New Stanford MBA Club Envisions A World Accessible To All

Sophia Fang, MBA ‘24
Club Co-founder

Why did you want to pursue an MBA? I’ve always been at the intersection of startups, social impact marketing, and art. During undergrad, I helped start a nonprofit called Health Bridges, which assisted immigrant patients in navigating language barriers in hospitals. We trained college students to support limited English proficient and low-income patients with language translations and insurance enrollments for Medicare and MediCal. This experience ignited my passion for storytelling and working with early-stage organizations.

My first job out of college was as head of marketing at a fintech startup called Honeycomb Credit, which helps small businesses crowdfund loans from their communities to open restaurants, coffee shops, and gain access to capital in a challenging landscape. I joined as the first marketer and employee No. 3, helping to build the organization nationally. At the same time, I do mural painting professionally, working with immigrant-owned small businesses and food entrepreneurs to tell their stories through public art.

Around this time, I started getting really bad migraine attacks. My mother has had chronic migraines my entire life, so I grew up watching her really suffer to the point where she had to quit her job in her early 40s to care for me. Seeing her go through so many challenges and then receiving the same diagnosis in my early 20s was terrifying. I wondered if I would end up like her one day, bedridden in a dark room. This drove me to focus on my own personal health, going to neurologists, digging into migraine research. I realized that migraines are the second most common disability in the world, but because it’s chronic pain, it often doesn’t seem like a disability since it happens internally.

I started thinking more about social entrepreneurship and wanting to build something in the migraine space to support the over 50 million people – 1 in 5 women in the U.S. – living with migraines and chronic pain.

Why Stanford? What drew me to Stanford was the social entrepreneurship resources, especially for founders. Stanford and GSB have so many cool fellowship programs that basically allowed me to fund my summer doing research on my venture. I won the Stanford Impact Founder’s Prize, which is funding me full-time. It’s an incredibly tight-knit and supportive community.

I was also drawn to the class size and the strength of relationships we can build here. With only about 420 students in a class, you really get to know a lot of folks on a deeper level, understand your “why,” and build lasting friendships.

I also value the opportunity to have a more interdisciplinary MBA education and build up my competencies as a founder. For example, I wanted to learn more about chronic conditions and how to design sticky products to build healthy habits. Through the GSB, I was able to take classes at the Stanford design school and at the medical school. This opened up doors not only to resources across the GSB but also to meeting people and accessing entrepreneurship resources within the entire university.

Tell us about your venture, Peachy Day: Inspired by my and my mom’s struggles with chronic migraines, Peachy Day is a trusted care app that empowers migraine patients with daily tracking, access to neurologists, lifestyle coaching, and peer community. Migraines are the second most common disability in the world, impacting 1 in 5 American women with debilitating head pain and severe life disruptions.

Because of shortages in migraine specialists, 95% of patients are not getting diagnosed and treated, leading to a $78 billion yearly economic burden in health costs and lost productivity in the U.S. With Peachy Day’s integrative model, we will fast-track patients with effective tools to reduce speed to quality care by years, if not decades.

What is the motivation behind the Disabilities and Caregivers Club? Disability inclusion has many different flavors. When we were ideating our club, we decided on three core pillars for our first-year focus.

First, we focused on the existing student community by organizing private dinners where students with disabilities could work together and share their stories. This included an allyship component, where the wider student community could learn about disability access.

Second, we aimed to build an evergreen institution by working with admissions to ensure we have a diverse pool of candidates, so that students and applicants with disabilities feel included during the admissions process. We ran webinars and talked to students to encourage them to apply.

Third, we focused on academic inclusivity by showing representation of disability tech and innovators in the curriculum and case studies taught in the classroom. This initial vision involved a mix of student-led initiatives and close collaboration with the school administration.

Why does this kind of representation matter at business schools and in organizations? I think it’s time we shift the mindset that people with disabilities need extra accommodations or that we’re going out of our way to accommodate someone else. Everyone has their own diverse skill sets. In many ways, people with disabilities have an extra ‘secret sauce’ for being leaders because we’re constantly being resilient, dealing with a world that’s not built for us, being creative and flexible, and still delivering on our goals. Working with people and communities where this resilience is valued is very important. This is a stance I believe both GSB and future leaders will be endorsing.

NEXT PAGE: Paulina Paras, MBA ‘24, caregiver and founder of LivEdge Capital, an early-stage VC firm investing in startups supporting individuals with disabilities