The Most Disruptive MBA Startups Of 2022

There are many ways to treat cancer. It can be heated or frozen, cut out or shrunk down – and sometimes just slowed. At Harvard Business School, Shardule Shah is taking a different approach:

“Starve it.”

That’s because many cancers, Shah says, use fats for sustenance. In response, Shah co-founded Lime Therapeutics, a technology designed to develop drugs that prevent cancer cells from feeding on fats. Already flush with $2.7 million dollars in funding, Lime Therapeutics’ model has also proven successful in early trials.

“Our lead drug led to a 50% increase in the lifespan of mice with non-small cell lung cancer and we are moving this drug toward human clinical trials in the next 18 months,” Shah tells Poets&Quants. “This drug has already been shown to be safe in 28,000 people in two clinical trials run by another pharma company.”

Shardule Shah, Harvard Business School

The venture began while Shah, who holds a Ph.D. in immunology, was pursuing his MBA. There, he met scientists from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center during an online event who shared his passion for producing “safe and effective” cancer treatments that reach the market faster. Since then, Lime Therapeutics has operated out of New York City, where Shah networked with venture capitalists, potential partners, and medical experts while taking advantage of the area’s business incentives. At the same time, he tapped into Harvard Business School’s vast resources to prepare him to build Lime Therapeutics.

“The HBS MBA program provided me with so much: a world-class business education; the ability to bounce ideas off professors and other life sciences practitioners in the Harvard community; a world-class student and alumni network full of depth and breadth; and continual inspiration by the people around me,” the ’22 grad adds. “The Harvard network is incredibly strong throughout [Boston and New York City], so I feel fortunate that I am currently able to take advantage of resources from two of the greatest startup ecosystems in the world.”

DO YOU WANT TO BE A SEA DOG…OR A PIRATE?

Lime Therapeutics is one of the 43 student startups honored in P&Q’s 4th annual “Most Disruptive MBA Startups.” This year, P&Q invited 42 business schools to submit nominations for ventures with “the greatest potential for lasting beyond business school.” They may include startups that have raked in substantive investment, created a unique business model, or earned recognition in competitions. This year, 34 MBA programs participated in “The Most Disruptive MBA Startups,” including Harvard Business School, Stanford Graduate School of Business, the Wharton School, INSEAD, Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and MIT’s Sloan School of Management. To qualify, a school nomination must feature at least one founding member from the Class of 2022.

In business school, students often wrestle with a universal question: Do I want to become a pirate or enlist in the Navy? A four-year hitch means safety and support – and you can move on with some valuable experience too. Still, it is hard to resist the allure of being Captain Jack Sparrow. Swift and light, pirates follow their entrepreneurial spirit –flying their Jolly Roger flag and making their own rules. And that requires a lot of work. At Washington University’s Olin Business School, Tova Feinberg conducted over 300 interviews – from farmers to restauranteurs – to hone their Vertigreens concept, a “scalable network of hydroponic farms targeting the b-to-b market.” Indeed, this year’s disruptive startups are hardly side hustles. Instead, these MBAs are busy identifying, testing, prototyping and bootstrapping. In the process, they are often making “hundreds of decisions in a given week,” in the words of Stanford grad Kimiloluwa Fafowora, whose Gander startup helps consumers connect with aligned brands. All the while, they must weather the hardest part of being a student entrepreneur: constant rejection.

“Every time an investor told me no, I would ask them for feedback,” explains Matt Shieh, a graduate of the University of Chicago’s Booth School who founded Canopy Aerospace. “This turned into dozens of data points that guided a lot of our early strategy.”

A NEW MARKET: SPACE

Matt Shieh, University of Chicago (Booth)

The best part of being an entrepreneur? To borrow another pirate analogy, you get to keep more of your loot. This year, 10 of the 43 MBA disruptive startups enjoy funding of $1 million dollars or more. Take HEC Paris’ Duplo. It helps Nigerian businesses to collect and make payments in a market that is largely cash-driven. Thus far, Duplo has attracted $5.6 million dollars in investment. By the same token, Stanford GSB’s Gander has collected $4.5 million dollars. Thus far, Chicago Booth’s Canopy Aerospace has generated $1.8 million dollars in pre-seed funding. The latter produces heat shields to protect space vehicles when they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Along with earning a spot in the Techstars LA Space Accelerator, Canopy Aerospace has also forged partnerships with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the United States Space Force. And Matt Shieh credits such success to MBA offerings like the New Venture Challenge (NVC).

