Harshwardhan Singh

Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania

“Engineer-turned-consultant-investor-operator.”

Hometown: Mumbai, India

Fun fact about yourself: I rang in 2025 in Antarctica. It was below freezing, the sun never quite set, and I spotted a few penguins on the shore – easily the most surreal New Year’s countdown of my life.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay, Bachelor and Master of Technology in Energy Science and Engineering

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Plum (Insurtech), Director, Founders’ Office

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? Artisan AI, Strategy and Operations, San Francisco, CA

Where will you be working after graduation? Joining an early-stage startup in the San Francisco Bay Area (in process)

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

• Board Member, Wharton Entrepreneurship Club
• Student Board Member, Venture Lab
• Communications Fellow and Teaching Assistant for the Entrepreneurial Communications course, mentoring first-year MBAs on pitching, presenting, and communicating with clarity
• Career Fellow for Startups, advising classmates navigating the unstructured world of startup recruiting
• Member of the AI and Analytics Club, Technology Club, Golf Club, Motorsports Club, and Outdoors Club
• First Year Honors
• Director’s List, Fall 2025

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? Participating in Wharton’s Leadership Venture to Antarctica. For a week, our team navigated brutal cold, unpredictable conditions, and the kind of physical and mental fatigue that strips away pretense. What made it transformative wasn’t the adventure itself – it was discovering how I lead when comfort is gone. You learn things about yourself at the edge of the world that no classroom can teach. A close second is serving as the Entrepreneurial Communications TA, where I mentored first-year students on pitching and storytelling. Helping someone find their voice and nail a high-stakes presentation is one of the most rewarding things I’ve done at Wharton.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? At Plum, an Indian insurtech startup, I was the first full-time hire in the founders’ office. Over two years, I worked across growth, operations, and product – launching new business lines from scratch, rebuilding the customer experience system, and helping scale the company to over $10M in ARR. But the achievement I’m proudest of is building and leading a team of seven. Most of them were early in their careers, and I got to watch them grow into confident operators. Managing people taught me something no individual contributor role ever could: your real leverage as a leader isn’t what you build – it’s who you build.

Why did you choose this business school? Flexibility. I came to Wharton knowing I wanted to build companies, but I didn’t want a program that forced me into a narrow track. Wharton gave me the freedom to design my own MBA. In two years, I participated in a Leadership Venture to Antarctica, took a Global Modular Course, spent an entire semester in San Francisco immersed in the startup ecosystem, served on multiple club boards, and formed lifelong friendships with people from wildly different backgrounds. No other program would have let me do all of that in the same two years.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? Scaling Operations, taught by Professor Gad Allon. It was the most practically relevant course I took at Wharton. The course covers every dimension of scaling a business – from operational efficiency and business model alignment to organizational culture and identifying the binding constraint. For someone who wants to build and operate startups, it was like getting a diagnostic toolkit for the exact problems I’ll face. I walked out of every class with ideas I could immediately apply.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? Storytellers. It’s a Wharton tradition where students take the stage and share deeply personal stories in front of their classmates – stories about identity, failure, loss, resilience, and growth. No slides. No polish. Just raw, honest storytelling. What makes it special is the vulnerability. These are future CEOs and investors standing up and talking about the hardest moments of their lives. It reflects something I love about Wharton: beneath the analytical rigor, there is a community that genuinely values authenticity and human connection.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? I would specialize sooner. My first year, I explored broadly – different clubs, courses, industries, social circles. That’s valuable, and I’d encourage anyone to do it, but the real transformation happened when I narrowed my focus between first and second year. When I stopped trying to sample everything and went deep on what I cared about most – entrepreneurship, operations, and the startup ecosystem – that’s when the MBA started compounding. If I could do it again, I’d give myself one semester of exploration, then commit.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? The DBS Bank AI journey case in the Financial Services Management course taught by Professor Patrick Harker. In the early 2000s, DBS was known internally as “Damn Bloody Slow” – a bureaucratic, unresponsive bank despite being Singapore’s largest. By 2022, it had been named “Best Bank in the World.” What fascinated me wasn’t the technology itself but the sequence. Piyush, the CEO, didn’t start with AI. He started by reorganizing how teams worked – breaking down silos through cross-functional “performance cells,” building unified data platforms, and creating an ethical governance framework before scaling any AI use cases. The biggest lesson was that technology transformations are really organizational transformations.

What business leader do you admire most? Dario Amodei, CEO and co-founder of Anthropic. Building an AI company is hard. Building one that puts safety and responsible development at its core – when the competitive incentives pull in every other direction – is extraordinary. Dario left OpenAI to co-found Anthropic because he believed AI development needed a different approach, one grounded in making AI systems safe and aligned with human values. What impresses me most is that he has held to that vision even as competitive pressure has intensified. Anthropic is one of the youngest major AI labs, yet it has built a world-class product, attracted exceptional talent, and remarkably, every co-founder is still at the company. That kind of retention says everything about the culture he has built.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Wharton has leaned into AI more aggressively than most business schools. There are student-led clubs and hackathons, an official Wharton AI and Analytics Initiative, and dedicated conferences bringing together researchers and industry leaders. On the practical side, Wharton provides enterprise access to AI tools, which has fundamentally changed how I work. AI has made me dramatically more productive – I can research, analyze, and iterate two to three times faster than before. That productivity gain has allowed me to take on more at Wharton: more trips, more projects, more learning. The insight isn’t just that AI is powerful. It’s that AI is a multiplier. It amplifies whatever you bring to the table, and Wharton has created an environment where students can discover that firsthand.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Akash Subramanian. We stood together among penguins in Antarctica during our Leadership Venture, and we’ve traveled together since. But what I admire most about Akash isn’t the adventures – it’s his relentless entrepreneurial drive. He is actively coming up with multiple business ideas simultaneously, and our conversations about building companies are some of the most energizing I’ve had at Wharton. Akash combines genuine kindness with an ambition that’s infectious. He’s the kind of person who makes you want to think bigger.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? First, I want to start my own company within the next three to five years. I’ve spent my career operating inside other people’s visions – as a consultant, investor, and operator. The natural next step is to build something of my own. Second, I want to lead a team where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts – not just a high-performing team, but one where people feel a genuine sense of belonging, where they push each other, grow together, and actually enjoy the work. I’ve had glimpses of this at Plum and at Wharton, and creating that feeling at scale is something I think about constantly.

What made Harshwardhan such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2026?

“From my first meeting with Harsh when he arrived at Wharton last August, he struck me as a thoughtful, engaged, curious and kind student. With every subsequent meeting, he continued to impress me with the depth of his engagement, curiosity and interest in all aspects of the MBA experience. Due to his very diligent and successful job search for his summer internship, I nominated and encouraged him to apply to be a second-year Career Fellow – a role he has performed with incredible care and energy to support his fellow classmates in their own recruiting journeys. Harsh has been an exemplary student, receiving First Year Honors, and he also received the Mayer Fellowship for outstanding professional achievement, being 1 of just 2 in his class to have that recognition. In addition to his role as our only Startup Career Fellow, Harsh has taken on a myriad of leadership roles, serving on the board of the Entrepreneurship Club and the Student Board for Venture Lab. He also has served as a Communications Fellow, a role given to a select group of second-year MBA students to serve as peer mentors for students enrolled in Management Communication courses. The breadth of involvement in addition to the thoughtfulness with which Harsh has undertaken all these roles really is a testament to the kind of person Harsh is.”

Jennifer Savoie
Career Advisor, MBA Career Management

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