>he finally finished his nominally 12-month master's degree there
A Sloan SM/MBA is 2 yrs (nominally and actually). There is also a 12 month SM/MBA for "senior executives", so that's probably what is being referred to. But in that case, it wouldn't have been him "finishing" the degree program he had left (because he would not have been taken as a senior executive then), so they probably applied the credits he did have to this other program for which he would have to write a paper anyway.
(as a side quibble, MIT only started offering "an MBA" in the '90's (purely for job-market name recognition) and prior to that time the (same) degree was called SM Management, which is what his original program would have been. the SM is technically "better" because it entails also writing a thesis)
He visited a company I worked at when I was fresh out of school, and he was brought by my office impromptu to see what I was working on. my software crashed immediately, and he laughed, in a friendly way, but didn't ask for my resume.
PDF here: https://www.d-eship.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/kapor-mdk...
Kapor found himself in an elevator with another employee sometime after he had handed over the reins to Jim Manzi. The other employee, who apparently didn't recognize Kapor, was dressed in a full three-piece suit. "That's when Kapor decided to leave," my erstwhile friend told me. "He said, I started Lotus because I wanted a company where I could wear Hawaiian shirts and sandals. I didn't want to work somewhere where I had to wear a suit." But that's what Lotus had become, so it was time to go.
We never met, but I have always admired the guy.
But also, if you value appearance, perhaps invest in looking great while not wearing a suit.
Azim Premji completed his degree from Stanford, many years later, after having to leave it and go back to India, to take charge of the family business, after his father's death, IIRC.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azim_Premji
I could not find it in the Wikipedia article, but I remember reading about it some years earlier, in some Indian magazine.
I didn’t find it in an Indian magazine, but here it is in a magazine Stanford puts out.
https://stanfordmag.org/contents/the-world-according-to-azim...
> Premji was just finishing his engineering studies at Stanford in 1966 when he got word of his father’s sudden death. “It came as a complete shock,” he says. “I just had to rush back.” He had only one term until his graduation, a passage the news would delay 30 years. (Premji eventually sought—and got—permission to attend arts courses by correspondence to complete the requirements for his bachelor’s degree. “I had met all the core requirements for engineering—I just wanted that degree.”)
bookofjoe•7mo ago