Hi, I’m Hannah! Welcome to Nonlinear News, where I write for smart, ambitious people choosing the nonlinear route.
Congrats to everyone who’s graduating in May! I’m at my brother’s graduation this weekend, so I figured I’d take this week’s newsletter as an opportunity to share the recording and takeaways from a Substack Live I did last weekend with Alexis Barber and Simi Shah, two fellow creatorpreneurs who also got their MBAs from Wharton.
If you want the full tea though, you’ll have to watch the live 🍵
For a long time, I was embarrassed to call myself a “creator” after getting my MBA.
Wharton grads are supposed to go into consulting, banking, PE, big tech, or a startup with a real title. Posting on LinkedIn and building a personal brand is not on that list.
It felt weird until I started getting to know Simi and Alexis, who graduated from Wharton the year after me. Simi runs South Asian Trailblazers, an award-winning podcast and media company, and advises C-suite execs on marketing strategy. Alexis hosts Too Smart For This, a podcast with 150+ episodes, wrote a book published by Penguin Random House, and built a creator business after working at YouTube.
Why we went to business school
For me, there’s an official answer I tell people and a real one.
The official answer is that I wanted to pivot into product management. I’d come up through investment banking and tech strategy and ops, and Wharton was one of the only ways to make that move without taking a huge pay cut at a tiny startup.
The real answer is that I was living in Latin America right after the pandemic, it was a lonely time, and I thought business school would be a silver bullet that fixed my career, network, social life, and a lot of other things that were not going so well. (It wasn’t.)
Talking to Simi and Alexis, what came through is that the three of us walked into Wharton from genuinely different starting points. Simi had already built South Asian Trailblazers into a real platform before she applied — a podcast with traction, a growing community, an advisory practice. Alexis came in straight from launching YouTube Shorts at Google, with her own creator work already in motion. Neither of them was using the MBA to find a career. They were using it to build on top of one.
What business school actually gave us
It taught me the thing I thought I wanted was not the thing I wanted.
I got the product internship I’d been gunning for, realized I didn’t want to build products from the back end, and pivoted toward launching and storytelling instead. The silver bullet came as a result of realizing business school was not the silver bullet.
The network also took longer to mean something than I expected. In school you meet everyone, but you don’t really know who’ll stick around until after graduation. Some of the connections that I relate to the most — including with Simi and Alexis — only became real after we were out of the bubble.
One of my favorite moments in the conversation was Simi describing comparing herself to a past version of herself, walking over the same bridge in Philly beause she came out of the MBA more confident in her business and vision.
For Alexis, the MBA was more additive than reinventive. She kept scaling Too Smart For This through school, landed her Penguin Random House book, and treated the two years as a platform on top of what was already working. She talks about her time at Wharton as a chapter where she blended “cultural fluency with strategic rigor” — and that’s a pretty accurate way to describe how she navigted it. She came in with the audience and the cultural read, used Wharton for the operational and strategic muscle, and walked out with both.
Our 3 different post-grad paths
My path was the most typical of the three, at least at first.
After the product internship didn’t pan out, I took a chief of staff role on the go-to-market side at a mid-sized B2B SaaS company. On paper, the dream business school outcome — fully remote, well paid, normal hours, reporting to the CEO.
A couple months in, my very clear thought was: this cannot be it for me. The job was fine but felt stagnant.
Content was the thing I’d been thinking about but avoiding for years. Once I started doing it on LinkedIn — badly and publicly, in front of the same classmates who would actually see me — it became how I got my current marketing job at a startup.
Simi didn’t take a corporate job after graduation. She went full-time on South Asian Trailblazers and her advisory work with C-suite leaders on digital branding and strategic communications. Her business now is a media company, a community, and an advisory practice running in parallel — the podcast keeps building reach, the community deepens the platform, the advisory side monetizes the strategic expertise the platform proves.
Alexis didn’t take a corporate job either. She went full-time on her creator business and has spent the year out of school building it like an actual business, not a brand exercise. The Penguin Random House book is one piece of it. The 11K+ subscriber Substack is another. So is the personal branding coaching she now offers — cohorts, 1:1 work, office hours, a course launching at $500+ — that turns the audience into revenue without burning her out.
So when people talk about post-MBA paths as “consulting vs. tech vs. PE,” the three of us are a useful reminder that it’s also “salaried job vs. founder vs. founder-with-different-business-model.” All three were available to all three of us. We all picked differently.
Why building publicly is so “cringe” in school
Business school loves entrepreneurship in theory, but it has a very specific idea of what serious entrepreneurship looks like.
