Rachel Carlson, Guild Co-Founder and CEO, Bill Sahlman, Baker Foundation Professor, Dimitri V. D arbeloff - MBA Class of 1955 Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus

Professor?Bill Sahlman?will discuss his new case, “Guild Education: Unlocking Opportunity for America’s Workforce,” with CEO and cofounder?Rachel Carlson. Guild connects employers and universities to provide employees with “education as a benefit,” transforming traditional tuition assistance programs by facilitating direct payment by the employer to the academic institution and by supporting students with coaching and advising. Can Carlson extend her business model and?enter?other related markets, which would require finding the same incentive alignment as in Guild’s core education platform? Sahlman and Carlson also will look at larger issues in the economy, including the broad consequences of reskilling and upskilling of employees and strategies to retain employees and attract new employees.

HBS Professor Tom Eisenmann will discuss insights from his book, Why Startups Fail, with two failed alumni founders: Christina Wallace (MBA 2010), cofounder of Quincy Apparel and now Senior Lecturer at HBS, and Lindsay Hyde (MBA 2014), cofounder of Baroo, now Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Moderne Ventures, and soon to join HBS as a lecturer co-teaching the MBA elective “Entrepreneurial Failure” with Eisenmann. Eisenmann’s book describes six patterns that account for most startup failures and offers guidance on how to anticipate and avoid them. The book also shares advice on how to fail well as an entrepreneur: How to decide whether/when to pull the plug on a struggling startup; how to wind things down in ways that preserve relationships and integrity; and how to heal from the failure, learn from it, and figure out whether to pursue the entrepreneurial path again. Book details can be found here: https://shop.harvard.com/book/9780593137024 Cohosted by: Harvard Innovation Labs and The Arthur Rock Center for Entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School