Alumni couples share how they met, married, and stayed together.
The beginnings of these 11 Stanford Graduate School of Business romances are as varied as the alumni themselves. Whether it’s a story of instant attraction, a slow burn stoked by friendly competition, or a tale of dislike-at-first-sight, these couples encompass the full range of the circumstances and emotions that bring people together. Sometimes, the romantic connections happened before they came to Stanford; sometimes, the love matches occurred well after graduation. Despite all their differences, what each couple has in common is that they all attended Stanford GSB — and that Stanford sits at the heart of their relationships.
André Macedo, MBA ’14, and Erica Jannini Macedo, MBA ’14
São Paulo
Erica Jannini Macedo and André Macedo worked across the street from each other in São Paulo. But they didn’t actually meet until just before their MBA Admit Weekend. André was riding his bike near Hoover Tower and spotted Erica wearing a Brazil jersey; he immediately struck up a conversation.
The two hit it off instantly. “Being by ourselves in a different country without friends or family, we kind of became each other’s support,” Erica says. André helped her buy her car and assemble her IKEA furniture, and Erica booked his pre-MBA student-led trip to Colombia. While they had different hobbies — “André would go out biking and running, and I’m completely not that; I’m a party person,” Erica says — they were in the same section and got to know each other on a deep level working through sticky projects and complicated assignments together. “I started to admire her as a person, her values, and her ethics,” André says. “It was a very special connection, a friendship.” Erica respected how driven André was to make a name for himself. “He wants to succeed and he works ultra hard to get there,” she says. “He’s also humble and super smart.”
Part of a close group of Stanford GSB friends, “we were afraid to date and have that ruin our friendship,” André says. They quietly started a romance a year after graduation, then married in 2016 and welcomed their son, Gabriel, in 2018.
Erica and André believe having the same frameworks from Stanford GSB helps their family life. “It sounds a little cheesy, but I think it creates a language,” Erica says. “You can understand the thought process.” However, there’s a caveat. “I know when she’s using the tools that she learned at Stanford against me,” André playfully quips. “I know when she’s crossing the net.”
They hope their son, who went to Camp Cardinal this past summer, might want to attend Stanford one day. “To go to Stanford was like a dream,” André says. “If you can dream about things, maybe you can accomplish them. We are trying to raise our kid to learn that he can dream.”
Adriane Gamble Armstrong, MBA ’09, and Mike Armstrong, MBA ’09
Oakland, California
Mike Armstrong and Adriane Gamble Armstrong became fast friends after an orientation week barbecue at Professor Garth Saloner’s house. New to the Bay Area, Mike asked Adriane — who had attended Stanford as an undergrad — about the hip-hop radio stations he should tune into. The answer was 106.1 KMEL. “This was pre-Sirius and Spotify,” Adriane recalls.
From then on, “we were always around each other,” Mike says. They were assigned to the same MBA section, sat next to each other in class, and saw each other at the gym and at parties. They also became part of the same study group that met at Schwab, Adriane’s dorm. “It felt natural, just part of the flow,” Mike adds.
Within six weeks, Mike and Adriane became a couple. Then, during Work and Family, a course they took together their second year, Professor Myra Strober asked for a show of hands of who was married, who was single, and, finally, who thought they were dating someone they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with. “We were looking at each other and, with the entire class staring us down, we both tentatively raised our hands at the same time,” Adriane recalls. “To this day, our classmates bring up this moment.”
Mike admired Adriane’s thoughtfulness and ambition, and Adriane appreciated Mike’s charm and kind heart. “What stood out to me is just how engaged and involved he is in his family and his community,” Adriane says. The pair married in 2012 and now have two children, ages 12 and 10. Frameworks they learned in Stanford GSB classes help them maintain a strong partnership. “Marriage is a mutually beneficial enterprise,” Mike says. “You focus on optimizing, collaborating, and compromising in ways that are helpful.” To wit: They both like to judge the annual Stanford GSB Executive Challenge, “but sometimes we have to rock paper scissors for who’s going to stay home with the kids,” Adriane says.
Amy Huber, PhD ’22, and Stefan Huber, PhD ’21
Philadelphia
Amy Huber and Stefan Huber met in the cramped backseat of a rideshare on their way to Admit Day at Stanford GSB. Stefan, a consummate academic who had never lived more than 60 miles from his tiny German hometown, misunderstood Uber surge pricing. Amy, fresh from global management consulting and private equity roles in New York and Abu Dhabi, was completely annoyed. “It was a very expensive ride that epitomized our different backgrounds,” Amy remembers. “It was the opposite of love at first sight,” Stefan says, laughing.
After starting in the doctoral program — Amy in finance, and Stefan in accounting — they took the same three-quarter-sequence econometrics course. “We did many problem sets together,” Amy says. “That made me realize that he’s not just smart, but also very kind and has a heart of gold.” “The work really brought us close,” Stefan says. Finding they also shared values and religions, they regularly attended weekly Sunday services at Memorial Church and went out to brunch afterward.
The pair started casually dating, but Amy initially balked at a relationship. Then, the summer after their first year, they ended up being the only two people on what was supposed to be a group trip abroad. Cooking in the communal kitchen of a YWCA in Banff, hanging out at Amy’s childhood home in Toronto, everything finally gelled in Portugal. “It was just in the small, everyday things where we saw that we make a really good team,” Amy says. Stefan was thrilled at Amy’s decision. “I was not on the fence,” he says. “It became clear much earlier for me.”
