admired my mom’s courage and was amazed when I discovered she was one of twenty-eight women out of 800 in Harvard Business School’s Class of 1972. During her tenure, they didn’t even have a designated women’s restroom in Aldrich. While the experience was one of the hardest in her life in a white-male dominated institution, the struggle was worth it. [...]
“Good morning!” welcomed Lillian Lincoln Lambert (MBA 1969) in her address to the African American Student Union’s (AASU) 48th Annual H. Naylor Fitzhugh Conference on February 27, 2021. The conference was the central day in Elevate: Uplifting Black Leadership for an Equitable Future, the three-day virtual event that included the Black New Venture Competition and Black Tech Masters Series.
Lambert went on to recall Fitzhugh’s mentorship during her undergraduate years at Howard University; he encouraged her to apply, attend, and remain at Harvard Business School (HBS) as the first Black woman student (and co-founder of AASU). Those lonely, rigorous two years, she said, were worth it to see the many Black graduates who followed her and her five Black classmates. [...]
Since graduation, I have spent a lot of time in the entrepreneurial space! Currently, I am the CFO at Pilot.com, a $1.2Bn Series C FinTech startup backed by Sequoia Capital, Index Ventures, Stripe, and Bezos Expeditions. Pilot builds advanced automation technology to streamline accounting, tax, and analytics for startups and small businesses. [...]
In April of 2020, Sarika Mendu (MBA ‘20) and Amina Mohamed (MBA ‘20) watched their EC year turn upside down due to a sudden global lockdown and saw an opportunity for MBA students to get involved and help small businesses stay afloat in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The soon-to-be graduates recognized that many struggling organizations could benefit from those with MBA skills -- marketing, finance, strategy, etc. -- to navigate unprecedented challenges. As they spoke to friends about this, they found hundreds of MBA students eager to help, but who didn’t know where to begin. Seizing this opportunity, they founded “MBAs Fight COVID”, an initiative that matched HBS students with business owners seeking help. [...]
When I started at HBS in the fall of 2020, I had one goal in mind: to challenge myself. I previously worked in communications at Cloudflare, a security, performance and reliability company founded in 2009 by two HBS alumni. Cloudflare had started as an idea on the back of a napkin during a school trip, so I knew that HBS was a place where entrepreneurship thrived. [...]
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The views and opinions expressed in the MBA Voices blog are those of the authors.
Any political views shared by students are their own; HBS does not endorse a
particular party or candidate.