“I was building the business case for this company during the school year and NVC helped me translate this into an opportunity for investors,” Shieh explains. “We knew there was a big problem in the industry and we had a solution for it. Pitching a startup manufacturer in a highly technical field is difficult. However, we were able to pitch in front of VCs from a variety of industries who provided candid feedback, which was critical to honing our story in with the right audience.”

Shieh isn’t alone in exploring the heavens. At the Wharton School, Michael Contreras founded Ensemble Space Labs, which has already raked in $1.1 million dollars in funding. Currently, there are over 3,400 active satellites orbiting the Earth, which are vulnerable to phenomena like solar flares. Such anomalies can disrupt everything from telecommunication to navigation systems and put lives in jeopardy. Contreras’ venture provides data that enables analysts to better forecast space weather and “mitigate” potential damage.

“Being a builder at heart, I was constantly looking for the right opportunity to make the pivot from being a services company to a technology company. Having NASA as a customer since 2018 allowed us to intimately understand its space weather data pain points.  Once we felt those pains firsthand while maintaining a NASA space weather web application, we felt confident that we could develop better technology for the growing number of space weather users.”

DISRUPTING RETAIL MODELS

MBA founders are restless souls, attuned to the unmet needs and building frustrations – be it in mental health, fashion, or education. In many cases, they are looking to revolutionize their spaces through cost, service, and convenience. Before joining ESADE, Ishan Talathi watched smaller businesses struggle to correctly scale their cloud services, often paying high costs that hurt their profitability. In response, he created CloudJiify, which upended the standard ‘pay-as-you-go model.

“CloudJiffy simplifies App Deployment on the cloud using Platform-as-a-Service containers, and disrupts expensive Pay-As-You-Go cloud with innovative consumption-based pricing,” Talahati explains. “CloudJiffy reduces DevOps time by 60% and reduces Cloud costs by 80% compared to Hyperscale clouds.”

Retail is another industry ripe for disruption – and the Class of 2022 didn’t disappoint here. Ground zero is INSEAD. Here, Spaciously likes to call itself the “Airbnb of retail.”  Founded by Hanna Kanabiajeuskaja and Laurent Baillot, Spaciously helps local creators to place pop-ups inside established brands like Kiehl’s and Lululemon. Thus far, the firm has been placing 15 pop-ups in shops per month. In contrast, SureBright targets the internet space. Founded by Manish Chauhan and backed by $2.5 million dollars in investment, SureBright supplies warranties and insurance to online merchants, where half of the transactions lack such protections.

“We take care of regulations, customer management, claims, and everything else related,” Chauhan explains. “At zero money and time cost, we can improve your net profits by 30%, average order size by 5%, and reduce loan default rates so that you sit back and see your earnings grow!”

Hannah Weber, University of California-Berkeley (Haas)

TACKLING WORLD-SCALE ISSUES

The Class of 2022 isn’t afraid to tackle the big issues, either. Case in point: HOPO Therapeutics, a biotech startup launched out of the University of California-Berkeley. Weber, a Haas MBA, is part of a team that is developing medicines to prevent lead poisoning, an often-overlooked affliction endured by a billion people worldwide (or comparable to Malaria or HIV). Across the pond, Ishaq Bolarinwa launched Anfani at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Targeting small and mid-sized business, Anfani acts as an energy broker by providing affordable renewable energy to overlooked businesses in Nigeria – home to Africa’s largest population and GDP. South of Oxford at the London Business School, Panos Kyrkopoulos and John Frangis are working to overhaul the UK’s child care system through Little Steps Financing. The firm’s mission hits close to home for Kyrkopoulos. With two toddlers at home, he notes that childcare ate up to £3,000 a month in his household budget. On top of that, he notes, UK childcare costs have skyrocketed, with fees rising eight times faster than income over the past 14 years. Now, Little Steps Financing is starting to make a difference. For one, it is partnering with one of London’s largest nursery chains. More recently, Little Steps Financing has been selected to join the FCA Innovation Sandbox, an incubator run by the British government.

“The firm uses its advanced technological capabilities in risk, operations, and finance to provide parents with interest-free (0%) financing tailored to cover childcare fees,” Kyrkopoulos adds. The firm’s financing solutions tackle the issues of childcare affordability in the UK and overseas that push parents (and especially mothers) out of work and deprive children from accessing high-quality early years education. Solving those issues, the company creates additional benefits for employers (high employee retention rates), the suffering childcare industry (high occupancy rates), and the government (growth in workforce, GDP, and wage tax bills).”

