Michael Olenick: The Deck Is Dead

This is a series about how AI is changing business school education, short interviews with faculty at various schools focused on the use of AI in business and business education.

While this series examines the impact of AI in business education, as a longtime tech entrepreneur and a decade-long research fellow at INSEAD, I find the shift borders on shocking. The deck is dead – or dying, at least, reborn from static slides into living prototypes right in the heart of Silicon Valley.

Below, I talk with Kostas Bimpikis, the Jeffrey S. Skoll Professor of Operations, Information & Technology at Stanford Graduate School of Business who earned a Ph.D. from MIT, about a class where non-engineering business school students are creating prototypes rather than decks to ideate, iterate, and describe a prospective business. Students spend about half the class with traditional lectures, either via faculty or visitors, and the other half working on specific prototypes.

This idea represents a seismic change not only at Stanford but to the overall venture community, an expectation that MBAs show up at coffee hours or pitches not with a static deck but with a functional early-stage prototype, finishing the class showcasing their projects.

Bimpikis notes that students know the difference between these early-stage prototypes and finished software; this is Stanford, after all, with a world-class computer science engineering department. The purpose of the exercise is not to create a program but, like the deck before it, to model, ideate, discuss, and describe a business, a major change to business education and the startup community overall.

Q: Tell me about what you’re doing at Stanford with AI and teaching.

My core MBA class is Optimization and Simulation Modeling, the first technical class MBAs take at the GSB. We’re modernizing it to bring in more AI. But the class I think will interest you more is one I taught last spring for the first time: Digital Platforms in the Age of AI.

The idea was to combine rigorous academic content on how marketplaces work with hands-on experimentation using tools like Colab, where students could essentially code in plain English with Gemini embedded. Every session split between me lecturing on marketplace design and students working through live exercises.

Q: What kinds of exercises?

We built a matching marketplace using their own professional data, so they could see in real time how changing the matching algorithm changed who they were paired with. We ran a dynamic pricing simulation modeled on ride-sharing. The highlight was a live prediction market I built, modeled on Polymarket, where I played the role of the manipulator without telling them. They had to figure out what was happening while watching prices move in real time. Engagement was off the charts.

Q: The final projects sound like the real story though.

Completely. The main deliverable was a team prototype of a marketplace concept, built from scratch. I was blown away by the quality. Students with zero technical background built working MVPs. One key thing they told me afterward: the class gave them permission to try. They had ideas sitting in the back of their heads for years. What they took away was how easy it now is to prototype, and that changed their behavior after the class ended. I still meet with students every week who want to talk through their ideas.

Q: I want to push on something. Does building a quick prototype give Stanford MBAs a false sense of what it takes to go from prototype to production?

That’s a great point and I think about it. I don’t believe our students have the illusion that vibe coding skills build a sustainable company. What Stanford MBAs have always been good at is finding the right business model and, being in the heart of Silicon Valley, finding the right engineering talent. That collaboration model continues. What’s changed is the prototype no longer requires finding the engineer first. You build it yourself, test the idea, get conviction, and then go find the team to build the real thing.

Q: You mentioned something I haven’t heard anywhere else. That prototypes are replacing PowerPoint decks, not just in class but in campus coffee chats.

That’s what students are telling me. The centerpiece of those conversations used to be a slide deck. Now it’s an MVP. They have access to tools like Lovable and Claude and Cursor, and it’s almost as easy to build a small working prototype as it is to build a PowerPoint. So they’re showing rather than telling. That’s a meaningful shift in how ideas get discussed and evaluated, and it’s happening organically, not because anyone assigned it.

Q: Do you think this is the future?

For this generation of students, it already is.

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After our interview, Prof. Bimpikis shared some student feedback:

The course did a great job of grounding platform strategy in real cases across Airbnb, Uber, and the others in a way that made the frameworks actually stick. The live prediction market simulation was a highlight for me. Watching the market unfold in real time made the theory tangible in a way a case discussion alone wouldn’t have. Presenting our sublet leasing platform to the class was equally valuable. The reaction from our classmates, and your encouragement, gave our team enough conviction to keep pushing. We’re now actively working through feasibility and thinking seriously about how a rollout could look across MBA and Law School programs.

I really enjoyed the course material and just the fact that I learned the accessibility and ease of vibecoding a totally new idea through the final project was awesome.

I’m reaching out because I just started building a startup called Paréa, partly inspired by our Digital Platforms in the Age of AI course and the conversations we had around marketplaces.

And, finally, a closing thought from Kostas:

“What is impressive,” he writes, “is that they built their prototypes, recorded a pitch video, and prepared a presentation in 1-2 weeks in the midst of a very busy quarter!”

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Michael Olenick, JD, is a former INSEAD research fellow and founder of VSTRAT.ai. He has spent four decades building AI and expert systems; his research has been used at INSEAD and, before then, cited by Congress and media on how to resolve the 2008 era financial crisis. Michael currently lives with his partner, Anastassia, in Austin, Texas.

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