While a senior associate consultant at Bain & Company, Jennifer Fried immersed herself in the world of strategy, marketing, and growth across a variety of industries. All the while, however, she harbored a desire to make an impact in the health-care space. “You need to feel good about what you’re doing,” she says, “and feel like what you did that day made the world a slightly better place.”
Wanting to transition from consulting to an earlier stage company environment and focused in healthcare, Jennifer decided to enroll in the Full-Time Program at Booth to get more exposure to early-stage businesses and earn enough entrepreneurial expertise to get her own venture off the ground. “It’s a big decision and a big commitment, obviously, to leave your full-time, paid job and go back to school,” she admits. Even before Booth, while working at Bain, she says, “I had the chance to work with a lot of Booth grads who were phenomenal and so encouraging. I started seeing the value then.”
While enrolled at Booth, Jennifer cofounded ExplORer Surgical, a startup that provides workflow management solutions for the operating room. “I never thought I would be running my own company,” says Fried, its CEO. “The nice thing about Booth is that you have a safety net for what you’re doing. You have this phenomenal network of people that can help you to define what you’re doing next.”