The Wheel of Terror

A voluntary hostage situation inside HBS’s most controversial class

It’s Wednesday night and I can’t sleep. Tomorrow, I might have to pitch my startup to a live audience at Demo Day, the culmination of three months in HBS’s most controversial class, Founder Launch.

I say might because I genuinely don’t know if it will be me. Reza Satchu, in his infinite wisdom, has decided that instead of asking for volunteers, or picking the strongest presenters, or doing literally anything rational, he is going to spin a roulette wheel. Wherever it lands, that person pitches to 400 people: top VCs, classmates, and admitted students deciding between Stanford and Harvard. (A classmate of mine coined “Wheel of Terror.” I am not that funny.)

I have stage fright. I have never pitched to a live audience. And this man wants to leave it to chance. Marvelous.

His only guidance, delivered with the calm of a man who has sold a company for a billion dollars: “Trust me. When there’s uncertainty, you rise to the challenge.”

This is what it’s like to be in Founder Launch. A voluntary hostage situation. Voluntary. Because I did, in fact, sign up for this shit.

***

Founder Launch is one of the most competitive courses at HBS. Last year’s inaugural cohort was 33 students out of 91 applicants. This year, 175 people applied for 75 spots. The class has more than doubled in a single year. The inaugural cohort had such a positive impact that it pushed HBS to start interrogating the case method itself. The Harbus wrote a long, glowing profile of it. Completely sanitized with a lot of ass kissing. This is not that article. I warned Reza. His reply: “I trust you.” Are we suffering from collective insanity now?

Getting in is unlike getting into any other class at HBS. It comes with a condition: you must sign a contract. In it, you pledge that you will not recruit for a full-time job during the semester. No keeping one foot in the safe world while flirting with entrepreneurship. You are either founding a company, or you are not in this class. Reza frames this not as a sacrifice but as a privilege. The hero’s journey, he calls it.

So, you sign. And in that moment, you become, in the most literal, bureaucratic, HR-legible sense of the word, unemployable. At Harvard Business School. The entire machinery of this institution is designed to place you. Obviously, Career & Professional Development hates Reza and his acolytes with the passion of a thousand burning suns.

David Fialkow, co-founder of General Catalyst, who attended Demo Day, didn’t hesitate when I asked him about the class: “He has burned the boats. He is ferreting out the people who want to be founders, and the imposters who are just chasing its glamour life.”

***

The CliffsNotes of Reza’s ideology: HBS admits the most extraordinary people in the world and watches their slope flatten the day they arrive. Every step of our lives was a leap. Then we get here, miscalibrate, and start playing small. He wants us swinging for the fences. Not trading the right-tail outcome for a return ticket to McKinsey or Blackstone.

The odds of me being here (a Latin American woman from Lima, where one year of my HBS tuition is sixteen years of the minimum wage) are already absurd. Why, having beaten those odds, would I stop now? By the end of his fall course, Founder Mindset (the prerequisite where he convinces you to leap), I had dropped every private equity process I was in. Completely brainwashed.

***

To be clear: some of Reza’s monologues make me want to roll my eyes so hard they detach from my skull and roll right out of Hawes Hall. Last year’s Harbus article made it sound like every student in Founder Launch worships the ground Reza walks on. That does a disservice to what makes his class work.

Yes, I can’t deny the cult allegations. There might be a classmate of mine who has tattooed “commitment” (one of Reza's mantras and the title of his upcoming book) on his arm. And yet. And yet this is the only class at HBS where I really pay attention. Where I don’t check my phone under the desk.

Reza doesn't praise or coddle you. He usually ignores you, until you develop a primal need to be seen. Imagine being praised your whole life and then made invisible. So, you fight for his attention. You fight for the opportunities. You fight for the arena. And the arena, you discover, is built to keep you uncomfortable.

The mechanics, in shorthand: He cold-calls you to pitch before you are ready. When you fail, he replays it for the class and asks what you missed. He has investors rank you top to bottom and reads the rankings aloud. If you and your co-founder are fighting, he makes you have the fight in front of everyone. When you are irrelevant, he says so. Then there is the Wheel. All of it is the curriculum.

David Deming, the Dean of Harvard College and a labor economist who studies higher education, said on Demo Day: “The only way to learn something is for it to be effortful. Most classrooms have settled into a low-effort bargain — I like you, you like me, you’ll get mostly A’s. What Reza has shown is a different way. Even when he has pushed people to be uncomfortable, they show up. Yes, he is a great founder. But he is also a great educator.”

***

Every week, Reza invites a few investors into the classroom. They do not yet know they have walked into a trap.

