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Northern California Club Honors Noom; LGBTQ Alumni Share HBS Stories
Clubs News
In a virtual award celebration held on April 6, the HBS Association of Northern California (HBSANC) honored the digital health platform Noom as its 2022 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year (ECY).
Noom’s CEO and cofounder, Saeju Jeong, accepted the award and shared the company’s success story during the online “fireside chat” organized and cohosted by HBSANC board member and dinner chair Ben Dubin (MBA 1997) and HBSANC president and board member Phani Nagarjuna (MBA 2000).

“We were looking for a mission we could commit to for life,” said Jeong, who launched Noom with cofounder Artem Petakov in 2008, in order to “help people everywhere lead healthier lives.” Jeong said that mission helped them through several iterations of ideas for a health platform, difficulties raising capital, and early product attempts that missed the mark on health outcomes—including a prototype of a smart bike and apps for fitness and calorie tracking.
“In order to have a healthy outcome, our users need to adopt a healthy lifestyle—daily, little-by-little choices,” he said. “Diet, exercise, stress management, and sleep are all important. We are humans, not machines. We realized it must be a holistic approach.”
Today, Noom is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing, consumer-first digital health platforms, empowering users to achieve positive health outcomes through behavior change. Fueled by a combination of technology, psychology, and human coaching, Noom is backed by more than a decade of user research and product development. Its platform includes two core programs: Noom Weight for weight management and Noom Mood for stress management. The future of Noom, Jeong added, could include programs to address more specific health conditions that can improve with behavior change.
The Entrepreneurial Company of the Year award was launched by the HBSANC in 1979 to honor entrepreneurial firms that are making a transformational impact globally. Previous honorees include Apple, Twitter, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pixar, Salesforce, and Facebook.
“During the time I was president, we held three in-person dinners, honoring Twitter, Workday, and Yelp, says Susan Hailey (MBA 1984), current HBSANC board chair and former president. “It was a true team effort to select, organize, and raise sponsorships. The dinners were well-attended networking events that attracted many luminaries in Silicon Valley and helped raise the profile of HBS in the Silicon Valley. Due to COVID, we shifted to an all-virtual model to honor Noom. While we didn’t get the in-person networking impact, the organizing team did a fantastic job raising sponsorship funds. All in all, we will pursue both paths in the future to engage our alumni in-person and virtually.”
The club has established a fairly selective process for evaluating potential honorees, according to HBSANC board member Lara Druyan (MBA 1994), who has helped select ECY winners for more than 20 years.
“We care about, and choose, companies that will hopefully stand the test of time,” says Druyan. “We look at market cap, growth, whether it’s a compelling business. Companies have to be fundamentally sound, and they don’t have to be tech companies. But they tend to skew to tech just because of where we are. Over time, we’ve chosen truly lasting and iconic companies.”
The company’s team, and its values, also play a major role in their selection, says Ping Hao (MBA 1997), a former HBSANC president, who helped establish the award and has long served on the selection committee.
“We won’t honor a company if they don’t share our values. For example, how they treat women or other issues,” says Hao. “We ask, are they representative of the entrepreneurial spirit of HBS and our club? Are we going to be proud of who is on this list when we look back in 20, 30, even 50 years from now?”
Both Druyan and Hao say the award has become quite prestigious among the world’s top entrepreneurs and venture capital firms, and winners are excited to be honored by HBS alumni. The event, which is open to the public, has been a gala dinner in downtown San Francisco in previous years, and always sold out. When Apple’s Steve Jobs was honored, Druyan says, the venue was standing-room only.
While the award brings prestige to the honored companies, Hao says the event has had many benefits for the association. “Northern California is one of the centers of entrepreneurship in the United States,” she says. “This event gives us credibility—I once heard someone say this is one of the top three major events they go to every year in the Bay Area that relates to venture capital. And it gives our alumni an opportunity to get together around the common theme of entrepreneurship.”
Nagarjuna adds that this year it was particularly challenging to organize this capstone event given the pandemic. “We fast-tracked all aspects, from planning to execution, in order to have the event organized in time,” he says “Noom was the right choice. Our alumni members loved Noom’s business model, its message, and its impact on people’s lives.”
Dubin adds that while the virtual event was “a bit different,” it reached more people as a webcast, and clips from the recorded conversation with Jeong will be made available online for anyone to view. “They can be searched and watched for many years to come,” says Dubin. “In the past we never did that. There were little jewels of wisdom that Seiju spoke about that will be really useful for teaching, and for other students, and for understanding Noom, especially as they move on and become an even more successful company. I love the fact that it’s going to have legs to it, when our other dinners—while they were great—lasted just four hours and then they were gone.”
