Yash Maheshwari

Stanford Graduate School of Business

“Turned around companies at Blackstone, now building community at Stanford. Driven by speed and growth.”

Hometown: Gwalior, India

Fun Fact About Yourself: I know how to speak Japanese but have never been to Japan.

Undergraduate School and Major: IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Kanpur, Electrical Engineering with ML/AI minor

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Associate at Blackstone Private Equity in India

What has been the best part of living in the Bay Area and Silicon Valley so far? The sun. Coming from India, I was really worried about US weather since I’m used to the warm Mumbai climate with a cool sea breeze. But Stanford has kept me happy. I love taking walks around campus, watching trees change colors through the seasons under bright sun and blue California sky. It sounds simple, but after years of working long hours in offices, having that daily ritual of walking through campus has been grounding.

The other thing I love is the diversity here. I came to the GSB to experience different cultures by meeting different people, but I’ve been able to do that outside Stanford as well. You can find all kinds of food, festivals, and events in the Bay related to different cultures around the world. Going to Indian restaurants and festivals makes me feel closer to home when I miss it.

Aside from your classmates and location, what was the key part of Stanford GSB’s MBA programming that led you to choose this business school and why was it so important to you? GSB’s values and the alumni. In my previous job at Blackstone, I had the pleasure of working with two GSB alumni. I also met several alumni in India after getting the GSB offer. The excitement I saw in them and their values really resonated with me. Empathy, respect for others, ownership, integrity, striving for greatness, and engaging intellectually. More than that, GSB’s culture of openness to failure, vulnerability, stepping out of your comfort zone, and embracing diverse opinions stood out. I wanted to come to a place that forces me to break out of my mold, instead of a business school that reinforces what I’ve already done.

Courses like Touchy Feely (Interpersonal Dynamics), Engineering a Remarkable Life, Winning Writing, Strategic Communication, and Humor: A Serious Business made me realize that these values aren’t limited to extracurricular culture but are central to academic life here as well.

What has been the most important thing that you’ve learned at Stanford GSB so far? Prioritization. And I don’t mean the textbook kind where you rank tasks by urgency. I mean the hard, personal kind where you have to choose between things that all matter to you.

I’m in a long-distance relationship with my girlfriend back in India, which means time zone math is a daily exercise. Add to that, I have the academic workload, recruiting for summer internships, community events I’m helping organize, and other social events happening almost every night. Early on, I tried to do everything and quickly realized that spreading myself across all of it meant I wasn’t fully present for any of it. The turning point was when I overcame the feeling of FOMO and started saying no to things that didn’t deeply resonate with me. I focused on a few career paths instead of attending every possible recruiting session. I prioritized my relationship and making the most of the learning experience here. And honestly, AI has been a big enabler. Generative AI tools are my buddies now, helping me be more efficient with my academic work (yes, GSB actively encourages us to use AI!) so I can spend time on the things that matter most.

What course, club or activity have you enjoyed the most so far at Stanford GSB? I’m really enjoying Winning Writing, taught by Glenn Kramon, who was an editor at the New York Times. At The Times, reporters he supervised and edited won 10 Pulitzer Prizes and were finalists 25 times. The course has taught me how to write compelling cold emails, how to pitch myself, and how to communicate under pressure. This is exactly the type of knowledge I hoped to gain from the GSB. It sounds like a simple thing, but learning how to write a single email that gets a busy person to respond has been one of the most practically useful skills I’ve picked up here.

I’m also glad to be part of the leadership team at SABSA, the South Asian Business Students Association. I’ve already organized a Holi celebration and a Bollywood movie screening even before officially taking charge. I enjoy this because I love building community through shared experiences, and I also love showing Indian culture to my classmates who haven’t been exposed to it before.

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: At Blackstone, I was going through the monthly financial performance of one of our EdTech portfolio companies as part of a routine summary for the Managing Directors. While reviewing the cashflow, I discovered the company had only 12 months of cash runway left. Nobody had been tracking this metric closely. I flagged it to the senior team, and after internal discussions, we brought in the CEO and business head for urgent strategy conversations.

Rather than just identifying the problem, I raised my hand to go work from the company’s office and help them build the turnaround plan from the ground up. Over the next few weeks, I helped the company identify 30+ cost reduction levers across multiple departments, quantify the opportunity for each, and set monthly targets with specific owners. I also helped them build a cashflow structure from scratch and develop a working capital breakdown to identify the sources of cash leakage. The company went from a negative 15% margin to positive 4%, and from burning $5 million per quarter to generating $2 million. The CEO wrote to the deal partner saying they wouldn’t have been able to do this without my help and asked if I could stay on for another couple of months.

What made this special to me wasn’t just the financial turnaround. It was that I chose to get in the trenches with the management team rather than operating from a distance, and that approach ended up being the difference.

Describe your biggest accomplishment as an MBA student so far? I became the Chair of the Student Association’s International Committee. All my initiatives have revolved around one question: How do I solve the real problems international students face? Before joining GSB, I felt there needed to be more resources to help international students prepare for life in the US, which can be very different from where you’ve lived before. To address this, I’m building a handbook for international students that will be a one-stop resource for all their concerns. We also launched “Culture Crew,” where we form groups of 4-5 students from different cultures at the GSB so they can learn from each other’s backgrounds. It’s the first time we’re doing this, and our hope is to establish it as a GSB tradition alongside things like Leadership Labs squads.

On a lighter note: in one of our courses, Business Intelligence from Big Data, we had a prediction challenge where teams compete on a public Kaggle leaderboard to help a business solve a data problem. The class is filled with former data scientists, tech PMs, and ML engineers, so I was nervous as an ex-PE person. I paired up with another former PE classmate and we ended up finishing on the podium. It was a small thing in the scheme of the course, but beating data scientists at their own game with creative data engineering felt like a real win.

What has been your best memory as an MBA so far?

On campus: It was the time I spent with my squad in Leadership Labs. We went through business case simulations every week in a group of six, and this was my first real experience with vulnerability at the GSB. You receive direct feedback from your peers on how you act in the simulations, and you push yourself to stretch into goals that feel uncomfortable. The culmination was the Executive Challenge, where over 200 GSB alumni came to campus to act as board members while we played CXOs of a company. I was able to stretch into my leadership goals during that simulation, and our squad leader, an Arbuckle Fellow from the second-year class, congratulated me on the growth she’d seen. That day is one of my best memories from my first quarter.

Off campus: It was learning how to ski. We organize weekend trips with classmates to places like Napa Valley, Lake Tahoe, and national parks. This January, I visited Palisades at Tahoe with some friends, and one of them taught me how to ski. Going from falling every few seconds to skiing independently the next day felt incredible. I still remember those slopes.

What advice would you give to a prospective applicant looking to join the Stanford GSB Class of 2028?

Be yourself, but be prepared to change yourself as well. Come with a few goals for what you want to get out of the GSB, but come with an open mind at the same time. Be open to learning through diverse perspectives and stepping out of your comfort zone to try new things. These are two years you might not get ever again, so prepare to make the most of them.

Also, be genuine and empathetic. Genuineness and empathy go a long way. If you help the people around you and are good to the people around you, it will come back to reward you someday. The cycle of karma goes on.

DON’T MISS: MEET THE STANFORD GSB MBA CLASS OF 2027

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