In the real world, the founder-investor relationship is a masterclass in performative bullshit. You pitch, they nod, “let’s stay in touch,” and then silence. The power sits with the investor, and the founder is supposed to be grateful for the audience.

Founder Launch drops the act. As Reza repeats: “The power dynamic is totally flipped. Capital is plentiful. Great founders are not.” The founders are the prize.

Here is how it works: investors meet with founders, both sides fill out surveys, and Reza reads the gaps aloud. Meetings where one side thought it went great and the other thought it went terribly. Investors explain why they wouldn't invest. Founders hand it right back.

And because the transparency cuts both ways, you watch investors reveal their doubts, biases, and blind spots in real time. Turns out they are human beings, improvising. Fundraising stops feeling like begging and starts feeling like a conversation between equals on different sides of a table.

Look who is flying east. Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia, and Khosla (firms that for years treated Boston as a place to recruit out of, not invest into) are sitting in our classroom for hours and showing up for Demo Day.

That shift, from supplicant to peer, might be the single most valuable thing I take from my MBA.

***

I need to talk about Ajay, because this article would be incomplete and unfair without him.

Ajay Agrawal is a professor at the University of Toronto and the founder of the Creative Destruction Lab. Fifteen years ago, he and Reza co-founded Next Canada, a Toronto-based startup accelerator. This spring, they agreed to do it again at HBS, with Ajay flying from Toronto every week. Call it insanity or call it devotion.

If Reza is the fire, Ajay is the architect. Reza trains you to barge into any room. Ajay makes sure you've got something worth the entrance.

Firas Atoui (MBA ’26, founder of Sawa, a community-native prediction market) put it plainly: “Reza is great at selling. Ajay is great at making sure you have something to sell. He keeps pushing on our business model: are we the disruptor, or are we about to be disrupted?”

Every AI founder's nightmare is being a feature. That Anthropic or OpenAI ships an update tomorrow and your entire company becomes a button on someone else's platform. Ajay is the one who makes you confront that fear.

Hugo Lieber (MBA '26, founder of a stealth startup) added: “Ajay has a rare ability to cut through complexity and see the forest for the trees. He helps you see how a point solution can evolve into a system-level shift that reshapes an industry.”

Ajay's one flaw is that he is too kind. He is our biggest fan, and he should tell us more often when an idea is bad. (Ajay, if you're reading this: some of us need a skeptic.) But that kindness is also the source of his gravity. He believes in us. He holds the vision before we do.

You need both. Reza to make you a fighter. Ajay to make you a thinker.

A note, in case someone at HBS makes it this far (shocking!): Ajay is not confirmed to return next year. Whatever he is asking for, give it to him.

***

What this class teaches, beneath everything else: if you are not uncomfortable, you are not learning. Every week you are pushed into a room you do not feel ready for, sure you can't do it. And every week, you walk out having done it anyway.

Ella Rubin and Katie Pfleger (both MBA ’26) are building TRACE, the first AI-native presale marketplace. They learned the lesson faster than most.

Ella: “We met with more investors than anyone else in the class, and that was never a strategy. We just understood that you cannot wait. The learning is in going before you’re ready.”

Katie: “I have always cared what people think. It’s very hard not to. But once you shed it — that has been my biggest growth. The class makes you raw. You feel like an idiot the next day, and you still have to force yourself back out there. Eventually it trains you.”

What I have learned is this: you will never be ready enough. That is the point. What the class trains is the judgment to act without perfect information, and the willingness to do it anyway.

***

Widen the frame: what is this class doing to the institution behind it?

When I asked an investor what success looks like for Founder Launch, he said: “Does the institution change? Does it keep building this?”

Early signs say yes. A Harvard venture fund was announced at Demo Day. The case method is being interrogated. The school is, uncharacteristically, moving fast.

The numbers reflect the shift. Last year's inaugural cohort raised over $70M. This year, by April (before most have even launched), roughly 38 ventures of the new cohort had already raised commitments totaling more than $32M. Reza expects this year's cohort to clear $100M by December.

Here is the question that is going to get this article killed. If HBS is the best business school in the world, why isn't it the best place to start a company? For years it has produced far fewer founders than it should, given the size and the talent of its student body. Right now, the correction is one course and two people. And it exists only because Reza decided to care disproportionately. He had no obligation. He has no equity. The change is real, but it is happening slowly, and the institution is not the one driving it.

So, the question for the school: does this remain a Reza project, or does it become a pedagogy?

Valerie Chen (MBA '26, building Celery, a competitive and social screen time management app) put it bluntly: "First-person learning is the best. Watching another founder live through it is second best. The case method is third. Maybe last."