The classic business school startup is an AI company with a pitch deck, no revenue, and a few classmates nodding about TAM. Meanwhile, Simi and Alexis already had real businesses with customers and revenue — Simi’s podcast and advisory work, Alexis’s media and audience — but the perception in school could be completely different.
If you’re building a creator business, hosting events, or making money from something that looks too internet-native, the questions you get are “Why don’t you just be an influencer?” and “Is this a serious thing?” In the cringe stage, that’s hard to brush off. So I waited until after graduation to even think of building a platform.
At Wharton, I’d hear classmates talk about people who posted daily snippets from their lives. They weren’t even trying to build creator businesses. They were just posting for fun. And people would still talk behind their backs and say it was ridiculous. The thought “who does she think she is?” is everywhere.
How to start creating content from scratch
The first version of my content calendar came from posting my career story on LinkedIn and letting people book free calls with me. I did around 20 of those calls, treated them like customer research, dumped the notes into ChatGPT, and asked what I should post about.
If you don’t want to do calls, the better question is: where does your alpha come from? (Yes, I used to work in finance in case you couldn’t tell!) What can only you say in a way AI can’t copy and a stranger can’t paste into a chatbot?
If you’re summarizing the news or reporting on trends in a way anyone could say, you’re competing with everyone. The better question is what only you can say that the people you want to speak to actually want to hear.
Going to business school can be a source of alpha. So can working at a top company.
Simi has been doing this for years through South Asian Trailblazers, and her advantage is specificity. She didn’t try to be a generalist career platform. She built for a specific community, with a clear point of view about who she was elevating and why, and grew the audience and the advisory book on the back of that focus. Her alpha is the depth of her niche.
Alexis’s advantage is different. She came from inside the platforms — she launched YouTube Shorts at Google — and she now teaches the operational and strategic side of personal branding to ambitious women. Her alpha comes from having been inside the systems she’s now creating on.
The 3 questions to ask before getting an MBA
These are the 3 questions I suggest that everyone ask before they get an MBA:
Do you actually need the MBA to pivot into your desired industry or next role?
Will it tangibly increase your salary or earning potential?
Do you care about the network it will bring you?
Sponsored consultant who doesn’t hate the job and is fine with two years of party adult summer camp? Go.
Trying to break into banking or consulting? Still one of the clearest paths.
Trying to do social media at a B2C brand? Building content on Instagram is probably the better proof point.
Trying to break into tech or startups? Writing thoughtfully on LinkedIn can do more for you than the degree.
I’d be careful about the MBA as a vague “I need to figure my life out” move. The environment will pull you toward whatever everyone else is recruiting for that week.
Simi and Alexis answer this differently than I do, because I came in trying to pivot. They came in to compound.
The three questions above are most useful if you’re using the MBA as a career change, which is how I was using it. If you’re using it to invest in something already running — like Simi was with South Asian Trailblazers, or Alexis was with Too Smart For This — the math changes. The ROI is less about salary or pivot, and more about how the two years compound what’s already in motion: the network, the credibility, the time, the proximity to people you’d otherwise have to chase. Simi has written about her version of this calculation from the founder side; both of them are evidence that the founder version of the MBA decision is a different question than the career-pivot version.
Who goes to business school (and who doesn’t)
People at the very top of their careers, who already have it figured out, usually don’t go to business school.
Business school has a high floor. Most people there have already achieved a lot — Ivy League, banking, consulting, tech. But people running million-dollar businesses or raising tens of millions of dollars are not going to business school.
In some startup circles, especially on the West Coast, you get more street cred for being a business school dropout than a graduate. On tech Twitter, the MBA can actively count against you because it signals you’ve always operated inside the traditional path.
That said, Simi and Alexis are both walking arguments against it — Simi running a media company, community, and advisory practice; Alexis running a creator-author-speaker business with brand partnerships, a Penguin Random House book, and a paying community. Building something during or after business school is evidence that you can do more than collect credentials during it.
The most important thing we each got out of the degree
For all of us, it was the people - genuine friendships, interesting connections that helped us grow our careers and as people, and of course, meeting my boyfriend in my case too!
Follow Alexis and Simi
Alexis Barber
Simi Shah
Manager, Business Strategy & Analytics – Chicago Bulls (Sports, Chicago)
Chief of Staff to the CEO – Factorial (HR Tech, Growth Stage, Barcelona)
Chief of Staff, Marketing – Clay (AI, Late Stage)
Strategic Partnership Manager, AI Ecosystem – GridCARE (AI/Energy, Startup)
Applied AI Claude Evangelist, Startups – Anthropic (AI, Late Stage, SF)
Product Specialist – Sequence (FinTech, Early Stage)
Strategy/Product Hire – Casper Studios (AI, Startup, NYC)