The Entrepreneurial Company of the Year event is one of the most-attended networking events by HBS alumni and Silicon Valley investors and entrepreneurs. It serves as one of the HBSANC’s two major annual fundraisers, primarily aimed at supporting its Community Partners programs throughout the Bay Area. The other is the Annual Leadership Dinner.
The HBSANC leadership successfully executed a virtual event that was broadcast far beyond its local geography, and attracted significant sponsorships. According to Nagarjuna, this year’s celebration raised more than $85,000 in revenue, from marquee brand sponsors RRE Ventures, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Hanson Bridgett LLP, Asset Management Company, Cooley LLP, and Bill Draper.
The newly renamed HBS PRIDE Alumni Association (formerly HBS LGBT Alumni Association) recently welcomed an audience of nearly 150 alumni and current HBS students to a multi-generational panel discussion titled “Five Decades of PRIDE: Personal reflections on the LGBTQ experience at HBS over 50 years.”
The April 19 event, co-organized with the student HBS Pride organization, featured a hybrid presentation, with an in-person discussion held in Spangler Auditorium for students while alumni attended virtually via livestream.
“I happen to be a big proponent of intergenerational learning,” says club board member and the event’s organizer, Paul Donaher (MBA 1981),who also participated as a panelist.“As someone who lived through the AIDS epidemic in the ‘80s, I’m always surprised when I encounter younger people who are so unaware of the gravity of our movement’s historic struggles.”
Donaher created the multi-generational panel event to highlight the progress at HBS around LGBTQ diversity and inclusion. Joining Donaher on the panel were Megan Chann (MBA 2018), Joseph Steele (MBA 1983), Ellen Bossert (MBA 1992), Paula Cobb (MBA 2000), Reggie Van Lee (MBA 1984), and Willis Emmons (MBA 1985), a senior lecturer at HBS.

“I was the oldest, from the Class of 1981, while the youngest one on the panel graduated in 2018,” says Donaher. “Every panelist gave a summary of their experience as an LGBTQ person on campus at HBS. Then we took questions from the audience.”
Donaher shared that when he started at HBS in 1979, the LGBTQ students’ club was known as “Alternative Executive Lifestyles” and they had to hold meetings off campus, with no formal recognition as a school club.
“The younger folks in our audience didn’t know about that, and everyone laughed—it was kind of a humorous name, though unfortunate at the same time,” says Donaher. “But that’s what it was like for us. We didn’t get any of the benefits of being an official student club on campus.”
And though some official records date the first LGBTQ student club at HBS only back to 1980, Donaher says that it existed unofficially prior to that, though he does not know exactly when it began. “In those days, people somehow found out about it if they searched for it.”
Illustrating how much things have changed, Donaher says there were about 22 members of the club over his two years at HBS. Now, the student HBS Pride association has more than 100 members. He adds that the HBS PRIDE Alumni Association has more than 700 members, and there are two openly LGBTQ faculty members on campus as well.
Panelists described their challenges at HBS in their respective decades, with one sharing that they chose to be out from the start, and most noting steady improvements on campus over time. As for their careers after HBS, some panelists shared that they’d been outed at work and how that affected them.
“Back in my day, I would be afraid to interview with a lot of companies for fear of being found out as being gay,” says Donaher. “But now these companies are some of the most proactive LGBTQ supporters, like BCG, Bain, Goldman Sachs, and McKinsey. They have really been at the forefront of LGBTQ leadership and diversity within their organizations.”
Donaher says the panel event marks the beginning of a re-activated alumni club, and plans are underway to expand the alliance between LGBTQ alumni and current HBS students and to develop a steady roster of events and activities. The first of these will be a series of social networking events over the summer in key cities, including Boston; New York; Washington, DC; San Francisco; and Los Angeles.
In addition, over the last year, the club has launched LGBTQ-specific Alumni Forums to help build connection and community. “We’ve got one Forum on the East Coast, and one on the West Coast,” he says. “They’re multi-generational, and each has nine members. They’re very successful, and we’re expanding to create more of them.”
Donaher invites any LGBTQ alumni who are interested in joining the club or a Forum to contact him at pauldonaher20@gmail.com or the HBS PRIDE Alumni Association at presidents@hbs.lgbt.org.
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