Buddy Foster

Washington University in St. Louis, Olin Business School

“A maverick. A curious, inquisitive, and adventurous person. A contrarian looking to shake things up.”

Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia

Fun fact about yourself: I come from a family of educators and pastors. My mom and sister are public school educators, and my father is a pastor. He is why I got my understanding of entrepreneurship. He founded his church when I was in the first grade, and I always remember him saying, “If it’s not there but needs to be, then do it yourself.”

Undergraduate School and Degree: Harbert College of Business at Auburn University in Auburn, AL. (WAR EAGLE!) I dual majored in Entrepreneurial Management and Marketing, concentrating in Professional Sales.

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? I was a sales consultant and project manager at KONE Elevators in Washington, DC. I led our region’s new product initiative and introduced the newest line of elevators, the MonoSpace 300.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2023? I started interning as an MBA venture catalyst at a venture capital firm called Muditā Venture Partners in December 2022 and continued through the summer of 2023. The firm is based just outside of Detroit, Michigan; however, I was based in St. Louis, Missouri.

Where will you be working after graduation? After the summer of 2023, I continued working with Muditā Venture Partners. I will work with them full-time when graduating as an associate based in St. Louis, Missouri, as my wife finishes the Professional MBA program at WashU Olin.

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• Inaugural Class of WashU Olin Entrepreneurship Fellows
• Vice President of the Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital Association
• Vice President of Olin Beer and Mead Society
• Graduate Advisor for WashU Venture Network
• Venture Advisor for the League of Extraordinary Entrepreneurs (Accelerator Program)
• Team Lead and Program Liaison for the InvestMidwest Conference
• Co-Chair for WashU Olin MBA Class Gift Campaign
• Team Lead for the 2024 VCIC Olin Team (2nd Place in Regionals)
• Graduate Teaching Assistant for three courses – Venture Capital Methods, Venture Capital Practice, and Undergraduate Business Management

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I joined the WashU Venture Network as a Graduate Advisor to help support the growth and education of the venture capital community at WashU. The program was getting back off the ground after being sidelined for COVID-19, so we had to restart it from scratch. Venture capital is not a very well-known area, especially for undergrads. Teaching these kids what VC means and then watching them get excited about innovation and “catch the fire” for the entrepreneurial ecosystem has been incredibly impactful.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? As I’m wrapping up business school and entering my eighth year of work in my professional career, I have a lot that makes me proud. However, what has changed my life more than any other was co-founding a small coffee shop in Opelika, Alabama. The lessons I learned in starting, managing, and transitioning Side Track from a retail coffee shop to a growing services company working with boutique hotels and restaurants were life-changing.

Entrepreneurship is an incredibly hard and lonely path. Most careers help you to learn what you are good at—your strengths. However, entrepreneurship highlights your weaknesses. It shows you a million times why something won’t work and forces you to push past that to find the slight chance of success. At the same time, entrepreneurship is also a vibrant and beautiful ecosystem. Starting Side Track opened me up to this world. It changed the trajectory of my life and my career. It will forever be some of the proudest moments in my career.

Why did you choose this business school? Some of the best advice I was given during my business school journey was to forget everything else and find the program that best fits me and my goals. Coming into business school knowing exactly what I wanted was a huge advantage, and I was determined to use it. WashU Olin has a fairly small cohort, only about 100 per class. So, I was able to get connected to the right resources that plugged me into the innovation and venture capital scene much faster than I could have at a larger program. However, small cohorts don’t matter if there isn’t an ecosystem to be plugged into. The St. Louis startup environment is growing faster than many other parts of the country, with some incredible founders, investors, and members who have invested heavily in the innovation community here.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? Michael Wall, a professor of practice in the marketing department, reinstalled a deep connection to marketing in me. Since marketing was my undergraduate degree, I didn’t expect to take many marketing courses. However, Michael’s teaching style, a combination of theory and practical application from his own career as an entrepreneur before WashU Olin, brought about a new appreciation for the craft of marketing.

I took two courses with Michael, one on developing early-stage products and the other on managing the innovation of those products. I started applying what I learned in those courses almost immediately. Working with early-stage founders, I use the same frameworks Michael gave us as I coached founders on their journey. I love these frameworks because, even though they are backed by solid theory and research, they are practical and have been refined by his career of using them to grow his business.

What makes him a great professor is his ability to give good lectures or handy frameworks and his desire to help students in and out of the classroom. When my wife was interviewing for a new job in St. Louis (she was not in the part-time MBA program at this time), I mentioned the company to Michael, and he immediately looked them up to see if he had connections there that could help her—even though he had not met my wife at this point. This commitment to student success is rare, but it differentiates Michael Wall as a person and a professor.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Economics of the Organization with Professor Bart Hamilton was an incredible class. I fully believe this class must be required for every MBA. There is a saying that’s paraphrased, “Business is easy, people are hard.” As MBAs, it’s our job to understand how to recruit, retain, develop, and correctly incentivize the people in our organization to get the job done. This class takes a view of the human capital side of business from an economic standpoint. It teaches you to think about incentives and choices within an organization to get the optimal result for the business and the employee. Bart does a great job teaching from both a practical and theoretical side and engages the class in incredible discussion.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? At the start of the MBA program, we went on a Global Immersion, where we spent six weeks studying and living in Barcelona, Paris, and Santiago. During our time abroad, we worked with well-established, family-owned wineries and upstart new businesses, developing new ways for them to engage with their existing customers and innovative ways to find new customer segments.

On the front end of the trip and the back half of our MBA, we spent time at the Brookings Institution, a renowned think tank in Washington, DC. This time in DC and abroad solidified friendships with my classmates and showed Olin’s commitment to remain connected to the world and the growing global business environment. The time in DC was especially memorable, as it intertwined the concepts we learned in class with the geo-political landscape and showed how the broader environment affected our lives and careers in business.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? Overall, I’ve been pleased with how my MBA experience turned out. However, if I had a regret, it would be not attending a conference while in school. WashU Olin does a great job of pushing its students to explore different areas outside St. Louis. One of the ways they do this is by giving each student a yearly conference stipend. For one reason or another, I wasn’t able to use that and attend one of the MBA conferences or another industry conference. These are great times to get to know other peers who have similar interests and will be working in similar industries.

What is the biggest myth about your school? This is Washington University, not the University of Washington! On a more serious note, though, when I was exploring graduate schools, I was concerned that most WashU Olin graduates would stay in the Midwest due to proximity. The Midwest is great, but I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into a location—I wanted some choice. I found that WashU Olin graduates go to every corner of the United States (and the world) after graduation. Sure, some stay in St. Louis and the Midwest. In fact, I will stay here after graduation for a few years. However, it’s not because of a lack of choice.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? St. Louis has been a great place to spend the last couple of years while in business school. My wife and I love good food and drink, and there are some incredible restaurants, breweries, cocktail bars, and wineries here. If you ask any St. Louisan, they’ll talk for hours about Forest Park (a full 500 acres larger than Central Park!) and the many festivals and fairs hosted there. However, being on one income during business school, we were not prepared to be able to indulge in much of that. Instead, we found that due to St. Louis’ very manageable cost of living. We have been able to enjoy most of what St. Louis and the surrounding area have offered, even while I am in school. It’s hard to do that in many places.

What surprised you the most about business school? I expected business school to be much more theoretical than it was, at least at WashU Olin. While an undergraduate, I always felt that I wanted a more practical understanding of what I was learning, and I thought an MBA was more about teaching the theory of business in a deeper way. WashU Olin turned that on its head and taught the theory through practice. Not every school has this trait at its disposal, as it requires professors to have more than just a higher degree and a proclivity toward research. It requires professors who understand what application looks like. Professors like Michael Wall, Doug Villhard, Jeremy Degenhart (and so many more!) have a huge part in this. Places that steward innovation, like the Skandalaris Center and its staff, bring together different schools on WashU’s campus. This makes them an interconnected network pursuing creative ways of solving problems. Yes, business school does, and should, teach theory, frameworks, and processes, but it should do so in a pragmatic and applied sense. Olin does this better than most.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Oh, to pick just one! There are several who I admire greatly in my class. However, John Badgett has stood out as incredibly thoughtful and passionate about business and people. Even though we are a smaller class, it is possible, even easy, to stick to your group of people. From the outset, John did an incredible job of seeking everyone out and knowing their names and who they were. I’m not the only person to think so. After a class with Professor Trish Gorman, she commented on John’s ability to connect with everyone in our class. Seeing how John uses this in his career after WashU Olin will be fun.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? I’ve been told that you should always have someone you are learning from and someone you can teach it to. That it’s important to be a river of wisdom, not a dam. The first item on my professional bucket list is to be in a place where I can give back to the places that gave to me. I have had incredible mentors and teachers at Auburn University and Washington University; I would love to return the favor to someone coming after me.

I’ve always enjoyed public speaking and teaching, which made sales so much fun. As I continue to hone my craft, learn more about my field of investing, and gain some expertise, I would love to translate that into a place where I can speak and teach about it. I love what I do every day. If I can even help one person or founder walk through the opaque and sometimes grimy world of venture capital – avoiding the pitfalls that are all too prevalent in this industry – I’ll consider that a worthwhile career.

What made Buddy such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2024?

“When I first met Buddy, his ambition was clear: to become a venture capitalist, arguably the most competitive role to land fresh out of an MBA program. And let me tell you, he crushed it.

Buddy wasn’t just attending classes; he was devouring them. He wasn’t just joining student organizations; he was leading them. He spearheaded the WashU Venture Network with the Skandalaris Center, helped revitalize InvestMidwest to champion local tech investment, and relentlessly networked through countless informational interviews. All this with one goal: to secure that elusive venture capital internship and, ultimately, a coveted job offer.

Sure, WashU Olin, a top-ranked entrepreneurship program, offers invaluable knowledge. But some things can’t be taught—raw intellect, insatiable curiosity, and an unwavering work ethic. Buddy possessed all three in spades, and in addition, he has a superpower—the fearless ability to network. This skill will be his secret weapon as he hunts for and evaluates the future stars of the startup world.”

Professor Doug Villhard
Academic Director for Entrepreneurship
Professor of Practice in Entrepreneurship
WashU Medical School Innovation Immersion Co-Lead
Adj. Professor of Innovation

DON’T MISS: MBAS TO WATCH: CLASS OF 2024