Environmental preservation is another popular issue for MBA entrepreneurs. At IESE Business School, you’ll find Ines Serra Baucells, whose passion is soil. She marvels over its beauty and history – and even collects samples. This passion has also led her to form BIOSORRA, a social enterprise that provides affordable and ecofriendly biofertilizer.

Dávid Pardavi (Left) and Nicole Rojas (Right), Stanford Graduate School of Business

“The biofertilizer increases crop yields by up to 150% for smallholder farmers in Kenya while removing 2,5x tons of carbon from the atmosphere for every 1 ton produced. This focus on sustainability enables BIOSORRA to sell carbon credits to companies to offset their CO2 emissions according to decarbonization objectives. Ultimately, this means BIOSORRA is able to both accelerate climate justice for underserved communities while alleviating food insecurity and poverty.”

TAPPING NEW MARKETS

At Stanford GSB, Nicole Rojas and Dávid Pardavi centered their efforts on reducing Methane emissions, which they say represents 42% of greenhouse emissions. How do you get cattle farmers to buy into reducing these emissions? That’s where Lasso comes into play. A software platform, which has drawn $1.4 million dollars in funding, Lasso enables farmers to track their performance and rewards them for reductions.

“Lasso automatically collects on-farm data, calculates carbon footprints, and monitors emissions across farms,” Rojas notes. “Lasso then generates reduction recommendations, aggregates emissions reduction project data for verification, and connects farmers or brands with emissions reduction funding (e.g., offsets, government incentives).”

Sometimes, disruptive startups target populations that can be overlooked. At Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, Mackenzie Loy opened The New Majority. She uses equity crowdfunding to support startups whose services deliver community impact. Along the way, Loy adds, these investments enable “historically marginalized and underrepresented communities to invest in each other.” After joining MIT’s Sloan School of Management, Megan Krishnamurthy and Hannah Rose Potter came upon an epiphany: a majority of Millennial women felt isolated and lonely professionally. In response, the duo started Something Brazen, where trained facilitators support 5-7 member support groups. And the response, to say the least, reflected the need.

“Within one week of launching our website to the public this past summer, we had 250+ women sign up for our paid pilot, which was held this fall in New York City,” Krishnamurthy explains. “It was amazing to see how much interest there was in our first product. We instantly knew that we were onto something.”

GIVING EVERYONE THE CAPABILITIES OF A DATA SCIENTIST

For many MBA disruptive startups, technology is the differentiator. The More Watter Co., a startup launched from the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, connects exercise data from devices like Fitbit with comparable data and resources to create customized fitness regimens. IE Business School’s Better Than Good also takes a personalized approach to preventive healthcare, adding a rewards system from wellness partners to engage and reward users. However, technology is truly the driver at Hue, a Harvard Business School startup. An AI platform catering to the beauty shopper, Hue was launched by three HBS women with executive experience at Google, L’Oreal, and Airbnb. Aside from successful track records in product development, marketing, and analytics, the trio also shared another similarity: none could find makeup products that matched their skin tones. Soon enough, they learned that three-fourths of women share the same struggle. In response, they created a community of beauty consumers, from all skin tones, to guide makeup choices.

(L-R) Janvi Shah, Sylvan Guo, Nicole Clay, Harvard Business School

“Hue’s technology matches shoppers to their Hue Twins™ –  a community of real people who share the same skin tone, skin type, purchase history or beauty preferences as you,” says co-founder Janvi Shah. “We directly integrate on beauty brands’ and retailers’ websites, so shoppers can browse authentic video and photo reviews from their recommended Hue Twins™ to get a clear view of how a product looks on real people like them.”

Sometimes, MBA founders just put a new spin on an old problem. How do you turn buying second-hand clothing into a satisfying experience? Check out Beni, a venture launched out of Northwestern University Kellogg School, which uses a browser extension to direct online users to resale outlets offering the same items. Want a yummy ice cream? Head to St. Louis for Ice Cream For Bears, a concoction from Washington University alum Tim Berg, which uses raw sugar to sweeten the mix. Let’s not forget TrovBase, the pride of Sam Jordan – a spring grad of New York University’s Stern School. She describes her solution as a data management platform that democratizes the collection, analysis, and management of data. In other words, it provides consumers with the capabilities of a data scientist. For academics, that reduces the potential for mistakes that can result in research being retracted – a major plus for a segment where 60% of its members lack formal data management training.

