My Story: From NASA To Stanford

In undergrad, your grades really do matter, so I invested a lot of time in getting decent grades. That’s the only way I got into Stanford, right? Ironically, though, grades at the GSB are not that important. Like at many other top business schools, there’s a grade non-disclosure policy. It was a nice transition, because now, we have time to focus on getting what we want out of this experience—which, in my case, isn’t necessarily classes or grades.

That’s not to say we’re not challenged academically. Many students, myself included, take classes in the computer science department or in the engineering department in general. Even within the GSB, a lot of classes are very hands-on: There are classes where you have to prepare a presentation for four to six hours and talk with five potential customers. But still, there are some classes where you just have to read a case before class. Your workload completely depends on the quarter.

The focus of the GSB is preparing students to change the world. This idea is on the cornerstone of the new Knight Management Center. It’s ingrained in the culture, in the tradition. One tradition is a weekly event called Talk, where one to two classmates share what’s most important to them with the entire class. We all cram into the MBA lounge, and it’s dead silent: We just listen to our classmates share their life stories in this personal, intimate environment. The students here are phenomenal—the most motivated, high-achieving, intelligent people who most of us have ever worked with or been in contact with. It’s phenomenal to listen to them talk about what makes them tick.

Day-to-day at Stanford is very, very busy, but not in the traditional sense of meetings and presentations. It’s busy with a lot of networking. My day-to-day is primarily focused on getting to know my classmates as well as I possibly can. Every day, I have coffee with one to two classmates. That’s an investment that you can choose to make—you don’t have to—but I’m very happy with that choice.

It helps that the GSB has a really collaborative, entrepreneurial environment. The class is very small, and people are willing to go out of their way to help each other in the most amazing ways. I’ve focused on embracing the culture here, and I’ve been involved with a lot of projects. I’ve worked with a dozen classmates on different projects, and it’s been wonderful simultaneously learning with them and building something. Some of them have turned into companies in the past year-and-a-half.

My current venture is Airborne Analytics. There are four of us working on the company at the moment: three Stanford graduate school engineers and myself. We’re using unmanned aerial vehicles—drones—to inspect construction sites. From our images, you’d be able to extract things like cracks and surface defects on the exterior of buildings and bridges.

Being at the GSB has been very eye-opening, and I recognize that I have interests in many different areas. I’m always going to be very passionate about space technologies and the space industry, and eventually, I will go back. But for the time being, I would love to explore a bit more.

I’m still trying to figure out what I want to do and which industry I want to pursue when I graduate. It’s recruiting season right now, so you see a lot of people running around with suits and ties, but I’m not planning to recruit. My plan is to either start a company when I graduate or to join a very small company. I see myself staying in the startup realm, going from startup to startup every few years or whatever it might end up being.

I got an amazing piece of advice from one of my best friends at the GSB. He said, “Do something meaningful”—meaning, don’t get sidetracked by the fact that there are so many opportunities out here in the Valley. There are so many things you could put your time and energy into, but a lot of them don’t offer the potential of a better world to a lot of people.

Wherever I go, I’m always going to be plugged into the technology aspect of the company, at least in the immediate future. I would love to lead a team and work very closely together on a technology project. To the extent that I can maintain the sort of environment where I’m working with a bunch of really smart people on a day-to-day basis—I love that.

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