Harvard Alumni Entrepreneurs Invites

IN THIS EPISODE:
Philip Guarino speaks with Paris-based executive coach Jon Passaro about the hidden pressures leaders face in high-performance environments. They explore how self-awareness, reflection, and coaching help professionals navigate uncertainty, improve decision-making, and sustain growth over time.
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Jon Passaro is a Paris-based executive and team coach working with emerging and senior leaders in high-pressure, fast-paced environments, particularly in multinational law firms. A dual US/French national, he coaches in both English and French. Prior to coaching, he was a lawyer specializing in international disputes at leading global firms and later worked in-house at the OECD. Jon holds a BA from the University of Pennsylvania, an MPhil from the University of Cambridge, and a JD from Harvard Law School. He is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation.

IN THIS EPISODE:
Every organization begins by serving customers. Not all of them get it right — or keep it that way. So where does the customer  relationship break down?
In this episode, Denise Silber speaks with HBS MBA Caroline Evans de Gantes, a transformation leader who has spent more than two decades helping companies design strategy, culture, and operations around customer love as an organizing principle.
Caroline recalls arriving at Harvard Business School in 2008 just as the Lehman Brothers collapse unfolded — an experience that shaped her leadership perspective: progress comes from experimentation, learning quickly, and working closely with frontline teams. Drawing on transformations across industries known for difficult customer relationships, she shares what it takes to reconnect organizations with the people they serve.
From mobile phone insurance and broadband installation to the transformation of leading real-estate marketplace SeLoger within the Aviv Group, the conversation explores how leadership culture, incentives, and technology can be realigned around customers — and how doing so improves business performance. Throughout the discussion, Caroline shows that making customer love an organizing principle starts on Day 1.
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Caroline Evans de Gantès, a 2010 MBA graduate of the Harvard Business School, has over 20 years experience transforming offline industries by placing the client front and center. From insurance to telecommunications  to real estate, Caroline has deployed this approach to transform culture, product, and strategy, and turn profits around. Most recently, Caroline led a transformation at SeLoger (a 30 year old French real estate marketplace) to 2X the growth rate and a great NPS (Net Promoter Score), through redesigning culture, organisation, and business model. She merged SeLoger, and other real estate companies in France, launched new services to take back market share from rivals and championed a customer-centric culture in France, Belgium, and Germany. The resulting business, Aviv, is the leading European real estate marketplace with 50M monthly active users.  Caroline is originally from the State of Mississippi and has fashioned a career as the bridge between people and technology and the US and Europe.

IN THIS EPISODE:
In this episode, Denise Silber HBS MBA welcomes Professor Daniel Elfenbein,  a triple Harvard alumnus and entrepreneurship researcher at Olin Business School. Together, they explore the delicate balance entrepreneurs must strike between confidence and overconfidence, commitment and detachment, and the hard truth of knowing when to pivot—or when to quit.
Dan shares insights drawn from his own entrepreneurial journey, research experiments, and global teaching experience. From biotech boardroom standoffs to mathematical models of founder behavior, he unpacks how emotions, attachment, and overconfidence affect decision-making in startups. You'll learn why "quitting" may just be the smartest pivot of all—and how founders can better calibrate their confidence to avoid costly mistakes.
GUEST BIO:
Daniel Elfenbein is Professor of Strategy at Washington University in St. Louis's Olin Business School. A triple Harvard alumnus, Dan earned his Ph.D. and M.A. in Business Economics from Harvard, and graduated summa cum laude with an A.B. in Chemistry.
Dan is a leading scholar at the intersection of strategy, entrepreneurship, and organizational economics. His research delves into how trust, incentives, and behavioral biases shape outcomes in entrepreneurial ventures and strategic alliances. His work has been published in top-tier journals including the Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, and The Review of Economic Studies.
A central theme of Dan's research is understanding the nuanced role of overconfidence in entrepreneurial decision-making. His work—spanning computational modeling, experiments, and economic theory—has provided deep insights into how different forms of overconfidence (including overestimation and overprecision) influence venture formation, pivot strategies, and exit decisions. He has demonstrated that some forms of overconfidence can impede learning and decision-making, while others may be counterbalanced by well-designed experimentation programs.
Dan served as Chair of the Strategy and Entrepreneurship Area at Olin from 2020 to 2024, where he championed a culture of scholarly excellence and cross-disciplinary collaboration. He served as Academic Director and then as Associate Dean for Olin's joint Executive MBA Program with Fudan School of Management in Shanghai.
Prior to academia, Dan worked as a consultant at Monitor Company—a firm founded by Harvard Business School professors and graduates, including Michael E. Porter, with whom Dan had the great privilege to work. He also served as a staff economist with the President's Council of Economic Advisers in the Clinton Administration.
He has held faculty appointments at Berkeley's Haas School of Business and has delivered invited talks at Harvard Business School, MIT Sloan, and London Business School, and more than 30 other universities around the globe.

Meet Our Co-host: Philip Guarino
An interim executive and growth consultant to technology firms, Philip Guarino has over 25 years of experience as an executive and entrepreneur, having worked in over 50 countries and traveled to more than 120. 

Philip is the Chair of HarvardAE's Paris Chapter. Fluent in five languages, he is a graduate of Harvard College and holds an MBA from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Meet Our Co-host: Denise Silber
Denise Silber, a digital health pioneer and opinion leader, is the founder of Basil Strategies consultancy, of Doctors 2.0 & You conferences, and a new venture in Virtual Reality, VRforHealth. A multi-cultural American in Paris, Denise's contributions to the development of digital health globally led her to receive France's highest civil award, the Legion of Honor. A graduate of Smith College and a Harvard MBA, Denise is also a keynote speaker, author and vice president of Harvard Club of France.
In this episode of HAE Invites meet our hosts, Denise Silber and Philip Guarino. They talk about what led them to be a part of the persistent global movement to make things better through innovation. Tune in to learn more about HAE Invites, the people that will be featured on the show, and how these individuals are changing the business landscape.