“We wanted to build a tool that acts as methodological insurance,” Jordan notes. “We take care of validation and give researchers the confidence that their data is accurate and that they are doing analysis like an expert data scientist.”

Page 3: In-depth profiles of 43 MBA founders.

Elizabeth Blankenship, University of Virginia (Darden)

RITES OF PASSAGE TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Where do these MBA founders come up with their ideas? Same as everyone else: daily experience – and the frustrations and hopes that come with it. For Janice Tam, it started with a new hobby born out of pandemic isolation. She picked up sewing and alterations, quickly learning that clothing isn’t designed for specific body types, including petites. Soon enough, she found a partner who shared her hobby, a former Apple sensing technologist, Together , they vowed to create custom dresses using a mobile device to conduct body scans. The result was TrueToForm.

“As we began talking to apparel designers, pattern makers, and brands, we saw that the fashion industry was undergoing a massive digital transformation in the wake of the pandemic,” explains the University of Chicago grad. “Seeing that the future of fashion was digital, we recognized that our technology could enable a much more powerful solution than the physical dress form. This inspired us with the vision of what TrueToForm is today – a 3D avatar solution that enables designers to construct and fit garments using a fully virtual representation of the body.”

Elizabeth Blankenship endured a baptism by fire – almost literally – on her way to becoming an entrepreneur. A fashion designer and brand developer, Blankenship was pulled out of a Los Angeles dye house after a chemical spill – one so toxic that it required a Hazmat suit to re-enter. For her, the event was a “wake-up call” on textile waste. The event was a catalyst to launching By Eilly at the University of Virginia’s Darden School – a venture that uses leftover fabrics from luxury brands to make clothing.

“We just surpassed 180 yards of fabric saved from landfills this year which, by our best calculations, stopped ~4,203 pounds of carbon from entering the atmosphere,” Blankenship tells P&Q. Those tangible environmental metrics are what excites me and keeps me going, way more so than any MRR {Monthly Recurring Revenue] or ARR [Annual Recurring Revenue] figures.”

BUILDING TEAMS AND MAKING MONEY

Bryan Dinner’s startup – Clarifi – is an expression of his personal struggles. Growing up, he was diagnosed with ADHD, which required personal coaching. When COVID hit and Dinner began studying from home, he fell back into his unproductive ways. At the same time, his situation sparked an idea, which the Wharton School grad describes as “a distraction-free digital workspace with automated coaching tools.”

“As a first year in the JD/MBA program, the pandemic caused my productivity to nose-dive when all of my work moved online to my distraction-filled computer, Dinner admits. “I reached out to Bradley, a friend from college, to build a solution for me that would digitize my coping strategies and make digital school work easier. When Bradley’s digital attention coach helped me through Penn’s difficult JD/MBA program, it was clear that we had software that could help more students, like my teenage self, who have had so much of their schoolwork moved online.”

Matthew White, MIT (Sloan)

Not surprisingly, this year’s class has racked up a variety of achievements in business school. Rob Miller, a graduate of Carnegie Mellon’s Tepper School, takes pride in successfully piloting his ByMe grab-and-go rice bowls – beating sales targets on a lean budget in the process. Harvard’s Hue has set up partnerships with two of the biggest names in beauty: Credo Beauty and Lawless Beauty. And MIT Sloan’s Multitude Insights may have overcome the biggest hurdle to starting a business: hiring a talented and reliable team.

“My co-founder and I spent a lot of time finding engineers who had the right balance of engineer skills, mission orientation, and dedication to the product,” explains Matthew White, whose venture provides a data-sharing tool to law enforcement. “Once the team was in place, we worked extremely hard alongside our police partners, testing which capabilities and features needed to be in place for BLTN to “just work.” We’ve learned a lot along the way (pivots, employee movements, etc.), but I feel like our team has done an amazing job during this process.”

Still, it never hurts to hear positive feedback. Shanna Traphoner-Liu co-founded bekome to support individuals suffering from anxiety. Supplying an integrative mix of coaching, health regimens, education, and peer support, Traphoner-Liu has heard clients tell her that bekome has helped them “finally know what ‘better’ feels like.” As affirming as such statements may feel to founders, Emily Smith has enjoyed the ultimate validation in 2022.

