Alumni Profiles

Streamlining the rental process for tenants and landlords by Joseph Edgar & Rhett Weiss As a Johnson student (MBA ‘14) Joe Edgar was irritated by the lack of efficiency when it came to renting. Redundant paper applications, fees, mailing paper checks, no receipts and the pan on the floor collecting water from the leak in […]

Change for good In China’s remote villages, residents who don’t have access to electricity cook their food by burning wood or yak dung inside poorly ventilated homes. The toxic smoke generated from these primitive stoves causes more indoor air pollution than can be measured on a city street in Beijing. Yet in 2008, a company […]

Better banking in Dubai As a consultant with PricewaterhouseCoopers in Dubai, Salmaan Jaffery advises banks on how to operate more effectively. But since moving to the Middle East in 2008, he’s found that working with banks in the region is a completely different undertaking than assessing financial institutions in the United States. While Jaffery primarily […]

Demir Sabanci, MBA ’99, President, chairman, and founder, Sedes Holding, and president and CEO of Sedesco Inc Two pieces of art dominate the main boardroom at Sedes Holding, Demir Sabanci’s Istanbul-based investment management firm. One is an oil painting of a ship swaying through choppy waters. The other is a scale model of the Titanic. […]

Growing Dropbox If a startup is a company designed to grow fast, then Dropbox, the online storage firm, still fits the model. Since Olga Narvskaia joined the San Francisco-based company as head of user operations in 2012, the number of employees has spiraled to 1,200 from less than 200. “The brand is so big and […]

Breathe Deep Victoria Chen immediately noticed something was different when she landed at Shanghai Pudong International Airport last December. Though it was nearly 11 p.m. and the food court was closed, the airport smelled like barbeque kebab. After staying in Shanghai for a few days, she saw clouds of smog so thick shrouding the city […]

Cornell’s first African-American MBA broke barriers throughout his career The Johnson community was saddened to learn of the passing of Wilbur Parker ’50, MBA ’50, Cornell’s first African-American MBA and inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award from Johnson’s Black Graduate Business Association — subsequently named in his honor as the Wilbur Parker Distinguished Alumni […]

Blending Social Change with Business Leadership When she isn’t working as chief strategist at MK Ellison Advisors in San Francisco, Kate Capossela might be volunteering with a program that teaches entrepreneurship to people with criminal histories working to transform their lives, or writing the professional development curriculum for her local San Francisco Bay Area chapter […]

Setting The Parameters In 2011, Faizan S. Syed, MBA ’09, left investment banking and returned to his native Pakistan to start an herbal products business. Before he could, his family asked him to manage the medical TV channel they started in 2009. Now, as head of Pakistan’s only healthand- lifestyle channel, Syed has seen his […]