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A podcast where global leaders from the Harvard Business School Owner/President Management (OPM) community join in a personal capacity and share the real decisions, failures, and mental models behind building enduring companies.
This podcast is independent and not affiliated with Harvard Business School.
61 Episodes
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Send a text Being a woman raised in a traditional family, married young, without completing college or having any work experience and then stepping in to lead a 96-year-old legacy business in the male-dominated shipping industry is an extraordinary challenge. Layer onto that the responsibilities of motherhood, running a household, and eventually navigating succession without a clear heir, and the scale of Nafeesa Moloobhoy’s journey becomes clear. She entered business out of necessity, not am...
Send a text Vivek Bhargava's philosophy is that the best entrepreneurial life is built on integrity, optimism, learning, and continuous stretching with happiness as the foundation, not the reward. Vivek is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and author of Happiness is a Muscle. He reflects on his journey from joining his family’s business to building Communicate2, one of India’s leading digital performance agencies, selling it to Dentsu, and later launching Consumer.ai. He also shares hard-earne...
Send a text Sucharita Basu, Managing Partner of Aquilaw, speaks about how leadership systems, KPIs, and lessons from the Harvard Business School OPM program helped her scale a modern law firm from two founders to around 150 professionals across multiple cities. After nearly two decades in practice, Sucharita and her husband Sanjay launched Aquilaw to fill a gap in the market - a modern, mid-tier law firm that combined professional structure with entrepreneurial agility. Their goal was to buil...
Send a text One of the strongest realizations from this conversation is the importance of a family constitution in sustaining a multi-generational business. Many family companies assume alignment will naturally exist because of shared blood and history, but Fernando’s experience shows the opposite—alignment has to be designed intentionally. Their family constitution acts as a living document that defines rules, expectations, values, and even behavioral norms for the family. It is reviewed eve...
Send a text Daf Dubbelman is a real estate entrepreneur, endurance athlete, and Harvard Business School OPM participant who is completing the program for the second time. Daf shares the mindset that drives both his athletic and business pursuits: start before you feel ready, challenge conventional limits, and always ask, “What’s the worst that can happen?” Through stories of running marathons in places like Iran and North Korea, preparing for 226-km Ironman races, and even registering for a 6...
Send a text Ankit Gupta, second-generation entrepreneur and leader of the Holistic Group, shares how business coaching played a critical role in sharpening his leadership, focus, and decision-making. While formal learning through Harvard Business School’s OPM strengthened his strategic thinking, Ankit credits business coach Rahul Jain for helping translate global frameworks, especially the Pareto (80/20) principle into actionable habits suited to Indian businesses and people dynamics. Through...
Send a text Devendra Surana describes his shift from founder-operator to builder of an enduring organization. Early failures (first 2–3 years) forced humility, sharper strategy, and resilience. Over time he leaned into what he’s best at - new product development, expansion planning, and “resource mapping” - and deliberately offloaded daily operations (production/dispatch/collections) to professional leadership. A key move was hiring a CEO 5 years ago for risk mitigation, succession planning, ...
Send a text It’s rare to attend Harvard Business School as a student and even rarer to later become the subject of two HBS case studies. Billy Jaime did both. While enrolled in the Owner/President Management (OPM) program, his work building MIA, a for-profit social enterprise delivering affordable housing at scale stood out so strongly that renowned HBS professor Linda Applegate wrote two cases on his journey. What makes Billy’s story extraordinary is not just the scale - over 70,000 homes bu...
Send a text With nearly three decades of entrepreneurial leadership, deep OPM roots, and the humility of a lifelong learner, Daniel Silva brings a rare blend of technical rigor, family-business insight, and reflective wisdom to this conversation. As the co-founder of DMS International, Daniel shares lessons from building and scaling a 29-year family business alongside his wife. Trained as a software engineer and now serving as Chief Innovation Officer, Daniel reflects on entrepreneurship as a...
Send a text Felix Kues is a serial entrepreneur, deep-tech investor, and Harvard Business School OPM participant. Felix shares his journey from building AI software companies across multiple continents to founding a highly automated venture fund and later launching an AI platform for investors during OPM. He reflects on how global exposure shaped his leadership, the loneliness of entrepreneurship, and the importance of cultural fluency in decision-making. Felix candidly discusses mistakes, es...
