Stanford MBA: From Baby Boomer to Gen Z | Class of ‘95 Meets Class of ‘25

Podcast Ep. 20 Glover Lawrence Stanford MBA ’95 Vikram Kanodia meets MBA ’25

• Katharine McLennan • Season 1 • Episode 20

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Today, I’m joined by Glover Lawrence from the Stanford MBA Class of 1995 and Vikram Kanodia from the Class of 2025.

Glover is a highly respected M&A strategist and financial advisory executive with over 30 years of experience helping founders, CEOs, and boards drive growth across the technology sector. Calm under pressure and pragmatic in approach, Glover has built a career structuring, negotiating, and integrating major transactions—from leading corporate development at AspenTech and driving its $12 billion deal with Emerson Electric, to advising global technology firms through his work at Oracle, Hambrecht & Quist, and his own firm, McNamee Lawrence. Today, he continues this work as the Founder of North Hollow Advisors and a Partner at FounderPartners, while also serving on the boards of innovative technology companies like Arundo Analytics and Prevu3D.

Vikram is a second-year MBA student at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business with a dynamic background in M&A, corporate strategy, and innovation. Prior to Stanford, Vikram worked at EY-Parthenon in New York, where he led the operationalization of major corporate divestitures across retail, healthcare, and industrial sectors. He then served as Manager in the CEO’s Office at Datamatics, driving M&A, go-to-market strategy, and helping build out the company's GenAI practice. Passionate about building value through business and technology, Vikram also brings creativity and perspective as an avid musician, photographer, and wildlife enthusiast. After graduation, he will return to India to help lead his family's technology business, celebrating its 50th year.

In this conversation, Glover and Vikram offer a fascinating intergenerational view of the evolution of technology, leadership, and entrepreneurship. They explore how the rise of AI, shifting global markets, and the power of resilience and intention are reshaping what it means to build strong, lasting enterprises today.


00:00 Introduction and Background
11:05 Career Paths and Transitions
20:54 Technology and Software Evolution
26:37 India's Economic Landscape and Global Perception
28:34 The Shift Towards a Consumer-Driven Economy in India
30:42 The Future of Technology and Innovation in the U.S.
30:57 Insights on AI and Future Trends
32:35 Cultural Perspectives on Global Innovation
34:34 The Impact of Immigration on U.S. Innovation
36:30 Skepticism Towards Global Developments
40:18 Government's Role in India's Business Infrastructure
44:34 AI's Influence on Business Models
50:48 Designing the Future of Work
53:57 Reflections on Career Journeys and Lessons Learned


Join the Podcast Series
Stanford MBA: From Baby Boomer to Gen Z | Class of ‘95 Meets Class of ‘25

Each of these episodes will feature a different pair of Stanford MBA people -- one from the class of 1995, and one from the class of 2025.

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More info: https://www.katharinemclennan.com/

Contact: kath@katharinemclennan.com


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Note: this transcript is generated by AI, so it won’t always be perfect, especially when it comes to: 

·        Incorrect breaks in a sentence (AI hears the pause and assumes a new sentence)

·        Exact word recognition – you may see that there are words that don’t make sense from time to time

 

Katharine McLennan (01:02)

Today, I'm joined by Glover Lawrence from the Stanford MBA, class of 1995, my classmate, and Vikram Kanodia from the class of 2025. Glover is a highly respected mergers and acquisitions strategist and financial advisor executive with over 30 years of experience helping founders, CEOs, and boards drive growth across the technology sector. Calm under pressure and pragmatic in approach,

 

GLEVER has built a career structuring, negotiating, and integrating major transactions

 

from leading corporate development at Aspen Tech and driving a $12 billion deal with Emerson Electric

 

to advising global technology firms through his work at Oracle, Hambrick and Quist, and his own firm, McNamee Lawrence. Today, he continues this work as the founder of North Hollow Advisors and a partner at Founder Partners, while also serving on the boards of innovative technology

 

companies like Arundo Analytics and Preview 3D. Vikram is a second year MBA student at Stanford's Graduate School of Business with a dynamic background in mergers and acquisitions, corporate strategy and innovation. Prior to Stanford, Vikram worked at EY Parthenon in New York, where he led the operative.

 

where he led the operationalization of major corporate divestitures across retail, healthcare, and industrial sectors. He then served as manager in the CEO's office at Datamatics, driving mergers and acquisitions, go-to market strategy, and helping build out the company's gen AI practice. Passionate about building value through business and technology, Vikram also brings creativity and perspective as an avid musician.

 

photographer and wildlife enthusiast. After graduation, he'll return to India to help lead his Family's technology business celebrating its 50th year. In this conversation, Glover and Vikram offer a fascinating intergenerational view of the evolution of technology, leadership, and entrepreneurship.

 

They explore how the rise of AI, shifting global markets, and the power of resilience and intention are reshaping what it means to build strong, lasting enterprises today.

 

Katharine McLennan (03:29)

Vikram, where are you at this moment?

 

Vikram Kanodia (03:32)

I'm on campus. It is still class free, which means I got in a good round of golf this morning on the course.

