Meet Yale SOM’s MBA Class of 2018

Viveca Morris

Yale School of Management

Describe yourself in 15 words or less: All-in for building a world that treats animals and humans with compassion and decency.

Hometown: Winston-Salem, NC

Fun Fact About Yourself: I know every song by the Irish band The Saw Doctors.

Undergraduate School and Major: Yale College ’15, Environmental Studies

Employers and Job Titles Since Graduation: First Round Capital, Partner Operations Manager

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I graduated from college a year ago, so I’m still at the start of my career. My biggest career accomplishment, and biggest joy is that with effort and some luck, I gained the privilege of working with some extraordinary individuals — people with immense energy and strategic creativity in pushing the envelope and creating what didn’t exist before in their respective fields, often combined with deep kindness and purpose.

Chris Fralic, the partner I worked for at First Round Capital, is one of these rock-star individuals. Josh Balk, co-founder of Hampton Creek Foods and Senior Director of Food Policy for the Humane Society of the U.S. (where, with another hero of mine, Paul Shapiro, he founded and leads an astonishingly successful effort to get dozens of the largest corporations in the world to improve animal welfare in their supply chains) is another. Working with these people has vastly expanded my sense of what is possible and what exceptional strategic leadership can achieve.

Looking back on your experience, what advice would you give to future business school applicants? Use the exercises of writing your essays and preparing for interviews as opportunities to clarify for yourself, as well as for others, what your personal values are, what you hope to accomplish in your career and how attending business school will advance you toward those goals. Spending the time – purposefully, thoughtfully – to define your ambitions, to define wealth for yourself, and to define the metrics that you will assess your success by, is empowering.

What led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA? I went to Yale as an undergrad and experienced the exceptional vitality, energy and creativity of the Yale community and grad schools. It’s an incredibly stimulating, exciting and diverse place, with vast resources, where there are few limits to what a person with initiative can discover and explore. It’s a great place to meet talented people and to ask: what can we create together? I also like Yale School of Management’s emphasis on the opportunity, and responsibility, for business to be used as a mechanism for social good.

Tell us about your dream job or dream employer at this point in your life? Today when our government seems increasingly gridlocked and impotent to act in the public interest, social entrepreneurs are inventing, developing and implementing innovative solutions to challenging problems to create wide-scale change. That is what I want to do; that’s my dream job.

I want to help create a humane economy, where human businesses and activities no longer rest on a foundation of animal cruelty as is the case in today’s factory farms, fishing industry, trapping, fur and whaling industries, and many other industries that destroy the natural world and abuse animals for profit when better alternatives are available.

Teddy Roosevelt said: “Far and away the best prize that life has to offer is the chance to work hard at work worth doing.” That’s the prize I seek. I intend to spend my career helping – in the most effective and strategic ways I can – to build a society and marketplace that rejects cruelty in favor of better, more humane and more environmentally sustainable alternatives. Two of the levers I intend to use to accomplish this are business and technology.

What would you like your business school peers to say about you after you graduate from this program? I’d like them to say, “Wow she’s making a big impact! And I hope she continues to do so because the work she’s doing really matters to me too.” In addition, I’d like the wealthy ones to add, “I’d love to fund/ invest in her organization or venture.” Lastly, I’d like them to say that I’m a good person – kind, spirited, focused on problems of great consequence, thinking big, capable of moving the ball forward in significant ways – and a good friend.