J.B. Horsley

Yale School of Management

“Community-builder and organizational transformer, committed to ensuring the best business decisions are deeply human.”

Hometown: Menlo Park, CA

Fun fact about yourself: The Oscars are my Super Bowl. I watch every nominated film and host an annual party complete with a costume contest, themed dishes for each Best Picture nominee, and prizes for the most accurate ballot and most creative predictions.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Stanford University – Bachelor of Arts (Economics major, English minor), Class of 2019

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Stanford University – Assistant Director of Employer Relations and Outcomes

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? UnitedHealth Group – UnitedHealth Leadership Experience Intern

Where will you be working after graduation? UnitedHealth Group – UnitedHealth Leadership Experience Associate

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School:

Student Government Representative

First Year (Cohort Representative): Liaison between faculty and cohort; produced a weekly newsletter featuring a community-curated playlist and rotating Kudos section celebrating classmates’ accomplishments

Second Year (Community and Inclusion Chair): Launched Humans of SOM storytelling exhibition and sponsored and organized several affinity events, culminating in organizing our Affinity/Spirit Week —including a belonging panel, cultural fair, intercultural dinners with every affinity group, and a school-wide Yale spirit celebration

Business & Society the Musical — Director, Producer, Writer, Lead Actor

First Year: Lead actor, assistant director, stage manager, and writer on The Hiring Games, a Hunger Games parody where District 12 (Social Impact) battles Finance and Consulting (District 1 & 2) for club funding. Featuring original parody songs including “Attaining Salary” (Defying Gravity from Wicked) and “PPT” (APT. by Bruno Mars and Rosé).

Second Year: Director, producer, and writer of The SOMulation, a Matrix parody in which an AI-replaced Dean convinces students to surrender their minds to technology until Neo and student government intervene; recruited and developed a cast and creative team twice the size of Year 1’s. I’ve been especially delighted by the number of first-time theatremakers involved this year and have worked hard to make sure everyone feels supported to participate and put themselves out there (first-time producer, stage manager, costume designer, writers, and actors).

Board Fellow: Long Wharf Theatre (Golub Capital Nonprofit Board Fellows Program) — Served as a Board Fellow for New Haven’s Long Wharf Theatre during their 60th and 61st seasons discussing and learning from marketing strategies, financial evaluations, and hiring practices and contract negotiations. Mobilized over 20 SOM volunteers for three service projects to build Long Wharf’s exhibit at the New Haven Museum and prepare for fundraising and community programming. Supported the capital campaign and promoted productions within the SOM community. Currently developing patron analytics and outreach strategy for 62nd season.

Teaching Assistantships — Head TA, Modeling Managerial Decisions (both MBA and EMBA courses); TA for Managing Groups and Teams, Customer, Negotiations, and Workforce.

Orientation Leader — Selected to welcome and support the incoming MBA and one-year degrees through a full week of activities and trainings. One of the positions I’m most proud of and grateful for, as it has connected me with all the first years, built many new friendships, and gave me the opportunity to support my peers through their transition and long after. Not to mention, I got to up the spirit every day until I was wearing full silver face paint, hair dye, body suit, and wings.

Board Game Club — Co-Lead — Organized game nights and cultural evenings including Mahjong Night, International Games Night, Smash Bros. Tournament, and a D&D Night.

Career Coach (Unofficial) — Designed and delivered a resume-building lecture and workshop for 40 MBAs; personally reviewed 60+ classmates’ resumes throughout the first year.

SOM’s Star Search Performer — Two acts at the annual charity talent show benefiting the student internship fund, including a performance of “If I Were a Rich Man” as a personal reflection on freedom, identity, and Jewish heritage.

Title IX Working Group — Member

Co-Founder, Wine and Poetry Club (Unofficial)

MBA Interviewer and Ambassador

Yale Healthcare Hackathon — Grand Prize Winner

Led a team of 10 strangers, including high schoolers, undergrads, PhDs, a postdoc, a PA, and industry professionals, from a single concept to a working MVP and business model in 36 hours.

Won the $5,000 Grand Prize sponsored by Rothberg Catalyzer at Yale.

Recipient, Steven N. Brody ’66 B.A. Memorial Scholarship — Awarded in honor of a serial entrepreneur in healthcare who combined innovation with ethics, integrity, and community building: the very legacy I aspire to leave behind.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? The achievement I am most proud of during business school is winning the Yale Healthcare Hackathon, hosted by the Yale Center for Biomedical Innovation and Technology (CBIT). Ten strangers walked in with no team, no plan, and no idea —and 36 hours later walked out as Grand Prize winners. Our concept, originated by 10th grader Annie Katz, was a smart bandage capable of detecting infections: a technology with the potential to affect 680,000 annual cases costing hospitals $3–10 billion, and to reduce mortality by 2x–11x. I divided our team of high schoolers, undergrads, a PA, a PhD, a postdoc, a professional, and an MBA, into four sub-teams (technology, medical research, business modeling, and marketing) and drew on everything I’d learned in my MBA to help each person contribute at their best.

