Karan David

Yale School of Management

“Builder of ideas, communities, and institutions; powered by purpose, people, and improbably well optimized systems.”

Hometown: Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh, India

Fun fact about yourself: I spend my free time maximizing credit card points, wearing great fragrances, and behaving like India’s batting order affects my credit score

Undergraduate School and Degree: St. Stephen’s College, University of Delhi – Bachelor of Arts, Economics (Honors)

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? Electronic Arts – Manager, Corporate Strategy: Led strategic initiatives across Asia Pacific, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America

Where did you intern during the summer of 2025? IBM – Corporate Strategy Consultant, New York City

Where will you be working after graduation? McKinsey & Company – Associate, Miami

Community Work and Leadership Roles in Business School: Business school should stretch you beyond your résumé. I wanted my MBA experience to expand how I lead, serve, and contribute to a community. That took shape through student leadership, teaching, applied research, and service across Yale:

* Student Co-Chair, Title IX Working Group: Helped lead a student, faculty, and staff group that advances awareness and dialogue around Title IX while shaping a more informed and respectful community

* Orientation Leader: Welcomed Yale SOM’s Master’s in Global Business and Society cohort of 75+ students from 20+ countries; presented to 600+ students on emotional well-being and career development

* Social Impact Consulting Club: Partnered with the founder and leadership team at New Haven Promise to define the organization’s purpose and codify its values

* Teaching Assistant: Guided learning across seven MBA core courses in strategy, operations, accounting, finance, economics, and negotiations

* Applied Research: Through the Yale Center for Customer Insights, Program on Stakeholder Innovation and Management and the Chief Executive Leadership Institute, contributed to institutional work on consumer behavior and executive leadership

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school? The strongest communities are built on trust, care, and the courage to take culture seriously. The achievement I am most proud of at Yale SOM was serving as Student Co-Chair of the Title IX Working Group during its 10th anniversary year, a milestone that reflected a decade of student-led work since the group’s founding in 2015. What began as “only a handful” of people grew into a lasting part of the SOM experience, with the group helping lead awareness campaigns, surveys, community-resource promotion, and an annual Title IX Awareness Week. By the time I served, that work had become embedded in school culture. 2026 marked the fifth annual Title IX Awareness Week, and the anniversary year made clear how sustained student leadership can shape a more thoughtful, accountable, and caring community. Working alongside Dean Anita Sharif-Hyder, Dean Rebecca Udler, Rachel Kinney, Emma Barron, Delia Reyes, Ellie Utter, and Kristen Soto showed me that culture is built quietly and intentionally, through care, consistency, and community.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? A model can tell you what a business is worth; great strategy tells you what it could become. In my first year at Bain & Company, as a 21-year-old straight out of college, I worked on a due diligence and value creation plan tied to an $850M investment thesis across three global gaming platforms. I was the most junior person on the team, but I got to focus on the question that mattered most to me: how these platforms could grow beyond their current footprint through localization, international expansion, and the right adjacency bets. My analysis helped shape a plan to drive 30-50% growth in the platforms’ user base. I am proud of that work because it showed me, very early in my career, that clear thinking from any seat at the table can help shape consequential decisions.

Why did you choose this business school? I chose Yale SOM because its integrated core treated business the way I believe serious leadership works: in systems, not silos. The problems I care most about are never just financial or operational; they are human, institutional, and strategic all at once. Yale SOM’s stakeholder lens made that complexity central, and that felt true to the kind of leader I hope to become. What made it especially compelling was that Yale let me keep widening that lens across the university, beyond management alone.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? The best teachers wake up your mind before the coffee does. I had the privilege of learning from and being mentored by extraordinary faculty at Yale, including Zoe Chance, Teresa Chahine, Daniel Esty and Magnus Resch. My favorite professor was Professor Jiwoong Shin, who taught both Customer and Marketing Strategy. He brought such clarity and energy to the classroom that the 8:30 a.m. lecture felt easy. Most of all, his teaching on the resource-based view of strategy made strategy feel less like theory and more like x-ray vision. He showed me that strategy begins with understanding a firm’s unique resources, how they fit the environment, and how they create enduring advantage.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? The classes you remember most are the ones that change how you see people. I was fortunate to take multiple courses that did exactly that, including State and Society with Mushfiq Mobarak and Ian Shapiro, and Negotiations with Barry Nalebuff, Daylian Cain, and Corey Cusimano. My favorite MBA course was Customer Insights and Applications with Treeny Ahmed, Ravi Dhar, and Nathan Novemsky. The customer sits at the heart of every product, service, and solution, and this course treated understanding people as the starting point of good strategy. Through the Discovery Project with HP Inc., I learned that insight is the discipline of listening closely enough to notice what others miss, then translating that understanding into action.

