From Middle School Dropout To Stanford MBA: The Incredible Journey Of Yegor Denisov-Blanch

For most, dropping out of grade school would be an insurmountable barrier to advancement in life. But since starting his own business shortly after dropping out at 14, Yegor Denisov-Blanch’s life has been a series of extraordinary adventures — of challenges overcome and milestones attained.

Though he never got a high school degree, he graduated in the top 1% of his class from a top-10 U.S. undergraduate business program. Though he had no math or English education, he scored in the 99th percentile on the Graduate Management Admission Test. And though he lacked a certain pedigree in his work experience, he used it to earn admission to six of the most elite business schools on the planet — leading to his current role, studying for an MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, having been awarded that school’s only merit-based scholarship.

Between all of that, Yegor Denisov-Blanch competed as a weightlifter in Olympic trials and national tournaments, traveled the globe, and was an eyewitness to history.

If you wrote his life as a screenplay, no one would believe it.

“I’m a middle school dropout who went six-for-six in MBA applications, including all three of H-S-W,” Yegor tells Poets&Quants, using shorthand for Harvard Business School, Stanford, and the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania — adding that while his job experience is “nothing extraordinary,” he wants his story to inspire others.

“It feels unbelievable to be in this situation. For years I thought I’d be extremely lucky to get admitted to even one top-15 business school.”

‘I WAS ASHAMED OF MY ACADEMIC BACKGROUND’

Don’t run from your story. Embrace it.

Yegor’s boiled-down advice for business school applicants makes sense when you look at his story, which helped earn him admission not only to Harvard, Stanford, and Wharton, but also three other top-10 programs.

It’s an incredible story — yet Yegor was once ashamed to tell it. The child of a Spanish mother and Russian father, growing up between Spain and Russia, he had a difficult upbringing, made more difficult by his mother’s illness when he was a teen.

“I dropped out of 8th grade to become a founder and be the sole breadwinner for my family after my mom’s cancer diagnosis,” he says. “I never finished middle nor high school, skipping five years of secondary education.

“I was very ashamed of my academic background until I applied to MBA programs and realized what a very big differentiator and interesting angle it proved to be.”

HUGE SUCCESS, AND TRAGEDY

At 14, forced to earn money to support his family, Yegor started a business in Spain in the B2B e-commerce space. His advantage: Internet commerce was still in its infancy in Spain, and over the next four years he was able to scale his business significantly.

He already had the makings of a great entrepreneur. His parents were against him dropping out, but in Spain “I had enough agency to drop out without there being repercussions.”

Eventually he started seeing significant income, and his parents were convinced. By the time he was 18, Yegor had scaled his business to around half a million dollars in revenue.

That year, tragically, his mother died. Suddenly the financial needs of his family eased, as government pensions and a small life insurance payout were enough to sustain the rest of his family.

START OF THE JOURNEY

Yegor had fallen in love with the power of entrepreneurship and how it had ripple effects on the community around him. But despite making significant money for his age, he realized that he had a lot to learn and wanted to study business at a university.

He had enough money to last through college. Now came a bigger challenge: getting in. How would he get admitted with no high school diploma?

It was clear that Yegor had to leave Spain. If he had stayed, he would’ve had to go to adult school for five years to make up for missing eighth through 12th grade. That meant he would not finish an undergraduate degree until he was 27 or 28.

Instead, he chose to get a GED. His plan was to move to the United States as an international student and attend a community college for a semester and transfer to a four-year university, at which point his lack of a high school diploma would not matter.

Securing an F1 student visa, he attended community college in Bloomington, Indiana, before transferring to Indiana University. After transferring, though, he still had to earn admission into the Kelley School’s undergrad program.

Starting community college, I was not sure if I would ever get good enough grades,” Yegor says. “After all, I had skipped five years of education.” Moreover, at the time he was training full-time as an athlete in Olympic weightlifting — up to 10 training sessions a week, and sometimes two-a-days.

His hard work was rewarded: He got straight-A’s in community college and aced admission tests to the Kelley School. He still had no idea how well he would do in B-school, and he lacked confidence — but here again his diligence and persistence paid off, and he eventually graduated in the top 1% of his class.

The lesson: “Put in the hard work and believe in yourself. Be disciplined, be focused.”

THE EPIPHANY

After graduation Yegor went to work for the international logistics company DHL, but failing to win an H-1B visa, he was offered to relocate to the company’s global headquarters in Germany. He spent five years there, rising to the position of strategy manager & chief of staff to DHL’s CEO for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

It was a productive five years, partly spent on the road in such places as Brazil and East Africa, and partly in Eastern Europe, particularly Ukraine and Belarus. “When I would go to Eastern Europe, I would see all these talented, hardworking people who were not able to realize their full potential. And the more I lived there, the more convinced I was that I would love to make an impact for people there.

“At DHL I was involved in many cool projects: Covid vaccine distribution, making an impact in East Africa, etc.,” he says. “But my heart yearned to try to address issues in a part of the world which I care about and where I’m very well positioned to make an impact: Eastern Europe. And the way I saw myself doing this is through developing the entrepreneurial sector there.”

Yegor points to the proliferation of tech talent in the region: software engineers and developers who “are talented and hardworking people with enormous potential.” “And I thought to myself, ‘What if we could empower some of that talent to make their own tech startups?’ Which would create jobs, stimulate the economy, and have all these positive ripple effects on the region. So I was like, ‘the way I can do this is by pivoting my career into entrepreneurship and early-stage investing through an MBA.’”

But he had doubts.

Next page: Yegor shares his strategies for gaining admission to six of the top-10 U.S. MBA programs.