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

BACK TO SCHOOL

“I thought to myself, ‘How am I supposed to take the GMAT? I don’t have any high school math knowledge.’” He had a strong undergrad degree from Indiana Kelley, but he had concerns about his post-graduate employment.

“It wasn’t Goldman Sachs, it wasn’t McKinsey, and I thought at the time it wasn’t good enough. Now I really see the value in having this diversity of experience. I bring a different viewpoint to class discussions.”

He also knew, as well as anyone, the value of hard work. And it was hard work, as anyone who has taken the GMAT knows. But the work paid off, and Yegor scored a 750 on his first and only try.

Still, his confidence in getting into the top schools was low. “There’s a reason why I applied to six schools: Because I really wasn’t that confident that I would get into one of them.”

Once more, he excelled by buckling down and doing the hard work.

“As I looked back toward the moments where I have been successful in life, I realized that all of them were preceded by periods of very hard and laser-focused work,” he says. “I sought not to re-invent the wheel and approach studying for the GMAT with the same laser-focus that I had when I started my first business, when I was training to compete in the Olympic trials, and throughout my undergrad studies.”

It all boiled down to putting in not just hours, but quality hours, he says.

“It was hard to do while combining it with working full time, but through careful time management and building on the grit I had developed from my life experiences, I was able to push through,” Yegor says.

“It was not an enjoyable experience, but it was so worth it – pursuing an MBA has already paid dividends in countless ways and given me access to opportunities which were previously not available for someone with my background.”

ESSAYS ‘ALLOWED ME TO EXPRESS ALL THESE UNIQUE ELEMENTS ABOUT MY LIFE, BOTH GOOD AND BAD’

The application essays were where Yegor really set himself apart. He was particularly proud of the ones he wrote for Harvard and Stanford.

“They allowed me to express all these unique elements about my life, all of my life story — the starting a business at age 14, all my life experiences and how they flow and intertwine and lead me to here.” Meanwhile, his work experience was not the weakness he had thought it might be. “For all schools, I think the chief of staff role in logistics was really attractive because of Covid and vaccines and how that impacted the logistics sector. We delivered billions of vaccines and truly made a positive impact on the world at a macro level.”

What he realized when writing his essays was that you need to be true to yourself.

“I wrote down every moment in my life where I had to make a tough choice and realized that there were a few threads that drove all the major decisions in my life,” Yegor says.

“The MBA application process was very introspective, and it helped me set a true north for my career and broader life. I was always being guided by this true north, but writing it out in an essay allowed me to pinpoint it and become aware of it.”

The process was very intense, and it was important to pace himself. “Know when to sprint, and when to relax,” he advises. “I was meticulous about when every interview was scheduled to allow me enough time to prepare.

“I put my heart and soul into the process. Once interviews were over, I had nothing left to give – I had given it absolutely everything. That was an important feeling for me, I didn’t want to feel like I could’ve done something more.”

Once he was admitted, he knew the choice was between Harvard and Stanford. He visited both, was impressed by both, but chose Stanford partly based on the experience of talking with other admitted students and partly because he was granted a BOLD fellowship, the only GSB-specific merit-based scholarship offered at Stanford University. He enrolled in fall 2022 and will graduate with the MBA Class of 2024. He also valued Stanford’s focus on soft skills growth, vulnerability, and genuineness, and the GSB’s strength in entrepreneurship programming.

THE DISCIPLINE OF WEIGHTLIFTING

Part of Yegor’s success is due to what he calls his determination — from a dogged temperament and refusal to fail. And part comes from his experience as an Olympic-level weightlifter.

Yegor started dabbling with lifting weights when he was a pre-teen. As his body grew, so did his dedication to the sport. He set a few under-17 records in Spain, but really made his mark in 2013 when he became Master of Sport of Russia in Olympic weightlifting, equivalent to a national champion. He would continue to compete through college at Indiana, lifting in various competitions, including qualifying events for the world championship and Olympics.