“NUFYX® is a profitable startup that has surpassed $500,000 in gross revenue without raising any outside capital,” says the graduate of UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. “It has become the #1 best-selling protein powder at Erewhon Market, the nation’s most premium grocery chain, and will be distributed nationwide in 2023 with UNFI, the largest natural foods distributor in North America owned by Amazon.”

SUPPORT FROM THEIR BUSINESS SCHOOLS

An entrepreneurial mindset may be hard-wired at birth, but honing entrepreneurial skills require intensive training. That’s exactly what Mejoy Lawson got at the University of Michigan’s Ross School. That started at the Zell Lurie Institute, which provided Lawson with deep resources, ongoing coaching, and hands-on programming that helped him launch Comme Homme, a platform catering to bald men. Lawson, along with his partner Kene Onuorah, also competed in the Michigan Business Challenge. Not only did the competition force him to take a deep dive into their proposition, it also yielded over $100,000 in prize money to nourish their venture. Lawson even took a spin on the other side of the table, serving as managing director of the Zell Lurie Commercialization Fund.

“My MBA experience at Michigan Ross and U-M provided me with the leadership and organizational skills needed to succeed through coursework and experiential learning opportunities,” Lawson says. “Also, it provided resources to help build, shape and structure the idea of Comme Homme into a fully functioning and scalable business venture.”

Janice Tam, University of Chicago (Booth)

Janice Tam was equally bullish about her time at the University of Chicago’s Booth School. The TrueToForm founder’s entrepreneurial journey began even before classes started. She took advantage of Booth’s Startup Summer Internship program, where she mastered product design and agile development at a SaaS startup. This experience led her to accept a venture capital internship, where she worked lead diligence on two deals. On campus, Tan completed a variety of startup-themed courses, such as Entrepreneurial Selling and New Venture Strategy, to pave the way for launching for venture. And that doesn’t count the lavish resources available through Booth’s acclaimed Polsky Center.

“I worked closely with the Innovation Clinic to build out my equity incentive plan and with the Corporate Lab Clinic to refine our privacy policies and data protection strategy,” Tan reminisces. “I leveraged the Polsky I-Corps program to accelerate our customer discovery efforts and launched our beta while participating in the Polsky Build Accelerator. We used the accelerator Demo Day to kick off our first fundraising round and successfully closed $260,000 in external capital from industry veterans in fashion and entertainment.”

UCLA’s Anderson School even went above and beyond for Emily Smith. Not only did the Anderson Accelerator team sharpen her pitch deck, but help her land a spot on Rob Dyrdek‘s podcast. The school’s alumni and friends were equally happy to help Smith.

“Someone with five years of nationwide food sales was one Slack message away from an hour walk-and-coffee chat along Ocean Avenue – being in such close proximity to a diverse pool of knowledge was an invaluable asset.”

OPENNESS SAVES STARTUP

While entrepreneurs are action-oriented, they gained plenty from MBA coursework. In her Entrepreneurial Thinking course at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School, Elena Nikvashvili was exposed to what makes founders tick – and how she could develop the grit needed to bring Future Farmers to life.

Mejoy Lawson, University of Michigan (Ross)

“The biggest lesson I learned was that entrepreneurs are not risk-takers, but instead smart about risk-taking. Whenever anyone thinks of an entrepreneur, they think of a person who was tired at their corporate job, quit, and started their own company. This is not what most entrepreneurs are like. Most start their venture while in school or working a full-time job to maintain stability. They test and retest, they measure 100 times, and then they make the leap. This lesson gave me the courage to pursue my own entrepreneurial journey at Tuck.”

That’s just one of the unforgettable lessons absorbed by the Class of 2022. In his Financial Accounting course at Ross, Mejoy Lawson learned how every decision must factor in its impact on a financial statement. For Stanford’s Nicole Rojas, the big takeaway was the concept of a minimum lovable product – “understanding what your customer will need and pay for before developing a fully-functioning product.” For Sanoma Jean, the Entrepreneurship Project (EP) at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School came with a dose of humility. A few months before starting her MBA, Jean was busy conceptualizing her startup, Aya. Before it became a patient management platform for mental health providers, Aya’s model favored the business-to-consumer niche. After discussions with her EP team, Jean chose to backpedal and take advantage of their expertise.