 

Katharine McLennan (03:38)

Okay, now that's the first time I've heard of I've interviewed about 17 of your classmates and no one has mentioned golf. So what's going on? Are you the only one out there?

 

Vikram Kanodia (03:48)

There were at least 15 of us out on the course this morning. It was really fun. found the 17 of us. Probably the only 17 people at GSB were not on the course.

 

Katharine McLennan (04:00)

That's great. love it. Glover, you play golf when you were at Stanford?

 

Glover Lawrence (04:04)

I took golf as did my fiance slash wife who was also the GSB at the same time. And so we weren't golfers beforehand, but we both took classes and she got to take advantage of getting priority her first year and her second year because her last name went from a B to an L because he chose to take my last name.

 

She took advantage of that since the rest of it was real pain in the ass for any woman to change her name.

 

Katharine McLennan (04:31)

I love it.

 

Glover Lawrence (04:31)

at least she was gonna capitalize on that. That and she had to move her box at the GSB from her own, what was her first year to being next to mine her second year.

 

Katharine McLennan (04:43)

I love that. So what? had to, Vikram, in those days, we were just kind of, we had a little bit of email. We didn't really have the internet. It was coming and there was a thing called

 

And Netscape went public, So we had pigeonholes. And I don't think you guys even know what pigeonholes are, but they're basically a whole wall of boxes, essentially, that each of us one age. And how did she get a new one? She would have had to shift everybody down, Glover.

 

Glover Lawrence (05:07)

Dookah!

 

It shifted basically because they have to shift every day. It's all alphabetical. So when an entire new class comes in, they have to redo them anyway. It's not, it's not, wasn't separated by class. It wasn't first year, second year, it was just the entire GSB by last name. And so when she came back, so Vickra, my wife and I had been dating before we went to business school, got engaged and then got married between our first and second year of business school.

 

Katharine McLennan (05:39)

That is.

 

Glover Lawrence (05:40)

And so she spent her first year with the last name, maiden name was Bowman. And then, you know, took my last name, which is Lawrence. And then we came back second year and we were married. So that's why she had a B, you know, as her last year for the first year of golf priority and an L for the next year and got, you know, got priority in one semester. So we took, we took lessons. but, yeah. So when you mentioned golf, it had been a bit.

 

Katharine McLennan (06:02)

That's it.

 

Vikram Kanodia (06:05)

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

 

Katharine McLennan (06:07)

And Glover, you guys might've been the first wedding. I know people were married when they came into business school, but you might've been the first wedding to happen.

 

Glover Lawrence (06:17)

I presume so, only because literally got married between her first and second year. So there were people who showed up who had already married. There were couples who showed up. And of course, a couple who developed out of the class. ⁓ But I think we were the only ones who were married during business school.

 

Katharine McLennan (06:32)

Yeah.

 

Glover Lawrence (06:40)

Especially who are classmates. There may have been others that we just, I just wasn't aware of.

 

Katharine McLennan (06:46)

We don't know. And I was talking to one of your classmates, Vikram, who also got into the business school with her partner. And I was like, God, that's lucky. What if one of you guys didn't get into the business school? What are you doing?

 

Vikram Kanodia (07:00)

There's a few actually in the class, which I've always surprised and impressed by. Not only did you both get in, but you both picked each other who are good enough to get in. Right, which is, which is a great, great talent.

 

Katharine McLennan (07:12)

Glover, where are you right now and what are you up to today? And by the way, we have to hear about Glover was at the top of my LinkedIn feed today, which is kind of coincidental. So I think it's a very good vibe. So tell us where you are and what you're up to.

 

Glover Lawrence (07:27)

So I'm dialing in from my home in Lexington, Massachusetts, where my wife and I have, last May, also 95, have been for 20 some odd years, 22, 23, whatever. And so that's where I am physically. Career wise, I have been doing more consulting type of things. And in fact, today,

 

Ironically enough, just officially announced the launch of an advisory firm on LinkedIn. Thank you. I've been doing some work, you so I figure I'm LinkedIn launched now. If that's a thing. And is it's a continuation of what I've done before. So for the last 15, 16, whatever, starting back in 2008, I moved from the investment banking world to the corporate development world.

 

Vikram Kanodia (07:58)

congratulations.

 

Glover Lawrence (08:16)

And so having run corporate development for a couple of public companies, I basically had a very, very steep learning curve from becoming an agent to becoming somebody running something. Needless to say, learned a lot mostly by screwing things up and falling into ditches and twisting my ankle and, and realized that there needed to be a lot of processes put in place and thinking about it. And so at this point, I've got a lot of best practices and experiences that I'm now focused on helping companies to, to

 

to learn from. So rather than going back and just running corporate development, the clients I've worked with, and I've worked with a couple so far, is basically saying, here's my view of how you do it. Here are best practices. Here's the things to avoid, et cetera. So I've got materials, and I've got a focus on that. So professionally, it's not full time.

 

I'm doing other things as well, advising companies. I sit now on the board of a couple of small software companies. Most of my career has been in and around software and technology before business school and after business school. And always kind of that intersection of industry-wise technology with a predominance on software and then kind of, and transactions and strategy. So strategy work or M &A, acquisition, self-side.

 

financing, a lot of like, you you know, what's more of the strategic, how do you do some inorganic things?

 

Katharine McLennan (09:40)

What was it about today that is particularly significant? Glover, has your consulting company reached a mass that you're ready to announce it to the world or?

 

Glover Lawrence (09:50)

There's a little bit of that. I'm doing, as I think many of our classmates are, a variety of things. I had been doing this and had a client that finished up a month or two ago. And I wanted to take some time to really get it buttoned up rather than do a little haphazard. And then it took me a while because I've got other clients that I'm doing stuff with. And so it happened to be today mostly because I don't want to announce things on a weekend. So it's the middle of the week.

 

you know, just good practices, you're not sending out emails and doing stuff on a Friday afternoon. And so there was no it wasn't that, you know, April 23 was in, you know, in arguably auspicious per se. But, you know, it was the middle of the week and get some announcements out. And part of it's just like, just get going.

 

Katharine McLennan (10:39)

Fantastic. Vikram, so this is a terrible question for second year. but you're going to be well-practiced at answering it, right? So you've got a couple of weeks left till June, maybe. And so.

 

What are you thinking? Which happens after business school.

 

Vikram Kanodia (10:59)

Oh, that was that was the that's an easy question. but before before I get to that, I do want to commend you on the matchmaking that you did, Catherine, because right before the so before the GSB after I used to be a strategy and transactions consultant at UI as well. So Glover and I matched on that. And then right off that I was at software and going back to software.

 

So we're good good matching that as well. So in that sense you subject every box of my career.

 

so right before the GSB, I was in Mumbai working at the software business that my family runs. So we were sort of IT consultancy software services, tech services business. So I was helping run that and post GSB I'm going back to go do that again, which was probably the plan.

 

from day one and continue to be excited about it. So happy to go to that again.

 

My grandfather started it. My dad runs it now and my brother and I both will be working there June onwards. And where this year, July, we'll hit our 50th anniversary.

 

in 1975.

 

Katharine McLennan (12:04)

I'm honored to talk to a 50th year. are you guys headquartered?

 

Vikram Kanodia (12:09)

So HQ is in Mumbai. Most of the business happens out of the US. But as the typical outsourcing model would suggest, HQ and lot of the headcount is in Mumbai and then around India. But most of the clients are the larger enterprises across the US.

 

Katharine McLennan (12:24)

Wow. OK, we're going to have to hear about this software. so, Glover, you're talking to somebody that should have been in the high technology club that met in the cafeteria during business school. What was I thinking,

 

Glover Lawrence (12:39)

Well, it's funny you mentioned Mosaic and Netscape because when I left GSB, I actually went into investment banking, which I'd done beforehand. I went to work for a firm called Hamburton Quist, which is a Bay Area tech-focused investment bank, books on software. And when I got there, they were working on the Netscape IBL.

 

I didn't personally work on it, you know, so I actually have at my home one of the original boxes of software with the the disks inside of that you would load up, you know, a browser on your, you know, on your on your PC back then, you know, and software back then, we were just really getting into the client server. You know, you had big mainframes on stuff and this whole client server thing was taking everyone by storm.

 

And obviously Oracle had been around already for 20 years when I left at GSB, because it was started as a project for the CIA for doing database and so forth. And it had been around and well established. It's not like software was just getting going. As an industry, was transforming a lot. And from a financial perspective, there big changes over the years.

 

If you look at, for example, the financial services industry that was serving the software industry for a long time, traditional big Wall Street banks just didn't bank technology, especially software, because the idea was you'd take them public and they'd never raise money again. So what was the business for? You didn't care. You don't need to raise much equity. You take them public and then they just start spitting off cash and never raise money again. And that was true for a period of time. And that's why there are a lot of tech-focused

 

investment banks in BCs that started in Silicon Valley area because that was the world they were in and they served it. But as these companies got much bigger and started becoming so mature, the finance industry realized that there are other essentially ways to generate fees from a finance standpoint. But basically, they could borrow money in different ways. They could start leveraging up. And so as we came out of the GSB, this transformation was just getting going. The internet boom was just starting.

 

It wasn't a thing, you know, Kathy, we had classmates who started eBay and other things like that. So we were kind of at the cusp of this internet thing starting, but also the extant large technology industry was going through big changes too. And so all of a sudden Wall Street, the traditional big banks came in big because they started seeing all the fees and the opportunity to finance these companies. Anyway, so there was enormous changes going on in technology and

 

there's always been this push and pull between the startups and the big incumbents, which is going on again with AI, especially generative AI, but AI generally. But Vikram, you you clearly obviously know this background too. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how things are different, how you see them changing.

 

Katharine McLennan (15:18)

Which is-

 

Vikram Kanodia (15:26)

mean, just from hearing you talk, was thinking about, I mean, when you guys got out, as you said, I some of your classmates started eBay getting into the whole thing. And this is pre.com, this is pre Y2K and pre.com. And obviously there was a turnaround that happened, I guess, shortly after you guys got out of school. Not too much time, but right post that it's never looked down since then, right?

 

Katharine McLennan (15:49)

Except for 2000 and 2001.

 

Vikram Kanodia (15:52)

Yeah, exactly. So dot com y2k and then dot com bus and then everything after that everything that survived that so did well. In that sense, honestly, all of us the the tech software discussion at GSB is I would say more than half the class is in that space or touching that space in some manner. I'm taking a class that start by Jeff Immelt this quarter and.

 

the CEO of GE and he asked at a dinner session, know, whose career is going to be or who's going to be building a career in AI. And I sort of want to take the opportunity to mention that was like every career is going to be built with AI. There's going to be not a single career that's not going to be touched with AI. And that's sort of the reality that I think we're looking at, we're getting out of school into. A couple of classmates have already started AI startups.

 

both in terms of using AI to help build new types of companies. In our own company, we're looking at how we can do software development better with AI, how we can do recruitment better with AI, how we can do governance better with AI. And all of those things, it's just to be all penetrative, like a database. I keep thinking this is the biggest thing we've seen since the internet

 

Katharine McLennan (17:00)

not. 50 years of a company history,

 

And that is, you got to start telling stories and teach the classes yourself, don't you think?

 

Vikram Kanodia (17:12)

I mean, I feel super, super privileged and super excited to be able to tell the stories. I think it's a perspective that's been baked into me since I was a child, obviously, and I've heard all these stories about how Y2K happened and how .com bust happened and then how 2008 happened. And obviously I was a child and not really experiencing it as you guys did, but I've heard the stories a lot, but being able to sort of draw that line through where we are now and where I think we're gonna keep going forward and where...

 

we'll all see it go in the next five or 10 years, is incredible, right? And honestly, being at the GSB is such a huge privilege that in many ways you're gonna be at the center of what's happening. The speakers that come, the types of discussions we have, the access to people and CEOs and business leaders that come, everybody's talking about technology in a way. And when I hear it, I hear it sort of with piqued ears because I know I'm gonna build a career in this space.

 

So it's just been an incredible opportunity to be here and the ability to engage deeply with all of these stories from my past and from what the future is gonna look like, it's been, I mean, really, really something amazing.

 

Katharine McLennan (18:17)

And is most of your career in Mumbai or did you also come and work in the US or other countries?

 

Vikram Kanodia (18:23)

I

 

when I was a strategy transactions &A consultant at EY in New York. So I spent some time there. And then prior to that, I did my undergrad at Carnegie Mellon. So I spent a bit in the States for 10-ish years. ⁓ given most of our clients are in the US, expect to be here four or five times a year easily. this is, we'll continue to remain the backyard.

 

Katharine McLennan (18:35)

Thank

 

Okay, so Lover, going back, it's interesting. One of the transitions I heard you say was being on the investment banking transaction side and then going to corporate development. get to see the views from both sides. Is that right? Like what do you learn from that transition?

 

Glover Lawrence (19:02)

So I went into banking out of undergrad when it was kind of this cool thing on Wall Street being an analyst and do all that and many of our classmates. I don't know what it is still today, but many of them either come out of investment banking or management consulting at the GSB. And I had been a history major undergrad, so for me to go to Wall Street was a bit of a drinking from fire hose anyway. ⁓

 

Vikram Kanodia (19:23)

you

 

Glover Lawrence (19:24)

and learning it and going back to business school is essentially trying to put a bunch of much more framework, much more perspective and understanding. So I thought, you know, I'm setting myself up to learn a lot, you know, as with any job, you learn a very narrow slice of things and you learn a component of it, especially the status. So I learned a lot about how to get transactions done from a process standpoint, from a positioning standpoint, from a

 

you know, valuation standpoint, from a negotiation standpoint, all those things. But if you think about the scope of what a transaction for M &A specifically, I think a choice of a company to do something inorganic, to add somebody to the company, to add another business to it, or to sell it, whatever, but especially to add, there's so much that happens before they even engage with a potential target. When they engage with targets, how they engage with them.

 

And then after the deal closes, there was a classic line, you know, investment bankers get involved, involve, as soon as the deal closes, they walk away. Well, I went over to the other side where I had to get involved early on to figure out which targets to go after and figure out all that stuff. But then the real work started after the deal closed. Or at least I kind of thought it did. I mean, I could go on for a very long time about all the mistakes I made, not realizing.

 

all the things I actually had to do as head of corporate development to make things successful internally. And for most companies, nobody thinks about buying companies other than say corporate development and a couple of key executives. Everyone else has a full-time job. And it's not that they're not capable, intelligent, whatever, but they're already busy. So there were so many things I didn't realize I just had to like get people to do.

 

Vikram Kanodia (20:59)

Yeah.

 

Glover Lawrence (21:09)

not because they're not smarter. They just need to be said, hey, this is a priority. so I messed so many things up initially. So the learning server is really steep. And while there are certain attributes of any acquisition that are quote unquote the same, meaning there's certain stages and things, what really comes over time is the realization where on this particular situation, it's much more of a people issue than a technology issue. Or in this one, the technology

 

Evaluation is going be really, important because it's really small. Or in this one, it's going to be much more about the go-to-market capabilities because it's already got an engine. So the sophistication capabilities in making it successful are much more about appreciating who the buyer is, what they want to do, and what stage the company that's being bought is, and how to bring those things together as opposed to, oh, how do I decide what the valuation is and what the contracts are? I mean, that's just a small slide.

 

You can see with that breadth of stuff, the amount of things I could mess up is large.

 

Katharine McLennan (22:09)

I'm so glad that you talked about people And that's what I've been doing So 25 years. And I've been involved with a lot of &A's I get really cross when, the CEO

 

comes and says, we're just on the brink of going IPO or acquiring. I'm like, why did you call me months ago, so many people will lose their jobs because two CEOs, two COOs, two CIOs, anyway.

 

Let's go back to India. I always watch the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times so I can have two perspectives of the world. one of them today was the Chinese manufacturing.

 

this is not a country that the common person in the u.s. Understands, but we aren't hearing about India

 

Vikram Kanodia (22:52)

You know, that's a great question. I saw obviously the outsourcing wave did did extremely well for us. We built a business in the same in the same sort of space. What was the reason that you don't hear about India is both a little bit disappointing and and a good thing in a way. There's a there's a funny saying that some people say that India has a great way to disappoint both the pessimists and the optimists.

 

And in part, the reality is that there can be a lot of exciting things happening that are not happening. But in part, there's a lot of exciting things happening more silently. I think India has become very internally focused, not in a bad way, just the over the last 10-ish years, the Indian consumer has matured in a way that they're able to consume a lot more. So a lot of India's focus has turned to the Indian consumer who's being able to sort

 

drive the economy and becoming a more a consumption focused economy, which is why the outside world, I guess, is hearing less, but we hear a lot more that's going on. It is true that in terms of a lot of international trade policy and international business policy, we could be doing better post COVID when we were in a China plus one thought process world. India should have been literally standing there with the doors open saying everybody come in, everybody who leaves China should

 

should have defaulted to India, they did not. And that was probably just bad government planning. But overall, mean, the macros for India looking very good in the sense that economy is doing well, consumer spending is going to keep increasing, both because people have more money, but also the culture is changing to become a more consumption centric economy. And don't know how much of the history of India you guys familiar with, but we were sort of colonized for hundreds of years by the British and then before that, other other colonizers in

 

And that sort of left its mark on the Indian psyche in a sense that Indians have always preferred security over growth. And for the first time, I think in the last maybe generation, my generation is probably the first generation, which is willing to take risk, or the risk taking ability is higher, which means that they're looking for growth over security. that's when you get, know, spending like savings rates used to be over 50%.

 

just because of the security of having that safety bucket or the safety net, people like that. But now for the first time, savings rates are nowhere close to that. And that sort of helps pump the economy as well, right? So I think in the next 15, 20 years, like India's the place to be, there's not too many economies that's gonna give double digit trillion dollars worth of growth in a decade, two 

 

Katharine McLennan (25:22)

consumer driven technology is exactly what Thomas Friedman was talking about with Ezra Klein, New York Glover, when you look at the technology in the United States now,

 

Will technology slow in the capital that's available to them? as you look at China and India coming up, what's the view when you're advising corporate development?

 

Glover Lawrence (25:44)

at this point, everything's a bit of a guess and a what if. Because policies that are being put forward by the current administration are new enough and potentially very disruptive that everything is conjecture right now. I can make conjecture along the following lines. If you look at major trends

 

The amount of innovation, technology innovation in the United States has been extreme for decades, post-World War II and so forth, driven by the Cold War and the move towards development for military purposes and geopolitical purposes that spun off into the creation of Silicon Valley, et cetera.

 

Katharine McLennan (26:26)

was DARPA funding, right? That was DARPA funding.

 

Glover Lawrence (26:28)

DARPA

 

funding and a whole bunch of others. then you combine that with a high trust society with good legal infrastructure to enable risk taking in these environments and a willingness to take risk, particularly on the West Coast, more so the traditional PE on the East Coast. There's just kind of a, you know, I'm really short, you know, shortcutting a whole bunch of, but there's a really vibrant

 

reason for doing so in a self-reinforcing one relative to other cultures and other places in the world. It's not about intelligence or capabilities, it's a mix of a whole bunch of things. What I personally worry about here, given the choice that the current administration is making, is that the number of really talented people who have for generations, now decades, chosen to come to the United States for educational purposes instead of companies,

 

who've already been dealing with, you know, increasing challenges will now just say the heck with it. I'm just not gonna go to the US. You've already seen reports of China trying to recruit Chinese back to China. I I live in Lexington, Massachusetts. I have a very international population. It's very liberal. During my walk, I regularly run into, I have neighbors who are immigrants from both China and India, who I talk to and interact with.

 

if I'm out walking my dogs all the time. And so it's a pretty cosmopolitan international area. There's the education system. I really worry about people no longer coming here for education and staying and driving innovation. think the long-term implications are a serious, are serious potential implications for people choosing to come learn and build.

 

their lives and families and career and innovate here. You see it also in the efforts to attack universities to squelch their ability, know, people, know, foreign students to come with visas to study here. That is just to me, cutting off our nose to spite our face from a, know, kind of metaphorically speaking. So I am very concerned and it won't show up like in a year or two.

 

Vikram Kanodia (28:43)

Yeah.

 

Glover Lawrence (28:43)

We're talking like it's a generation of somebody saying, well, what happened? Why did the US quote unquote lose? It's like, well, we basically pissed off everyone and told them don't come here.

 

Vikram Kanodia (28:55)

I'm curious, Glover, whether you resonate with what I've noticed culturally a little bit is that Americans love America. And I think that's absolutely an incredible feeling to have. And I think it's a great thing. I think at the same time, to discount other countries. So when Russia does something or the Chinese do something, it's like, oh, but it's Chinese, so you can't trust it. It may not be real.

 

And for example, when the Russian vaccine came out, I was like, but it's the Russian vaccine. It probably doesn't work. And I feel like that puts us, puts America sort of in a position to be blindsided.

 

Glover Lawrence (29:33)

I've had the advantage of working with many people and in the field, et cetera, who are generally surrounded by people who travel internationally anyway. my, whether they've been where I worked or clients I worked with, tend to be fairly cosmopolitan people who've worked overseas, traveled overseas, have colleagues that are immigrants or themselves immigrants.

 

one client I have recently, you know, is, is a Chinese woman who came over here 20, some 20, 30 years and bought a company she knew nothing about and built it into a great company, you know, all in a row. So, so part of it, you know, have a very skewed view of things like that, you know, and, and, so it's hard for me to say that, I put it, I'm not seeing people who are totally discounting where things are coming from.

 

because they have an international experience or they themselves have been international. So I do admit that there's like a, there is a skepticism about some of the things, particularly coming about out of authoritarian regimes. So when I hear claims and stuff coming out of Russia, I know enough and have read enough to know that, you know, it doesn't mean that people aren't talented and so forth. The question is, what are the,

 

What are the incentives in place? What are the mechanisms in place for safety around certain things? And I think we saw, particularly the vaccine, to my knowledge, is probably here safe thing there is the actual efficacy was substantially lower than vaccines developed in other places. So it doesn't mean it was useless, but as from an efficacy standpoint, it wasn't as strong.

 

Vikram Kanodia (30:54)

Thanks.

 

Glover Lawrence (31:11)

question certain data coming out of China, knowing that a lot of information is control. I don't have that same skepticism about stuff I hear coming out of India, because fundamentally, it's a democracy with a lot of openness about information. It is the most populous country in the world. I won't even begin to like, I've read enough about it, talked to people about it to have some informed point of view.

 

But I don't at all have the same skepticism or wondering about things I hear coming out of that. I've worked with enough Indians to have a healthy respect for the talent and the people and just seen the work. So I think it varies from country to country. so I am terribly disappointed about

 

the potential for where things are headed. But I also work with Europeans who are sitting there saying, you know what, some of them share. So Northern Europeans, I've got some connection to Scandinavia, Norway in particular, my sister lives over there, I'm on the board of a country over there. I mean, a board of a company over in Norway. And so I have occasion to talk to Norwegians weekly, or at least Scandinavians actually, like the CEOs of Sweden, but, and you

 

hear things like that. And obviously, they're very aware of Russia and what's going on there since they're there knocking on the back door.

 

Katharine McLennan (32:29)

So what's interesting about that, is the role of the government, Vikram, in India.

 

How do you see that playing out? If it's a democracy, what's raising capital like? What's venture capital like? Is that changing?

 

Vikram Kanodia (32:44)

That's a question. think one thing that's been big for the last 10, 12 years in India is the fact that we've had a majority government for the first time. Since independence, there was a very short periods of time where we had a single majority party government. So we always had coalition governments. And we have a coalition government, they tend to be slightly less decisive, because all parties have to be sort of kept happy.

 

But for 10 years, we got a stretch of single party governance. And because of that, a lot of decisions were made. A lot of things moved a lot. And some big things came out of it. You guys may have heard of the demonetization act that happened, where they changed the currency notes. things like those tend to hit the international news channels. But I think there's been fundamental business infrastructure that's put in place. So for example, we have an extremely, extremely mature and well distributed digital payments infrastructure.

 

The fact that every village in India can on the phone get money and they don't have to go anywhere. They don't have to lose the days worth of wage to go to a post office to pick up a check. Like those things have moved a lot and that's all heavily government driven, right? So building the fundamental business infrastructure in the country has been really big part of the government. We also have, I will want to say pretty liberal government in terms of

 

they're encouraging startups, they're encouraging technology, they're encouraging all those things happening. And the government itself is very willing to adopt this technology. So we work with some of the government setting up rail and metro, like city metro infrastructure. We build all the ticketing systems for them and they've been non-corrupt, extremely technology forward, very sort of well project managed in terms of getting city infrastructure in place, which is

 

been extremely helpful. At the same time, India has sort of been built by large family enterprises to some degree, but large, all enterprises to a large degree. The relationship with those people which run, know, companies that are worth tens of billions of dollars, hundreds of billions of dollars with the government is slightly more complex because the government has aimed to be sort of a people's government.

 

And these people sort of don't qualify as the people's people in many ways. So that's a complex relationship, but I think that's being figured out in a bid to sort of reduce corruption, which is a good thing, in a bid to increase or distribute more of the entrepreneurial ecosystem through the country, which is a good thing. But as a result, I think a lot of foreign capital is flowing in, a lot of Indian capital is being churned.

 

So we have all the big banks, all the big VC companies, all the big PE funds, all investing heavily in India. And I think that's only going to spur more of the business to churn, keep going. It will continue to be an export economy, which is a good thing as well.

 

Katharine McLennan (35:34)

with your clients, Glover, how do you see the AI influencing the way people think, the way people invest, the way people look at acquisitions,

 

Glover Lawrence (35:44)

Start from the very individual level. Yeah. So I can remember two years ago sitting in with a group of colleagues that I had joined in a pitch of a woman who was doing a startup. She'd Stanford. Maybe I'm trying to remember this two years ago. And she's pitching some AI idea. And I just sat there listening to it. And I hadn't looked at chat GPT or anything. This is two years ago. And I kept going like, how was this any different than Google? Like, how is this any different than just searching? OK, so that was my initial exposure. Fast forward two years.

 

I, you know, I subscribe, I pay for chat GPT, I pay for perplexity. I use it all the time to do research, help think through stuff to make life more efficient for, especially since I'm running my own small business, right? So it's not like I have no junior people to hand stuff off as they go do this too. So I do it myself. And so I've had to figure out how do I be more efficient with this, that, or the other thing that my ability to interact with? Okay, that's, that's a personal level.

 

even starting my own business to like, what's the more efficient way to do this to use it? You know, I've bought, you know, the, AI add-ins for, not for Excel, cause that I, but for, PowerPoint, stuff like that. Fine. Okay. I've gotten very fast with it to the boards I'm sitting on and one in particular, which is essentially trying to figure out, you know, they've already, they're, they're trying to figure out how to create.

 

agentic workflows and particularly creating a chat interface. And this is the company that sells into chemicals and oil and gas companies to create ways that engineers can use natural language interface to ask questions. Okay, that's a client, that's a borderline. So they're creating that ability to essentially use, you know, obviously,

 

an open source LLM, but obviously on a very targeted data set to be able to ask very sophisticated questions. There was not at all possibly for another client. It's like, okay, I'm trying to partner with some people are doing that. Which questions about is the SaaS business model going away? Because there used to be, you know, this idea if you use, let's use Salesforce as an example of, the props to post your child for a SaaS business. was an enterprise solution that basically said, look,

 

You don't have to have it on prem. You can do it off prem and we can create something that'll work for 80 % of use case and then you configure the rest of it, but it'll all be in the cloud. Okay. That people have marched down that path and made billions of dollars and so forth. Now people say, well, why would I, why would I pay those hefty per seat fees when I can create something much more bespoke for my business process at less cost.

 

using AI in ways I hadn't before. So everyone is sitting here figuring out what does it mean to me? Every board is saying, you know, what's our AI story? And all the CAs like we're on it. And then I'll go back to the rooms and go, what the fuck are we doing? Like, we don't know what we're doing because and so, you know, a year ago, I sitting there saying all the services firm are going to be totally disintermediated because they sell hours. Well, that might be true. And you have much more insight than I do in this Vikram, but

 

If you're selling hours as your business model and the amount of time it takes for you to accomplish something is cut not just in half, but by 90%. Are you selling hours anymore? Okay, so that's one thing on a literally selling the butts in seat hours. There's a different thing between the consulting firms and the talent to actually go in, which is a higher level consulting to say,

 

Let me help think about your business processes. How can I use this technology, this capability in my existing business process? Because businesses don't just throw stuff out and just throw it all away. Especially in the industries I'm most familiar with the last decade, which are big heavy asset industries, oil and gas and chemical, but it's true in banking and finance. know, the early stage startups and so forth, they can move very quickly, but every established business, I don't know, I'm making this number up. If you're more than 50 million in revenue.

 

You've got a whole bunch of processes in place and software in place that you don't just suddenly, you know, kick to the curb.

 

So you're trying to figure it out. So everyone I'm interacting with is all trying to figure out, know, is my business model changing? Is my value proposition changing? Are my customers going to change on what they expect from me? Because most of the time, I'm most in the technology. Like how I deliver it. you will all these things. And then do I have the right talent to be able to figure it out? So all of a sudden, that's why it's holy shit, what now?

