Chad Shimozaki

University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

“California-born, Chicago winter-tested. Driven by competition, great food, and meaningful relationships.”

Hometown: Stockton, CA

Fun fact about yourself: I proposed to my fiancée three weeks before Booth’s orientation, and I’m getting married three weeks before graduation. Turns out, wedding planning is the hardest class Booth never offered.

Undergraduate School and Degree:

University of California, Los Angeles

Bachelor of Arts in Business Economics with Departmental Honors

Bachelor of Science in Statistics

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Baker Tilly Advisory Group, LP; Senior Consultant

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Amazon; Senior Product Manager Technical Intern; Seattle, WA

Where will you be working after graduation? Amazon; Senior Product Manager Technical; Seattle, WA

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School

* Graduate Business Council – Random Walk Committee Co-Lead: Directed the transitioning of travel vendors for Booth’s ~35 pre-orientation trips to secure more affordable and higher quality travel for ~700 students. Led the redesign of the Random Walk website and created institutional documentation of the committee’s history for future leaders.

* Admissions Fellow & Ambassador: Pay It Forward to prospective students by conducting interviews, leading tours, speaking on panels, and giving candid responses to questions as a Admit Student Contact.

* Epicurean Club Co-Chair: Expanded the club’s programming beyond fine dining to include neighborhood treks, home-cooked meals, ice cream socials, and casual ramen alongside Michelin-starred dinners, with the goal of making food culture at Booth accessible to everyone. Personally organized 5 events for 120+ members.

* Awards & Honors: 1898 Scholarship Award, Kilts Case Competition Finalist and Presenter (x2), Dean’s Honor List (x4)

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? I’m most proud of co-leading the Random Walk vendor transition. The program sends ~35 trips for 700 students each year to domestic and international locations, and our existing vendor model had become increasingly more expensive while trip quality declined. With my co-lead Nicky Bradley and our executive liaison Syed Ahmad, I helped drive the end-to-end transition away from our vendor of over 20 years by evaluating alternatives, aligning GBC leadership and Student Life, and ultimately deciding to go with two new vendors. The part of this process that I’m proudest of is not necessarily the transition itself, but what I hope is lasting change: creating documentation to pass down institutional knowledge, a new website now owned by Booth, and a competitive bidding process that gives future leaders real negotiating power every year.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? My proudest professional achievement is the product I developed during my internship at Amazon. I was given the challenge of improving the accuracy of tax product classification across a catalog of 62 billion products on Amazon.com. Starting with the customer, I interviewed 30+ internal operations users, mapped their pain points, designed a new system architecture, and delivered a working prototype in 12 weeks. I presented a 6-page PR-FAQ to senior leadership, influencing the go/no-go decision, a three-year product roadmap, and operations resourcing for phased adoption. The team chose to implement my recommendation, improving classification accuracy to 99.9% and reducing manual workflow time by over 90% for 90+ users.

Why did you choose this business school? Chicago Booth stood out to me because I knew I would thrive in the community after interacting with current students, alumni, and fellow admits during First Day (now Booth Bound). The friendly interactions I had that weekend weren’t one-offs, as many of the first people I met are my closest friends today. Making the decision to attend Booth was one of the best I have ever made. I achieved my professional goals, grew alongside brilliant classmates, and learned from professors who genuinely challenged me to think differently.

Upon reflection, the Pay It Forward culture is what makes everything work. It’s embedded in the DNA of every student who steps foot on Booth’s campus: helping classmates prep for interviews, being generous with time, and taking on leadership roles that make a real difference for future Booth students.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? If I had to choose, my favorite MBA professor is Professor Devin Pope. He made The Study of Behavioral Economics feel alive through humor, clear explanations, and a genuine enthusiasm that’s contagious in a 65-person classroom. What struck me most wasn’t his delivery, but Professor Pope’s ability to surface insights that challenged assumptions I didn’t know I had. The fact that he’s a huge fan of basketball and Stephen Curry certainly didn’t hurt.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? My favorite Booth course was Generative Thinking. This class traced a path from the first neural networks to modern GPTs and agentic systems, with a syllabus that’s updated in real time. Examples from the prior week’s news were seamlessly woven into the next week’s class and complex ideas were explained in a simple and easily digestible way. It’s a rare type of class that didn’t just teach me what to think, but it changed how I think and view the world in the age of artificial intelligence. If I could audit this class for the next 10 years as an alumnus, I would sign up in a heartbeat because I know I’m guaranteed to learn something new.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what’s one thing you’d do differently and why? One aspect of my MBA experience I would love to change is trusting my instincts about courses sooner. On a few occasions, I stayed in classes past the point of knowing they weren’t the right fit, held back by sunk-cost thinking after spending bid points or wanting to immediately fulfill a requirement despite having other options later. With so many amazing classes and professors at Booth, the opportunity cost of even a single class is real.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? The most impactful case from my Booth experience was “Optimization and Expansion at OpenTable.” OpenTable’s history is a perfect example of platform development with network effects. Chuck Templeton recognized that restaurants lacked the infrastructure necessary for online booking in the early 2000s, and OpenTable subsidized the cost of the necessary hardware for those businesses. This kickstarted a platform that eventually connected diners and restaurants, with each side benefitting from more of the other joining the platform. This flywheel propelled OpenTable’s near-monopoly for over a decade.

