Meet Philipp Gschopf and John Fabros Sokolov Executive MBA Students

John: The best part of being in a classroom where your classmates have built, managed, and led across industries you’d never otherwise be exposed to is that every theoretical concept gets pressure-tested by someone who’s actually lived it. You’re not learning in the abstract; you’re hearing how a framework played out in someone’s actual experience, and that changes how you absorb the material. The curriculum is rigorous, but it’s the kind of rigor that feels worthwhile because you can apply what you’re learning in real time to your work outside the classroom.

What ties it all together is the international structure. Having classmates coming together from nearly every continent gives you exposure to markets, regulatory environments, and business cultures that you might not encounter in a domestic program. For someone like me whose whole career was international, that was nonnegotiable. 

Philipp: Booth’s focus on changing the way you think means you can generate deep change in yourself during the program. On the other hand, I have also learned that even in a field such as AI, the key factor in a project’s success or failure is how well you can connect your team to other departments and work with them. And the better you know the languages of these departments, the more this accelerator can kick in. The University of Chicago is renowned for its rigor, and during the program students get immersed in so many different “languages” that you will feel a deep level of confidence talking to all parts of your organization.

Philipp: Booth gave me the confidence to pursue the startup. Before I joined the program, I felt there was too much risk. I come from a working-class family, and with that background it takes a few years of showing your excellence at work until your funds reach comfortable levels. And at that stage I had three wonderful kids. As every parent knows, it’s hard to think about dragging your family into an unknown abyss of risks. So even though I was working in innovation roles, I didn’t feel secure in taking such a step. Plus, at that point your opportunity costs are very visible in terms of paychecks and bonuses. 

What really differentiates Chicago Booth is the tightness of the network, coupled with the legendary Midwestern friendliness. The university opens doors that reduce the risks of pursuing new business opportunities. We have prime access to the best practitioners in every field of knowledge. Also, it’s a great credential. Having the Booth degree shows investors that you have acquired a deep understanding of finance and will act responsibly with funds.

Philipp: The classroom expertise is rivaled by none. You might be initially attracted by the fact that it’s the only program that flies the best professors around the world to where you are, but the biggest gains can come from diving into three global locations where you gather with the best and brightest from all fields of work. This is why an EMBA can greatly exceed the value and growth that an MBA can create: The classmates teach you so much. 

The case study discussions in my study group are amazing. Recently we were talking about operations, and one of the cases was settled in a hospital. Tharwat El Zahran, a member of my study group, is COO at a renowned hospital. Throughout the discussion she was excited about how it related to her work, and I’ll never forget the lessons I learned that day. In class, people often throw challenges and industry insights at the professors that take us on super valuable detours and elevate the setting away from a typical methodological class setting into a higher experience of personal growth.

John: Phinorm makes air defense systems smarter through software. Counter-drone sensors today are drowning in overload; operators waste critical seconds sorting real threats from noise, and when every second of warning can save lives that’s a problem worth solving. Our software plugs into existing radar systems, making them faster and more accurate without new hardware. Five of us co-founded the company across the US and Germany, bringing together backgrounds in radar engineering, military operations, data science, AI, and business development.

What Booth gave us, in addition to an ideal team of founders, was coursework that has mapped directly onto the challenges of building a partnership and licensing a focused B2B software startup. Professor Scott Meadow’s Entrepreneurial Finance courses in both VC and PE during Elective Weeks were essential because they walk you through a business life cycle from inception to exit, which is exactly how you need to think when you’re pre-revenue and talking to investors. Competitive Strategy and Pricing Strategy have been just as important for a company whose product is licensed and integrated rather than sold off the shelf. And because our cofounders sit at different campuses we’ve had different professors for both courses, which means we come to the table with multiple frameworks instead of just one way of looking at the problem.

Philipp: Another great resource is the university’s Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. Polsky’s mentors are a collection of top guns, immediately giving you access to expertise, connections, venture capital, and guidance that greatly de-risks critical decisions you’ll need to take as part of launching your enterprise. The center has also established a very strong track record on the firms it launches. This gives you credibility that opens doors, and it’s also great for your confidence in taking steps into the unknown.

John: Phinorm’s roots were the conversations we had during our international cohort sessions. We were at different home campuses but spent intensive weeks together in Chicago, London, and Hong Kong, and the collaborative culture Booth fosters made it easy to go from classmates to cofounders. By the time we started talking about the counter-drone problem, we had already forged a kind of trust that can’t be replicated via coffee meetings or Zoom calls.

Turning that trust into an actual company has been possible in large part because of the Polsky Center. Our Polsky Entrepreneur-in-Residence mentor has been amazing as we navigate the early stages. His experience is truly stunning, and with his charisma—coupled with a background in bringing complex innovations to great value—he has become a crucial member of our enterprise. And our entrepreneurship coach has helped us think more clearly about ourselves as founders, not just the business we’re building. 

We’ve also worked with a UChicago Law alum who has been magnificent in his ability to open doors, and with his background in venture capital we were confident we could trust his assessment of the business.

Additionally, pursuing this venture came at a fortunate time for us. Philipp has a background in research. He was approached by one of our board members, Professor Dr. Wolfgang Haerdle, who made a fundamental discovery that almost ignores a limitation military defenders currently face. It’s a hot field, and widespread adoption of this breakthrough will be able to save many lives if brought to market. Not many organizations have such a strong ability to bring new ventures to market. That, combined with the extremely strong network of the university, convinced us this was a chance we could not pass up. With help from the Polsky Center, we were able to construct a low-risk path to large-scale market success. We can confidently say that this would not have been possible otherwise.

Philipp: We’re in the Global New Venture Challenge right now, and it’s an amazing experience. It’s structured as an accelerator, not a classroom exercise: You build a real business plan, pitch to real investors, and get coached by people who deploy capital and build companies for a living. You can teach entrepreneurship in a lecture hall, but the material doesn’t stick the same way it does when someone who writes checks for a living is telling you what’s wrong with your business plan. For professionals who already know how to learn from a textbook, GNVC is where education becomes experience, and for a program that recruits senior professionals with real careers and real obligations, that’s exactly the kind of offering Booth is investing in. From soft-skill courses like Managerial Psychology, Negotiations, and Leadership Capital that are essential to building an effective founding team, to hard-skill courses like Corporate Finance and Accounting that any business needs to get right, the classroom gave us the tools and GNVC gave us a workshop to test them. Huge shout out to the GNVC team for the amazing work and support they provide to students!

In our case, the university’s connections to Argonne National Lab and within the defense space have been incredibly valuable door openers. The Polsky Center also provides a host of resources—for example, collaborations with Amazon that led to significant free compute resources and access to expensive databases crucial for product placement and strategy research.

Another highlight is the network in finance. We have cofounders who are not at Booth, and they were worried about financing. We were able to immediately build a deck in a format that two years of coursework had helped us to master. With the university’s established routes for founders, we had opportunities to take the idea straight to VCs and potential angel investors. We were fortunate to line up agreements for future funding even before we went into pre-seed.

All that time and mental effort you save on cold pitches can instead go into making your product market fit better, R&D to make your product more amazing, and building truly meaningful relationships with the investors you have thanks to the University of Chicago.