We won the $5,000 Grand Prize sponsored by Rothberg Catalyzer at Yale. But what I’m most proud of is Annie standing in front of a room of experts, having a team behind her to elevate her idea initially meant to help her grandmother into a polished, compelling, fundable healthcare innovation. That, to me, is what Yale SOM’s “business and society” mission looks like in practice.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Stanford Career Education was never supposed to be my forever home. I started part-time putting on creative industry events while pursuing a theatre career until COVID-19 changed everything. But mine wasn’t the only career path to change. Every one of our students was going to be impacted by the global shutdown. Working with my manager, we decided to establish a program that would provide key learning opportunities and resume building for students who couldn’t get a summer internship: a professional Summer Boot Camp. I found myself scheduling 30 hours of Zoom meetings a week for a 15-hour job because I believed so deeply in what my team was building: eight weeks of programming for 475 students and alumni who had lost opportunities overnight, organized in two months with over 100 volunteers. Years later, I still had students thank me at events, telling me they’d gotten a job at a company they first encountered at one of our panels.

That experience became the foundation for everything that followed: redesigning our employer partnership program to focus on building connections, earning my coaching certification to support my students, and working directly with my director to reorganize our team structure so our operations were more efficient. Through the mentorship and belief of my manager, I grew from a coordinator into an assistant director, and I left for Yale SOM knowing exactly what kind of work I was meant to do.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose Yale SOM because of three words: “Business & Society.” SOM’s mission, “educating leaders for business and society,” isn’t just a tagline; it’s a way of being. I have felt “the ampersand” in every conversation I had with students before I applied, during my interview, and in every interaction since. Before business school, I spent years discovering professional purpose in improving teams and organizations from the inside — restructuring roles, building onboarding systems, and developing training programs in intercultural development and inclusion that stick. I wanted to take those instincts and give them real scale.

“Business & Society” can mean many things. On the one hand, it acknowledges the students pursuing social impact, ESG, and the public sector. On the other, it challenges those pursuing careers in more traditional for-profit roles to ask: what does it mean to optimize both the organization and the people running it? Before I ever set foot on campus, “the ampersand” shone through in every conversation I had with a Yale MBAs and alumni. A school centered on improving Business & Society wasn’t just the right fit for my career transition; it was the only logical home for someone who believes the right organizations, run by the right people, can genuinely improve lives. Yale was my first choice.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? My favorite professor is A.J. Wasserstein, the Eugene F. Williams, Jr., Senior Lecturer in the Practice of Management and a two-time recipient of Yale SOM’s Faculty Teaching Excellence Award. In Leading Small and Medium Enterprises, Professor Wasserstein ran a demanding, cold-call-driven class built around Teddy Roosevelt’s conviction that what counts is not the critic but the person “in the arena.” Every session required me to develop and synthesize financial analyses, valuations, workforce management, operational practices, and management strategy – simultaneously with all the infinite possibility and uncertainty that real decisions actually elicit. What I most valued was a perspective I hadn’t fully considered: an MBA doesn’t have to mean a slow climb at a Fortune 500. MBAs step directly into CEO roles at small and medium enterprises, take real ownership, and drive enormous impact from day one. By the time the course ended, I didn’t just understand that path. I believed I was ready for it.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? The perfect capstone to my time at Yale SOM was Customer Insights and Applications through the Yale Center for Customer Insights (YCCI). Through its Discovery Project, I consulted directly for a Fortune 500 company; conducted over a dozen stakeholder interviews, a large-scale research memorandum, and three surveys testing our assumptions. Finally, I delivered structured strategic recommendations through a presentation directly to the client’s executive team. The experience not only mirrored the rigor and ambiguity of consulting work, it reinforced the lessons from the rest of my MBA — collaborating with a team to translate complex, qualitative insights into decisions that organizations can actually act upon.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? If I could change one thing, I would have taken more courses across the wider Yale community. In my final semester, I enrolled in Torts and Regulation with Professor Ian Ayres at the Law School, and it has been one of the most intellectually energizing experiences of my MBA. Watching how the economic reasoning I’ve gained from my MBA sharpens a Torts analysis, and how legal policy enriches my discussions in business ethics, has made me realize there’s an endless buffet across Yale I could still learn from in the Divinity School, Drama School, Jackson School, and beyond. I suppose I’ll have to make the most of Yale for Life… or, as my Torts professor might suggest, consider adding a J.D. to go with the double letters of J.B.