The most important takeaway from this case came from understanding the erosion of OpenTable’s business. OpenTable charged a per-cover fee for their services, creating a high cost for restaurants as a portion of every reserved seat went to OpenTable. When Resy came along with a less costly monthly subscription option, there was a place for that frustration and new restaurants flocked to the more affordable platform. Network effects can sustain a dominant platform for years, but they can’t protect an undifferentiated product from a cheaper competitor forever. OpenTable’s competitive advantage was real, but resentment from restaurants became a true vulnerability, and now, there are several credible players in the dining reservation market.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? I love Chicago’s Lakefront Trail and Riverwalk. Walking my four-year-old goldendoodle, Katsu, along these paths became a daily ritual that rewarded me differently with every season. On quiet winter mornings, I often had the trail all to myself. On the opposite end of the spectrum is the middle of summer, where the Lakefront and Riverwalk are bustling with runners, children, and tourists. My favorite day is the first true spring day when the entire city “wakes up” and breathes in the first warm air after a long winter (or maybe that’s just my inner Californian talking).

What business leader do you admire most? I admire Brian Chesky, co-founder and CEO of Airbnb, for how he thinks about product at scale. Most CEOs at his level delegate product entirely, but Chesky stays in the details by choice. His 11-star experience framework is something I found very interesting: start from a 5-star experience that simply meets expectations, push all the way to an absurd 11-star extreme, then find the creative, realistic sweet spot in between. It’s a conceptually simple framework that is applicable to a wide range of products. In addition to product strategy, Chesky’s people-first leadership and values were highlighted during COVID. When Airbnb lost over 80% of its business during the pandemic, he made extraordinarily difficult decisions with transparency and care for Airbnb.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Booth launched the Applied Artificial Intelligence concentration during my time there, which I pursued in my second year. The program pushed me to apply concepts learned in the classroom by using tools like Lovable and Claude Code. I built functioning product prototypes for coursework, case and hackathon competitions, and personal projects. I not only gained technical fluency, but firsthand experience building, refining, and deploying AI products. This will be invaluable experience I’ll carry to my work at Amazon.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? I most admire Cazmier Tymoch, the outgoing President of the Chicago Booth Graduate Business Council. Many people could step into a leadership role and lead solely by energy or implied power, but Cazmier was intentional about building relationship first. At the GBC Committee Lead kickoff, he ran a two-hour session that could have been a formality. Instead, it became a genuine exercise on alignment. He came prepared with a clear agenda, set expectations around accountability, and then stepped back in a way that made the room feel like everyone’s voice was being heard. This led to an organic debate about whether GBC’s identity was an event-planning body or student advocacy organization. Without the environment Cazmier created, this conversation wouldn’t have happened.

Cazmier isn’t just a great leader behind closed doors. He’s willing to plan and get his hands dirty, as he did when nearly single-handedly putting on an unofficial Chicago Random Walk. Cazmier also makes a point of getting to know people, building real relationships before anything else. Whether he’s giving tours, DJing, or soliciting feedback from students, Cazmier always hears everyone’s concerns and actually listens. All of these examples demonstrate someone who earns trust instead of assuming it.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? The top two items on my professional bucket list are:

1. Launch a consumer product with global impact, reaching at least 100 million users.

2. Lead product strategy for a major technology company to become more sustainable, ethical, and trustworthy.

What made Chad such an invaluable member of the MBA Class of 2026?

“Chad is incredibly involved in the Booth community, and I have had the pleasure of working with him closely in some of his leadership roles, particularly within our Graduate Business Council.

When Chad isn’t busy giving tours around the Harper Center to prospective students or organizing new culinary experiences on behalf of Epicurean Club’s members so they can experience the Chicago food scene, we can find him working on behalf of the Graduate Business Council (GBC). Chad is one of those students who is exactly what you want in terms of being an active and involved GBC member – engaged, thoughtful, and deeply invested in representing the broader student community. In council meetings he consistently brings insightful questions forward, advocates for the student community’s concerns, and approaches it all with incredible professionalism.

Within GBC, Chad’s largest and most visible contribution is co-leading the Random Walk committee. This group is charged with organizing and implementing approximately 35 international trips for incoming students, and the time and dedication he has given it is remarkable. Within the last year he has led the committee in being more diligent and intentional in its vendor selection process, a massive overhaul from prior years. He worked closely to take in student feedback while working closely with myself and our office to ensure the University’s priorities were also considered while planning these trips. In addition, Chad is leaving the next leaders in great shape, as he led the overhaul of the website redesign, and created actual documentation outlining the history and complexities of this committee for future leaders.

I can’t say enough good things about Chad and his positive influence on the Chicago Booth community. We are lucky to have worked with him, and he is leaving the community even better as a result of his work.”

Stacey Ergang
Senior Director of Student Life
University of Chicago Booth School of Business

© Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE.