Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had met mentor Larry Summers and was getting a Harvard MBA.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg had met mentor Larry Summers and was getting a Harvard MBA.
At age 25, Sandberg had graduated at the top of the economics department from Harvard, worked at the World Bank under her former professor, mentor, and future Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and had gone back to Harvard to get her MBA, which she received in 1995.
She went on to work at McKinsey, and at age 29 was Summers’ chief of staff when he became Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary.
Her time at HBS was a ways before Google, but that experience helped her see the potential of the internet, she said in a commencement speech to HBS grads in 2012:
“It wasn’t really that long ago when I was sitting where you are, but the world has changed an awful lot. My section, section B, tried to have HBS’s first online class. We had to use an AOL chat room and dial up service (your parents can explain). We had to pass out a list of screen names, because it was unthinkable to put your real name on the internet. And it never worked. It kept crashing … the world wasn’t set up for 90 people to communicate at once online. But for a few brief moments though, we glimpsed the future, a future where technology would power who we are and connect us to our real colleagues, our real family, our real friends.”
Celebrity investor Mark Cuban was a bartender in Dallas.
Celebrity investor Mark Cuban was a bartender in Dallas.
By 25, Cuban had graduated from Indiana University and had moved to Dallas. The “Shark Tank” investor started out as a bartender and then worked as a salesman for a PC-software retailer. He got fired because he wanted to go close a deal rather than open a store in the morning. That helped inspire him to open his first business, MicroSolutions.
“When I got to Dallas, I was struggling — sleeping on the floor with six guys in a three-bedroom apartment,” Cuban writes in his book “How to Win at the Sport of Business.” “I used to drive around, look at the big houses, and imagine what it would be like to live there and use that as motivation.”
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington was traveling to music festivals around the world for the BBC with her boyfriend at the time.
Huffington Post founder Arianna Huffington was traveling to music festivals around the world for the BBC with her boyfriend at the time.
Before she was founded The Huffington Post or was even Arianna Huffington, she was Arianna Stassinopolous, and at the age of 21, she met the famed British journalist Henry Bernard Levin while on a panel for a quiz show.
The two entered into a relationship, and he became her mentor while she wrote the book “The Female Woman,” attacking the women’s liberation movement. The book was published when she was 23.
For the next few years, Huffington traveled to music festivals around the world with Levin as he wrote for the BBC. Her relationship with Levin eventually ended because he did not want to marry or have children. Huffington moved to New York City at the age of 30. That year, her biography of Maria Callas was published, which she dedicated to Levin.
She told William Skidelsky at The Observer:
“[Levin] was my mentor. Our second date was to see ‘The Mastersingers’ at Covent Garden. Our first trip abroad was to Bayreuth to see ‘Wagner’s Ring.'”