After graduation, Yegor transitioned to powerlifting, in which he unofficially fulfilled the requirements of Master of Sport of Russia, International Class — the equivalent to an international champion. “I was never able to get the ‘prize’ for this because I had given up my Russian passport by then,” he says.

But he benefited, and continues to benefit, immeasurably from the sport.

“A lot of what going to school creates in a child is habits: setting a schedule, being accountable, consistent,” he says. “I was lacking all of this. I was a 14-year-old entrepreneur who couldn’t pick up the phone because I spoke with a teenager’s voice, so I couldn’t talk to customers nor meet them in person. It was chaotic. But through weightlifting, I had built a lot of the same discipline that school gives you. So that’s a big benefit from it: discipline, grit, learning how to fail, and learning how to persevere no matter what.”

He’s retired from Olympic weightlifting. But his 5-foot, 10-inch, 230-pound frame betrays his prowess — and he can still lift the equivalent of three people his size.

“Nowadays I mostly do strength workouts,” he says. “I could probably bench 400 pounds, probably squat lift 650 pounds or so. It’s good. I mean, it’s not elite level, but good. I hope to continue lifting weights until after I retire.”

THE KIND OF MENTOR HE WOULD’VE LIKED TO HAVE HAD 

Because he lacked mentorship growing up, he says, he now goes out of his way to help others out, which usually starts through weightlifting, especially teenagers. “Because teens, especially from less-privileged backgrounds, want to get strong to get into sport — basketball, football, track, pole vaulting…,” he says. “These sports benefit from the strength and explosiveness you develop through Olympic weightlifting.

“First it starts as me being their weightlifting coach, but then it eventually transitions into what college do I pick? How do I approach studying for SATs? Then once they get into college, how do I approach an internship search? Resume review? So it spins into this mentor-mentee relationship. I enjoy it thoroughly.

“I’m very much someone who just loves to give back, loves to help people for no reason, and is always happy to just do things for the benefit of others. I’m a big believer that if you do good stuff for the world, the world will do good stuff to you. So that’s how I approach life.”

THE NEXT CHAPTER

If you wrote Yegor Denisov-Blanch’s life as a screenplay, no one would believe it.

Now the big question is, where will the story go next?

He was most recently engaged with FounderPartners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm where he was the only associate — in fact, he was the only person under 45-50 years old, and the only one who wasn’t a partner. “It was a great spot to be in,” he says.

But once an entrepreneur, always an entrepreneur. With the support of FounderPartners, Yegor is working on a startup in the software developer tools space, with a team mostly comprised of talent from Eastern Europe, where he plans to eventually return. “I see this as me starting to execute on my vision of making Eastern Europe a better place,” he says.

Eastern Europe is rich territory for entrepreneurs with vision. The region has plenty of engineering and software talent but less expertise in “being the CEO,” Yegor says. “Currently, the consensus is that Eastern European folks can build you a product, but they cannot grow it. They make the product, but they need someone with complementary skills to run the business side: either enter the U.S. market, or to just stay in the European market.”

He wants to find a way to bridge the gap between the tech talent in Eastern Europe and the U.S. — “and then eventually, as my career develops, do this at a more macro scale: So not just one startup, but three or five, at the same time. This is a model very similar to how FounderPartners operates: serial entrepreneurs who invest in and work with only a small number of companies at a time, engaging alongside founder CEOs every day throughout their journeys to profitability and beyond. They’ve built 39 companies, exited 18, and only four failed.”

At this point Yegor’s plans get a bit fuzzy. But they revolve around leveraging the tech talent in Eastern Europe to build startups that are creating jobs, developing the local economy, and most importantly, proving to people that being an entrepreneur is a viable career path.

“You can live a fulfilling professional life by being a founder or a co-founder, or just being part of a startup,” he says. “There are more ways to professional success than going to work for an established mega-company. You can just do your own thing and add great value to the world, and make it work for you and those around you.”

DON’T MISS: HOW I DID IT: FIRST-GENERATION STUDENT OF IMMIGRANT PARENTS EARNS BOOTH MBA AT 22 or A STANFORD-HARVARD-WHARTON ADMIT DESCRIBES HIS APPLICATION PROCESS