Send a text Sudhakar Kadavasal, a second-generation entrepreneur from Chennai has built and led businesses across IT services, logistics, chemicals, construction, and energy, with operations in India and Dubai. Sudhakar shares how his father’s early entrepreneurial leap created a foundation that enabled him to take bold risks, including returning to India in 1997 and later starting afresh in Dubai. He reflects on leadership lessons that transcend industries, especially people management, capi...
Send us Fan Mail What began as a $2,000 experiment at age 13 has grown into one of Brazil’s most influential independent platforms, bootstrapped to over $40M in cumulative revenue, 800,000+ paying subscribers, and 30M annual viewers. This conversation goes beyond the mechanics of building a media company. It explores how belief systems, values, and shared identity can become a lasting competitive advantage. Lucas Ferrugem’s story shows that when media gives voice to what people feel but rarel...
Send a text This conversation is a powerful reminder that entrepreneurs must consciously evolve from being hands-on operators to becoming true leaders. In the early stages, control feels necessary. Every decision, review, and execution flows through the founder. But scale, sustainability, and sanity only come when the entrepreneur shifts focus to building systems, senior leadership, culture, and reputation. Ankita Gupta’s journey as founder of Digitactix shows that leadership maturity is less...
Send a text Third-generation entrepreneurship isn’t about inheriting a business. It’s about inheriting a promise and upgrading it for the next era. In this episode, Portuguese pharmacist and OPM 67 participant Antonio Liberal shares how his family’s retail pharmacy business founded by his grandfather in 1942, survived loss, regulation, and economic shocks, and still found ways to grow. After his parents passed away when he and his brothers were very young, they carried the legacy forward, sca...
Send a text Build adjacencies before you chase scale. Enduring companies don’t grow by random diversification. They expand by moving one thoughtful step outward from their core DNA, solving the next customer pain that naturally sits beside what they already do well. Abhijit Vaish’s journey with InstaPower is a story of patient, adjacency-led growth rooted in engineering depth. From early exposure to entrepreneurship through his father, to conceiving an LED-focused business plan at Purdue when...
Send a text He sold his company to OpenAI last month and the story behind it is a masterclass in patient entrepreneurship, long-term bets, and knowing when to start. Tomasz Kulakowski didn’t start his entrepreneurial journey fresh out of college. He started after losing a job, being told he was “overqualified,” and asking himself a simple but dangerous question: If I’m overqualified to join, maybe I’m qualified to build. That decision, made in his early 30s, led to multiple companies, several...
Send a text Vinay Pasricha shares his unfiltered and potentially controversial observations from 25 years as a serial entrepreneur in India. He ran an education training company that scaled to 200,000 students across 40 cities before winding it down. Five years ago, he pivoted to AI, building talent acquisition automation that reduced recruitment time from 6 weeks to 24 hours and costs from ₹2 lakhs to ₹3,000, a 100x improvement. His platform now has 1.5 million candidates and can find any pr...
Send a text Elite endurance fitness demands structure, early mornings, repetition, and the ability to keep going when your brain wants to stop. Mohamed Mahlab uses that same “choose the hard thing” mindset to challenge himself as a leader: he sets public commitments, builds disciplined routines, and carries responsibility for thousands of livelihoods. Starting sport at 38 - overweight, out of breath, finishing last, he rebuilt confidence through daily training, then progressed step-by-s...
Send a text This talk is really about rewiring what “success” means. From chasing validation, money, and outcomes to building with reflection, detachment, discipline, and community, while protecting your inner life (mental health, spirituality, relationships, and creative practice). Somdutta Singh shares how she broke away from a “doctors and scholars” family expectation to pursue entrepreneurship, driven early by the idea of high risk, high reward but later grounding that drive in reflection...
Send a text How do you go about scaling in an unorganized industry that’s mid-disruption—while commodity prices swing wildly and brand “differences” can feel paper-thin? You stop trying to sell a product and start engineering trust, systems, and culture that compound over decades. Akshay Verma is a third-generation leader of Verma Jewelers in Himachal Pradesh, India, about modernizing a legacy business in a traditionally unorganized jewelry market. As competition intensifies with corporate ch...
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