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 I studied came from sitting across a negotiating table with a classmate. In Negotiations, taught jointly by Professors Barry Nalebuff and Daylian Cain, I worked through the Nextco Case, representing NextOil in acquiring a gas station from its current owners. What the exercise taught me – and what I carried directly into serving as Third Chair in collective bargaining at UnitedHealth Group four months later – is that negotiation is fundamentally an exercise in communication and curiosity, not combat. Sharing what mattered to me, putting myself in the shoes of my negotiating partner, and asking genuine questions about what matters to the person across the table reveal better outcomes. Deals that look impossible on first discussion reveal elements that are cheap for one party and enormously valuable to the other — and can create a fair and equitable agreement at bargaining’s conclusion. That insight has shaped how I’ve approached every negotiation since.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? New Haven is a city that rewards curiosity. The arts scene alone could keep you busy for years; Yale Rep, the Shubert, NXTHVN, the Yale School of Art’s Open Studios, Toad’s Place, New Haven Symphony Orchestra are just a few of the places I have come to appreciate (and there are so many more). I have loved the food — living across the street from the oldest pizza place in the city is genuinely dangerous. I have enjoyed exploring the history and architecture and meeting the people: an engaged, opinionated, caring citizenry that shows up for each other. Whether marching alongside demonstrating citizens in The Green, discussing apartheid with students I met at Yale University Art Gallery exhibition, or making a new friend at Elm City Social or Barcade, New Haven isn’t just a place to study. It offers a community where I belong.

What business leader do you admire most? I greatly admire Dan Weiss, who served as President and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2015 to 2023. When Weiss arrived, he was told the institution was thriving — only to discover a structural deficit of $40–50 million annually, masked by reserve drawdowns and accounting opacity. What he did next is why I admire him: rather than managing the information quietly or executing a swift round of layoffs, he chose radical transparency, bringing staff into the problem and inviting the organization to solve it together. Through zero-based budgeting and open dialogue, the Met implemented an out-of-state admissions fee that generated new revenue without breaking its promise to New Yorkers. When COVID made layoffs unavoidable, Weiss was explicit that rehiring those people was a priority, and followed through. I had read about these decisions from afar, but meeting him through Yale SOM’s Executive core course gave me a much deeper appreciation for the choices he made under pressure. His leadership reflects a conviction I hold deeply: an organization’s greatest asset is the trust of the people it serves, and the best decisions strengthen rather than spend that trust.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? It has been fascinating to watch AI evolve even within my two years at SOM. The integration started subtly with Professor Anjani Jain assigning us to audit AI-generated models and identify both errors and insights. In the second quarter, Professor Kevin Williams made clear that arriving unprepared was inexcusable when AI could produce a serviceable case summary in minutes. Since then, AI has been a discussion in nearly every class, woven in to help us parse and analyze large data, refine slide decks, and even build websites and applications. And yet, every time, I’ve come to the same truth: AI accelerates the work but doesn’t replace the thinking. The metaphor I keep returning to is that an experienced chef makes a better meal than a microwave, but a microwave can make a chef more productive. Though, a microwave is still only as good as the food you put in and how you decide to use it.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Yemajha Caraballo, ’26, inspires me every day. Before SOM, he served as a Signal Officer in the U.S. Army. From the moment we met I recognized a kindred spirit: a nontraditional background, a determination to transition into industry on his own terms, and an absolute refusal to do it quietly. I watched Yem build study guides from week one and share them freely with anyone who needed them; develop networking strategies sophisticated enough to teach a career coach something new, and then turn around and share those openly with our entire class. Over the past year, he has taught himself to code, assembled a leadership team, and built his startup, Pulse, from an idea into a real company. When he has encountered adversity, and he has, he has met it with a smile, a pivot, and a renewed sense of direction. In the moments I have stumbled, Yem has been there to help me back up, while carrying his own weight. He makes me want to be a better version of myself.

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

I am genuinely excited to return to UnitedHealth Group through the UnitedHealth Leadership Experience after graduation. Having watched my family navigate multiple health crises where we’ve struggled to obtain preauthorization and then had necessary procedures denied or delayed, improving healthcare from the inside isn’t an abstract career goal. It’s personal. Whether I’m working to build better work environments for nurses and physicians or finding new pathways toward affordability and value-based care, I can’t wait to start.

The second item is one I hope runs alongside everything else I do: serving on the boards of theatre organizations. Through the Golub Capital Nonprofit Board Fellows program, I served as a fellow on Long Wharf Theatre’s board, and the experience only deepened a conviction I’ve held since I first stepped into a theatre: that live performance is the purest form of storytelling we have, and that stories change the world. They make us human. I want to be one of the people who keeps that artform alive and accessible, so that the next generation of diverse and groundbreaking artists can make that impact.

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