“We ended up pivoting from B2C to B2B, targeting providers rather than patients,” she admits. “This was a huge lesson, as I felt ownership and responsibility for my original idea as I had been ruminating about it for so long. But when we began to map the landscape and really plan our strategy, the pivot made complete sense. This was my first dose of not letting my pride or ego stand in the way of what was a smart business decision. Just because I had the original idea doesn’t mean that this whole venture is owned solely by me, or that I deserve any more say than my co-founder, who has been there since the beginning. The best strategy is one that can be executed.”

GETTING AN EDGE IN THE LOCAL STARTUP ECOSYSTEM

Along with classmates, faculty also made a difference for MBA entrepreneurs. At the Darden School, Elizabeth Blankenship says Damon DeVito tracked her down before she’d even taken his Venture Velocity course. And it wasn’t by accident. In DeVito’s case, he wanted to know if Blankenship possessed the toughness to be an entrepreneur.

Hanna Kanabiajeuskaja (L) and Laurent Baillot (R), INSEAD

“In our first meeting, he challenged me to do the hardest thing first: call up the luxury brands and ask them to give me their fabrics,” she recalls. “He does this often for two reasons: he wanted to weed out the ‘wannabes’ from the real deal entrepreneurs, and to get people to find out at the beginning whether their idea will work. If the brands said no, my venture idea was toast and I would need another one. If they said yes, then the hardest part was behind me.”

Alas, business school is only part of education. For many disruptive startups, growth is predicated on the surrounding business ecosystem. INSEAD is an hour-long ride to Paris and Station F – Europe’s largest incubator and home to INSEAD’s Launchpad for student entrepreneurs. Spaciously’s Hanna Kanabiajeuskaja loves how she can be surrounded by people wired like herself there – along with having access to potential investors. In Chicago, Janice Tam was able to partner with a local fashion college, whose students produced a window exhibit that appeared along the city’s famed Miracle Mile. True to form, an immersion into Silicon Valley culture hammered home a bedrock fundamental to Gander’s Kimiloluwa Fafowora: Your network is your net worth.

“Stanford GSB introduced me to a series of networks that have consistently fast-tracked our company,” she tells P&Q. For example, through the GSB, I became a partner at Dorm Room Fund – the first student-run venture fund. After working with that team for about a year, their CEO, Molly Fowler introduced me to a VC who ended up co-leading our seed round. Our other co-lead was introduced to me by a fellow classmate, Sydney Sykes (partner at Lightspeed VC & co-founder of BlackVC). Had it not been for Molly, Sydney, DRF, and the GSB, it’s unclear whether we’d have the same success we have today.”

Page 3: In-depth profiles of 43 MBA founders.

THE BEST ADVICE OF ALL

Alas, you don’t have to lay siege to Sand Hill Road or Kendall Square to be a real entrepreneur.  Just ask Babson College’s Connor Harbison. In business school, he founded Atlas Urban Farms, which uses vertical farms to provide fresher produce to chefs. He doesn’t take his inspiration from Steve Jobs or Nikola Tesla. Instead, he looks back on the entrepreneurs he worked alongside in rural Montana. That’s because they practiced the unadorned fundamentals that enable businesses to thrive wherever they’re found.

“I think most people assume that a startup has to be a mobile app, has to raise venture capital, and has to be based in Silicon Valley,” Harbison observes. “I worked with some of the scrappiest, most resourceful, and most dedicated founders during my time in the Rocky Mountains. They showed me that entrepreneurship isn’t about shiny slide decks or raising capital; what it’s really about is solving a problem, building a sustainable solution, and most importantly being able to adapt when things don’t work out the way you’d planned.”

When it comes to advice for future MBA entrepreneurs, you’d be hard-pressed to top this nugget from Anna Shuford, who graduated this spring from the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. Here, she started BOOMROOM, which helps fitness professionals build their brands and client bases. With fitness centers shutting down during COVID, Shuford identified an opportunity for a group to strike out to the unexplored deep end and hoist their pirate flag. That means taking a leap of faith in themselves – their vision, values, and vigor – undeterred by risks, rejections, and recriminations. Or, in the words of Shuford…

“If something scares the hell out of you, do it.”

2022 MOST DISRUPTIVE MBA STARTUPS

DON’T MISS:

THE MOST DISRUPTIVE MBA STARTUPS OF 2021

THE MOST DISRUPTIVE BUSINESS SCHOOL STARTUPS OF 2022

The post The Most Disruptive MBA Startups Of 2022 appeared first on Poets&Quants.