Editor’s Note: The claim that HBS underperforms on founder output is more complicated than is suggested. HBS has produced more unicorn founders than any other business school in absolute terms. On a per-capita basis, Stanford GSB is either competitive or leads. Yet the deeper question raised is a separate and open one: whether the business school is structurally the best environment to found a company at all. Most of America’s top companies—measured by either valuation or revenue in every decade of the last century, ours included—were not founded by business school graduates, though most are led by MBAs. The answer depends on the benchmark.

***

Reza talks about where he came from. A lot.

The facts: he was born in Mombasa, Kenya, in 1969. His family moved to Toronto in 1976, when he was seven. They settled in a two-bedroom apartment in Scarborough. The reason he keeps showing us the photo of his first apartment building in Canada is not nostalgia. It is the underwriting case for the entire curriculum: if I could leap, you can leap.

I'll admit I've been an asshole about this. I was tired of the repetition. The Scarborough story again. It took a phone call from a classmate to understand it wasn't aimed at me.

“People like me who have lived that life hear him and think: wait a minute, someone took my path, and it worked. The broader audience thinks it's a story they've heard before. But seeing someone from that background do it gave me, and others like me, the courage to want to be an entrepreneur.”

That is what representation does in its least sentimental form.

But the numbers tell a different story. There are seventy-five of us in Founder Launch. Four come from genuinely lower-income backgrounds. Four. The rest of us, myself included, have a safety net, a different risk profile, a family that can absorb a bad year. Tearing up the recruiting contract is not an equal act of courage.

Ask Asif Satchu, Reza's younger brother, founder of MRC, the studio behind House of Cards and Ozark.

Twenty-five years ago, Asif went to Dean Kim Clark's office before graduation to ask for a tuition deferral. He had put every dollar of his tuition money into his company, one of only two HBS startups that year. Dean Clark's reply: “We're a business school, Asif. We're in a business. So, you must pay your tuition.” Cut to now: Harvard is announcing a venture fund. The specifics are yet to be defined. But done right, it could lower the barrier to who gets to be a founder.

***

Strip away the mechanics, the investors, the institution. What is left is seventy-five people in a room.

The MBA is, at its core, a social experience. (Most expensive social experience in your twenties.) But the Founder Launch community might be unique. These are people who signed a contract and gave up the safe career. There is no balance: there is the company, there is class, there is sleep, and you pick two. That shared sacrifice creates something closer to soldiers in boot camp than a professional network, except the drill sergeant is a Canadian millionaire with a philosophical commitment to making you uncomfortable.

What comes out of that is honesty. In a world curated by social media, where everyone shares only the wins, it is refreshing to have peers who share the failures too. That makes this different from the rest of HBS, where the culture rewards performance over honesty.

Anisha Agarwal (MBA '26, founder of Lighthouse, an emotional development platform for Indian adolescents): “Founding a company is the loneliest thing I've done. Seventy-four people in this class are doing the same lonely thing at the same time. It stops being a weight you hold alone and becomes something the room carries with you. You don't stop because they don't stop. Every small win, every big loss, you don't have to explain why it matters. They already know.”

***

So, back to the Wheel of Fame (formerly Terror). Which spun, eventually.

Thirty-two of us were selected at random. Some were brilliant. Some froze. It did not matter. When they faltered, their eyes would flick to our corner, and a ripple of applause would come back. After spending three months learning how to fail, we also learned how to hold each other up.

The Wheel didn’t land on me. I thought I would feel relief. I didn’t. I felt something closer to being cheated out of a fight I’d spent three months training for. That, more than anything else, is how I knew the class had worked. On Wednesday night I could not sleep. On Thursday afternoon I was disappointed it wasn’t me.

There was a $1M term sheet on the table, written on the spot at the end of the day. Lizzie Speed (MBA '26, founder of Greenlight Robotics, building collision-avoidance AI for buses and light rail) won it. Andre Charoo of Maple VC, explaining why: “Likely the biggest ambition in the batch: making public transit autonomous. The tailwinds are there. The perfect venture-scale bet.”

***

The Wheel produced a winner. The class produced something harder to name. I have fought this feeling for 3,000 words and seriously considered drowning in the Charles before surrendering my pride: I am incredibly grateful for such a terrifying, beautiful experience.

“I wish everybody in this class learned something enduring. Some businesses will succeed. Some will fail. But the most enduring thing is that everybody, when they look back on this in five, ten, twenty years, thinks this was a transformational period in their life.”—Ajay Agrawal.

Dana Chiabra (MBA ’26) is a second-year MBA student at HBS, originally from Lima, Peru. Previously at Advent International, now unemployable, she can be found outside of class turning every minor inconvenience or life event into a long-form essay on her Substack.