Kasra Khalili

Kelley Direct Online MBA Program, Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business

“Devoted husband and dog-dad in DC, NOLA mentally, fueled by people, big ideas, and competition.”

Age: 33

Hometown: Washington, DC

Fun fact about yourself: I convinced my parents to let me homeschool my senior year of high school to chase tennis full-time. Everyone thought I was out of my mind. I was.

Undergraduate School and Degree: Bachelor of Science, Occupational Safety, Health, and Environment, Southeastern Louisiana University.

Where are you currently working? I’m a senior value advisor in the Value Management Office at Atlassian. I work at the intersection of product, sales, and marketing to quantify and communicate business value to executive audiences.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? Founding and growing the Business Value Consulting team from the ground up at Semrush. I came in when the function didn’t exist, no framework, no playbook, no team, and built it from zero. That meant creating the ROI models, the executive storytelling approach, the sales enablement materials, and establishing value function as a credible part of the go-to-market motion. Seeing it become a real function that influenced enterprise deals is something I’m genuinely proud of doing, because it required both strategic thinking and the operational grit to execute without a roadmap.

What made it stick for me is what it proved. As a former founder who’d spent his career in startups (Startup Grind and ODF), I didn’t expect to find that kind of build-from-scratch opportunity inside anestablished company. It showed me that the instincts I’d developed in smaller environments could translate to a much larger scale, which is exactly what I’m doing now. I’ve since moved from Semrush (recently acquired by Adobe) to Atlassian, where we’re building the value team again, this time at acompany roughly 10 times the size. Taking the principles from a firm of 1,200+ people and applying them at 15,000+ has been one of the most rewarding shifts of my career.

Why did you choose this school’s online MBA program?  The ranking is what got me to look at Kelley in the first place – it signaled that this was a program taken seriously by the institutions that care about the quality of online and hybrid education. But as I dug deeper, two things made Kelley stand out from the other programs I was considering.

First, it was the in-person components. Growing my network was a core reason I was doing this. For me, that kind of connection happens in person, not over a webcam. Kelley’s required immersions made that possible without forcing me to pause my career.

Second, it was the faculty. Every professor teaching in the online program is a full-time faculty member who also teaches the traditional MBA. No adjuncts brought in to record sessions and no canned video library. It was the same instructors, the same material, nearly the same pace as the residential cohort, calibrated for students who are working full-time. That told me Kelley wasn’t running the online program as a side offering. They’ve been refining it long enough that the improvements are compounding.

What was your favorite part of being in an online MBA program? The in-person experiences. I came in expecting an online program, and what I’ll actually remember most are the weeks spent face-to-face with my cohort.

In Yorkshire, we sat with cask brewers, tea houses, and rugby league clubs – businesses with 100 to 200 years of history – on how they balance heritage and innovation. In Paris, we spent time with Cartier, Schneider Electric, the OECD, plus a stop at Station F to hear startup pitches that pulled me right back to my founder days.

In DC, we spent a week at The Washington Campus hearing from former members of Congress, trade association executives, lobbyists, and regulatory experts on how business and policy actually intersect. Living here, I’d been steps away from all of it and never really appreciated how the system works until that week.

The online format gave me the flexibility to keep my career moving. The in-person weeks gave me something the format alone couldn’t, real people, in real places, working through real problems together. That mix is what made it my favorite part of the program. The classroom taught me frameworks. The immersions taught me how people actually use them.

How did your online MBA experience compare with your in-the-classroom experience as an undergraduate student? It’s a tough comparison because life stage matters as much as the format. In undergrad, I was 18, 19, 20, and what mattered to me then is very different from what matters to me at 33. With that caveat, the education itself at Kelley has been every bit as rigorous as what I remember from in-person classes.

The real difference is serendipity. Undergrad gave you the randomness of campus life, running into a professor after class, falling into a conversation with a classmate on the walk back, and the unplanned moments that turn into something. Online, that doesn’t happen on its own. You have to manufacture it, stay logged in longer, reach out deliberately, and build the connections that would have happened by accident in person. Once I accepted that, the experience became just as rich, it just required more intention.

What is your best piece of advice to an applicant for thriving in an online MBA program? Treat the network like it’s the curriculum. The flexibility of online learning is a feature, but it can also make you passive about connection. The people in your cohort are your best asset. Lean into the student leadership opportunities, show up to the in-person immersions with intention, and reach out to peers before you need something from them. I was involved in student leadership, focused on networking and professional development, and those relationships became some of the most valuable things I took out of the program. This comes back to the main difference between in-person and online: the network around you has to be tapped into deliberately. The program office, the emails, the prompts: those only take you so far. You have to reach out.