The idea from the course that stayed with me was the beliefs-goals-choices framework, which taught me that what people believe matters, and the choices they make matter, but asking them to explain how their beliefs produced their choices was far less useful. It made the course feel like a lesson in leadership as much as in marketing research.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? The best business school events reveal a school’s values in action. My favorite Yale SOM event was the Yale CEO Summit in New York City. Through my work with the Chief Executive Leadership Institute and Professor Jeff Sonnenfeld, I saw leadership at its clearest: judgment under pressure, candor without performance, and consequence without theatrics. The summit brought together CEOs, policymakers, and leading academics in an intimate, off the record, highly interactive setting with none of the usual salesmanship. That gave the conversations unusual substance and made the summit feel like Yale SOM at its best: intellectually serious, outward facing, and deeply committed to leadership in business and society.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? One of Yale’s greatest gifts is how much of it sits just beyond your own school. The one thing I would do differently is take more courses across the university. I took the SOM classes I most wanted and cross-registered at Yale Law School, the Jackson School of Global Affairs, and the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Each one widened my frame and made me a better student of business. Looking back, I would have treated Yale itself as my second campus from day one and cross-registered even more aggressively.

What was the most impactful case study you had in business school and what was the biggest lesson you learned from it? A crisis can expose more than a mistake; it can expose the culture that made the mistake possible. The most impactful case I studied was Rio Tinto: In the Wake of a Crisis, Rio Tinto’s CEO Leads a Refounding, taught by Jakob Stausholm (former CEO of Rio Tinto) and Jon Iwata in Stakeholders, Management & Capitalism. What stayed with me was Stausholm’s refusal to treat the Juukan Gorge incident as a narrow crisis management problem. He saw it as a signal that the company’s deeper foundations – its culture, values, purpose, and stakeholder relationships – needed rebuilding. The lesson was simple and lasting: leadership isn’t fixing the headline; it’s rebuilding the institution that produced it.

What business leader do you admire most? The leaders you admire most change the size of your ambition. For me, that is Mihir Vaidya, Chief Strategy Officer at Electronic Arts. Mihir was my former boss, and he showed me that ambition and generosity are not competing virtues. He could zoom out to think about the future of a global business, then zoom back in and improve the quality of one conversation or one piece of work. He had a rare ability to bring rigor without ego and intensity without anxiety. He expected excellence and created an environment where others wanted to rise to the occasion. That combination of clarity and humanity is the kind of leader I hope to become.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? One of Yale’s smartest choices was treating AI as a practical tool rather than a futuristic ornament. I used it in classes and projects the way modern teams do: to synthesize research, generate hypotheses, test angles, and improve early thinking. Through Song Ma’s Silicon Valley Experience and John Kao’s Finding Yourself in the Future of Creativity, I came to see AI as a very powerful intern with infinite stamina and occasionally terrible judgment. That forced me to become more precise about the problem, more demanding about the output, and more aware of what only people can do well. AI is great at speed, range, and pattern recognition. The human work still sits elsewhere: taste, judgment, trust, discernment, and the ability to know which ideas are interesting, which are empty, and which are worth building around.

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? The classmates I admire most are those who make a community better simply by how they show up. Yale SOM is full of such extraordinary classmates, but if I had to choose one, it would be Ellie Utter. As Student Government President, my co-chair on the Title IX Working Group, and a fellow Orientation Leader, Ellie has shaped Yale SOM in visible and lasting ways. She brings energy to every room while making people feel seen, valued, and ready to contribute. She is the classmate I learned most from in business school. Her leadership is grounded in purpose, generosity, and conviction, and she has a rare ability to make everyone around her better. In a community full of strong ideas and strong personalities, Ellie builds trust, handles disagreement with care, and raises the standard for all of us.

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

1. Lead a global company or institution through a period that truly matters

2. Build a platform that helps talented people access opportunity, upside, and better decision-making

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

“Karan is a second-year student in the MBA program at the Yale School of Management and strongly demonstrates the qualities outlined for this award.

I have had the privilege of watching Karan excel both inside and outside the classroom. He is an outstanding student and has been selected by multiple faculty members to serve as a Teaching Assistant for their rigorous courses.

Karan also served as an Orientation Leader for our incoming students, providing exceptional support to first-year students. He led and facilitated numerous sessions during Orientation and continues to mentor and guide students throughout the year.

In addition, Karan is the student Co-Chair of SOM’s Title IX Working Group, where he has helped create programming for the community and raise awareness on important issues around sexual misconduct. He also ran the Sober Buddies program, helping ensure that classmates remain safe at social gatherings and fostering a culture of care and support.

Karan is deeply involved at Yale SOM. He consistently gives back to the community in meaningful ways and serves as a role model through his work ethic and dedication. He can often be seen proudly displaying his school spirit, further contributing to the strength of our community. I strongly recommend Karan for this award and am deeply grateful for the positive impact he has made at SOM.”

Rebecca Udler
Assistant Dean of Academic Affairs and Student Life at the Yale School of Management

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