Adrianna Ma (MBA 2000) has been member of the HBS Fund Investors Society, which recognizes leadership giving, for the past five years. “I had an unconventional background and I’m grateful that the School took a chance on me,” she explains when asked why she has consistently supported the HBS Fund since she graduated.

Business was not a path she considered as a child. At the age of 10, Ma, her younger sister, and her parents emigrated from Beijing to New York. Attending public schools and not speaking English, she focused on math instead. “It’s easier to learn numbers and analytics than liberal arts when you don’t speak the language,” observes Ma. Her hard work and focus paid off: She was accepted at MIT and graduated with a degree in electrical engineering.

After college, Ma worked as a project manager at Hewlett-Packard (HP), where she first realized she had an interest in business. “I had this insatiable curiosity about HP’s customers and the company’s competition,” she recalls. “I also found that I liked working with people—I’m an extrovert.” At the time, she read Year One, a 1994 book offering one student’s perspective on earning an MBA at HBS, and that convinced her to apply.

Expanding Horizons

Giving up her income to go back to school was not a decision that Ma took lightly, but when she was offered a spot in HBS’s January cohort, she accepted. The experience was exactly what she needed. “I was drinking from the fire hose,” she says. “At MIT, I learned how to problem solve. At HBS, I got a framework that allowed me to see the bigger picture.” The School also facilitated her career transition—from technology to investment banking and mergers and acquisitions at Morgan Stanley, and then to private equity, asset allocation, and now, to leading operations.

Ma recently was appointed chief operating officer (COO) of Index Ventures, a 25-year-old international venture capital firm. “We are investing in emerging growth businesses across all innovation sectors of the economy,” she says of the new position. Working as COO “synthesizes my past experiences,” she adds, citing her early career as an investor at General Atlantic; her recent work as a limited partner at Fremont Group, a family investment firm in San Francisco; and her service on endowment and foundation boards.

The Network Effect

Ma has found the HBS alumni network to be particularly valuable both throughout her career and in her personal life. “The alumni community is a group of people with shared values. We find each other all over the world. There is a commonality that is really powerful,” she says. A case in point, Ma relied on the alumni network to connect with graduates when she moved to San Francisco five years ago, and more recently to London, to prepare for her new positions. Connecting with kindred spirits, she says, was particularly important because of the isolation resulting from the pandemic.

In the years since she graduated, Ma’s appreciation for the softer skills that she gained at the School has only increased. “For me it is about lifelong learning and lifelong friendships, both of which are very important.”

Describing the School as “a wonderful source of support for me,” she says, it is impossible to place a dollar value on the connections to her classmates, the alumni she’s gotten to know since graduating, and the HBS faculty. “Jan Rivkin instilled a lifelong love of strategy,” she notes. In an effort to pay it forward, Ma provides financial support to HBS to sustain the School’s mission of educating leaders who make a difference. “I believe in what the School is trying to do,” she says simply.

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