 

Katharine McLennan (40:24)

I love that. it was only recently that we were looking for data analyst.

 

Right? So now we're looking for creators and questioners and curiosity. And the question I have for you, Vikram, is for 50 years, you guys have been running your business. What are you most excited about? What do you bring back from Stanford in a real excitement kind of point back to your company?

 

Vikram Kanodia (40:50)

Yeah, that's a great question. And I think that has a few layers of answers and I'll try and give you a few. From a business front, mean, A, the excitement that the technology world is only going forward and only growing bigger. And that's just, I think it's going to be sort of a permanent trend is what it looks like. So that's always exciting. What's equally exciting is that, as Gavir said, if you're selling hours, those hours are gone.

 

suddenly. So there's an excitement in terms of like our business model needs to change. What does that new business model look like? Question mark. We build software, but the ease of building software for a lot of people is just increased a lot, right? It's become a lot easier. It's become a less expensive. What do we bring to the table that any other company can't? And in our BPO business, in our outsourcing business, we can't be selling

 

people and hours anymore by selling outcomes and what does that look like? How do I help a company build an agentic workforce? When you don't need a human workforce, you need an AI workforce, how do I help a company build that? So those are some questions that we're debating, we're dealing with in terms of how do you paint a picture of what the future of enterprise looks like and then be a strong participant in that. But I think more at a personal level, the GSB has given me

 

A, lot of positivity in terms of how I want to be as a leader and how I want to sort of design the organization internally, how I want to create, how I want to sort of run the organization to create innovation. That's something that personally, I don't think we've done as deeply as we should, but I think the cultural transformation that we need to do to be able to achieve that and to become the kind of organization that's a much more innovative,

 

forward thinking impact sort of globally impactful organization. think building that is super exciting and I think the GSB has given me a lot of foundation in terms of how to think about those things.

 

Katharine McLennan (42:43)

I wonder Glover if we can possibly cast our mind back to graduating in 1995,

 

the excitement of Silicon Valley, the freshness of coming out of business school, If I asked, I wish I knew.

 

this. What do you think the answer would be? I wish I had known. Not that anybody could have told us because we wouldn't have listened.

 

Glover Lawrence (43:08)

This is the annual, this is the perpetual question of why your kids have to go out and fail on their own. Exactly. You can't be told something. Yeah.

 

I wish I knew how random the walk would be. There's a great book. was in maybe the 80s, The Random Walk Down Wall Street. I actually had this discussion for an alumni function relative to my undergrad talking to a bunch of, in this case, a bunch of guys, because I played football in college, and I was speaking to current undergrads.

 

uh, who are all in the football team and saying, look guys, if you look at my resume, it might look linear, but that's just cause it's on paper. And you know, leaving and going to hamburger conquest and leaving, going to Oracle and their venture fund and getting fired from that. Cause they shut it down to moving to the East coast to with two young children and not having a job and then deciding to start an investment bank, which is nothing I'd ever imagined doing.

 

to figuring out that that was a terrible thing for me to do because of my personality and so forth, but still pushing through it for five years before then finally getting smart enough to leave and go get a job that fit much more of my interests in corporate development in a totally different field. And then getting fired from that job, well, the position was closed. And I was trying to figure out how to get out of there because the CEO that had taken over was unethical. And so the timing was good, but then having to go figure it out and go to a totally different industry.

 

short answer is you fall on your ass a lot of times over a career. I wish I'd known that that's normal. It is absolutely normal to do to face plant. And the biggest issue is like, okay, how do get up and go figure it out? And this came out when I was having that alumni chat with this, this happened to be a bunch of undergrads. But what was I suppose, refreshing, because, you know, you got a bunch of sophomores, juniors, seniors, and

 

college listening to quote unquote successful guys. It was all guys because it was football players, right? And it happened to be a track on like finance and VC because they wanted people to learn about that industry. And so on paper, everyone's very successful. They are certainly by month. But every one of them talked about getting fired, screwing something up, know, closing down a fund or something like that where, you know, it blew up. And that's part of it.

 

So I wish I, you know, it is no magic, you know, golden ticket coming out of Stanford or any other place. And, and recognizing that, you know, that part of it is just like that. That's just what it is.

 

Katharine McLennan (45:45)

Beautifully, beautifully. And Vikram, as you look forward, you're just about to leave this incredible two years.

 

what's the number one thing on your mind besides your business and where you're going to end?

 

Vikram Kanodia (46:01)

I think what's been on my mind primarily is being intentional about designing what my long-term life looks like. A little bit in terms of, okay, getting close to 30, we'll move back, get start, you know, start getting into work at some point. But, in 10, 15 years, what do I want my day to look like? What do want my life to look like? And how do I be intentional about

 

getting there because a lot of it requires 10, 15 years, 20 years of compounding to get there and putting myself in the right spot at the right time a little bit. So just being a little bit trying to figure out what that looks like and then trying to figure out how do I get there in 10 or 15 years.

 

Katharine McLennan (46:50)

right today, the curiosity and the, the youth that you guys have is inspiring. It's absolutely inspiring.