A few concrete habits: Be the first to set up a group project team. When you click with someone in a session, message them and ask for a follow-up sync. Connect with every classmate on LinkedIn – everyone. Most people won’t do this, which is exactly why it’s worth doing.

The long-tail value of an MBA isn’t the coursework alone. It’s the collective intelligence you build through the people around you, peers you have things in common with, and (just as importantly) peers you don’t. You can’t learn everything on your own, and you can’t lead rooms on your own. If you get into a program like this, know that the classes are only part of what you came for. The rest is who you choose to connect with along the way.

How has your online MBA education helped you in your current job? The biggest lift has been the feedback loop: learn something in class, test it at work, bring the results back to class. I was fortunate to be leading a team and sitting close to strategy at a large company, so the opportunities to apply ideas were everywhere. That loop let me show up day after day with fresh perspectives and an energy that a lot of people around me didn’t have – not for lack of capability, but because I genuinely wasn’t turning off.

Early on, I made a choice about how to frame that. I was going to be busy, I wasn’t going to get much downtime, so rather than treating it as a disadvantage I leaned into it as a competitive edge.

The second big lift is the one I mentioned earlier: when something comes up at work that I don’t have an answer to, I now have peers in specific industries I can reach out to, and professors I can email about a specific strategic question. That access has made me measurably better at my job.

Did you earn a promotion while in the program or immediately after graduation? Yes. I changed roles from my previous company to Atlassian, a firm roughly 10 times the size.

What made the move especially meaningful was a moment with my Kelley career coach that I’ll never forget. Early in the program, she’d asked me about my goals. At the time, I told her I wasn’t chasing a title. I wanted to keep my head down, grow my team, make the right hires, and put together a framework and a model that I could eventually take to a larger company and run again at scale. It wasn’t something I thought about often after that conversation.

About a year-and-a-half later, we reconnected. I mentioned that an unexpected opportunity had come up and I was somewhere in the middle of the process, genuinely debating whether to keep moving forward. She said, “Hold on a second” and pulled up her notes from our earlier conversation. She read back to me, almost word-for-word, the goal I’d described: Lead a team, prove out a model, and take it to a larger scale. It stopped me in my tracks. Whether consciously or subconsciously, I’d been working toward exactly that, and the role I was debating was a near-perfect match.

Something Kelley does extraordinarily well is help you hold a clear view of who you are and where you’re going, even when you’ve lost track of it yourself. It was one of the most clarifying moments of my time in the program.

Why did you pursue an online MBA program instead of a full-time residential or executive MBA program? Pausing my career wasn’t an option I wanted to take. By my early 30s, the mix of role, opportunity, and compensation I’d built was in a good place. Stepping out for a full-time program would have meant giving up momentum I’d worked hard to earn.

The trade-off was that I’d miss some of the in-person experience I genuinely wanted from an MBA. What made Kelley work for me was how seriously they treat the in-person component within an online format: required immersions, on-campus courses, and additional optional opportunities to connect face-to-face. That gave me enough of the in-person experience to feel like I wasn’t compromising on the part that mattered most, while still keeping my career on track. Online wasn’t a fallback, it was the right move.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? Kelley built a dedicated generative AI course that every student has access to. What stood out to me was the philosophy behind it. Kelley is very deliberate about establishing shared foundational knowledge across the cohort, whether through the standardized core sequence, the Excel primers, or the econ refreshers. They recognized AI needed the same treatment. Letting individual students or professors fill the gap on their own wouldn’t be enough for a technology moving this fast; everyone needed to be raised to a common floor.

On top of that, they invested in giving us real access to frontier tools – Gemini, NotebookLM, ChatGPT, and others – rather than asking us to figure it out on our own. Within individual classes, professors started providing prompt guidance and even forking assignments like “use AI for this one, don’t use it for this one.” That balance was useful, and so was their openness about navigating it in real time alongside us.

What I gained from it is a much more honest sense of where these tools help and where they don’t.

Watching Kelley’s approach evolve class by class over the last two-and-a-half years – how they refined what they wanted out of AI in the program and how they wanted us interacting with it – has been one of the more interesting parts of being in the program right now.

Number of Hours Per Week Spent on an Online MBA: 15–20 hours per week on average (varies by course load and deliverables).

What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? I want to lead at scale, not just a single team, but multiple functions within a department – sitting at the intersection of strategy, revenue, and customer value. Beyond the org chart, I’m focused on building influence through writing and mentorship, developing a voice in the value consulting and GTM space, and creating a path for other young professionals who are figuring out how to connect business strategy to measurable outcomes. I want to be someone who builds things and builds up people.

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