Stefan proposed to Amy at the Oval the summer after their second year. “I was so nervous, I got down on both knees,” he says. “Luckily, we took pictures afterward so I could correct that.” The officiant and the witness at their California ceremony were both fellow Stanford GSB doctoral students, and another student attended their family wedding celebration in Germany. Two years later, their son was born at Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital, and they lived on campus at Escondido Village, hosting grad student social events, until they finished their degrees.
Now, as professors at Wharton, academia still grounds their relationship. “It’s nice to have someone who really understands,” Amy says. The couple returns to Stanford GSB annually for reunions and conferences, Stefan has coauthored almost all of his papers with Stanford colleagues, and Python-based workflows and spreadsheets organize their home life. “When we’re together, it’s more likely than not there will be work-related conversations going on,” Stefan says. “Our son’s not happy about that.” — Amara Holstein
James “Jim” King, MBA ’77, and Lili Pratt King, MBA ’76
Alamo, California
For 27 years, Lili Pratt King and Jim King had what you could call almost-connections. It began when they were both undergrads at Stanford. Lili was a freshman and Jim was an eating associate at Roble, the all-women’s dorm. “He was adorable, but he was a senior,” she says. Jim was also in a relationship, and he married his first wife soon after graduation, then joined the Peace Corps. Years passed. Then Jim returned to Stanford for business school. When he arrived for an admissions interview, Lili was working in the Stanford GSB placement office the summer before entering the MBA program. “I remember thinking, boy, she’s just cute as a button,” he says. “And so effervescent.”
Though they were both concurrently enrolled at Stanford GSB, since Jim was a first-year and Lili a second, their paths didn’t cross often. By then, Lili was married too. “We were just acquaintances, really,” Jim says. After graduation, they reunited at alumni functions, “but again, just, ‘Hi, how are you? What’s going on in your life?’ because we were with other partners,” Lili says. Then, in 1994, both were divorced and hoping to remarry. A classmate of Jim’s mentioned Lili was single, and they officially re-met in October that year.
Their courtship was fast. After her divorce, Lili had made a list of all the qualities she wanted for her next husband: someone she was attracted to, who was emotionally available to her and her two sons, and who was joyful. She also listed “something frivolous,” she says, which was “loved horses.” She shared the list with Jim the week after they reconnected. He had a horse at the time. “He looked at my list and said, ‘Oh, look, I can check every box,’” Lili says. On Thanksgiving, Jim proposed to Lili and her sons. “We have been married for 31 years and my heart still stops when I see him in a room,” Lili says.
When they married, Jim and Lili were in their late 40s and at the height of their careers. She worked as an executive coach and he owned a financial planning company. Maintaining economic independence was important to Lili (“Lesson learned from first unhappy relationship,” she says), and Touchy Feely’s tools came into play. “We could negotiate what we needed to support our business endeavors,” she says. “And our family,” Jim adds.
Jim and Lili maintain strong ties to Stanford. Together, they created a workshop called Composing the Rest of Your Lives, which teaches MBAers nearing retirement how to find meaning and purpose outside of their profession. “When we both retired, we had to swallow our own medicine and use some of the same tools that we had developed in the course,” Lili says. This summer they spent five weeks in Florence with Stanford, and in August they went to Montreal for a 10-day hiking trip up Mont Tremblant with Jim’s classmates.
Even now, they still practice what they learned at Stanford GSB every day. “Communication skills become really essential to not only fortifying our relationship, but also allowing us to grow and change through the different segments of our aging process,” Lili says. “Each decade has its unique challenges.”
Theresa Hagel, MBA ’12, and Lindsey Scrase, MBA ’12
San Francisco
Lindsey Scrase and Theresa Hagel took the same Touchy Feely class their first year at Stanford GSB but saw each other only in passing. Then, during a 10-day GMIX trip to South Africa that March, Theresa felt a potential spark between them. It was enough to convince her to join a 6 a.m. group hike up Table Mountain in Cape Town. “When they announced the hike, I thought, ‘What a terrible idea. Who’s going to do that?’” Theresa recalls. “And then Lindsey raised her hand, and I’m like, ‘Well, I guess I’m going to do it.’”
During the three-hour hike that they joke was “a grueling StairMaster climb,” Lindsey and Theresa started a conversation that lasted the rest of the trip. They talked about their lives, their families, and what brought them to Stanford. “Theresa’s just such a real human, so grounded in who she is and so authentically herself,” Lindsey says. “There was a deep connection.” Back on campus, they continued building their friendship through walks around the Dish and dinners at Cafe Borrone in Menlo Park.
That June, after a lingering meal on the longest day of the year, Theresa says, “It was just very clear to me that I’m in love with her.” They married in 2014; the wedding was officiated by their friend Pallen Chiu, MBA ’12, “who initially told me I should get to know Lindsey. She didn’t mean it in a matchmaking sense, but she was correct about that,” Theresa says.
Lindsey is now the COO of Checkr and Theresa is an operations executive at Stripe. Their shared experiences have helped them navigate life as LGBTQ executives and mothers; they often use Touchy Feely terms like “pinches” and “owning your side of the story” in their relationship. While they are busy with work and with their family — they have two children, ages 7 and 9 — they still keep up with other Stanford GSB alums and make time to walk the Dish for long conversations. “We’re both very driven professionally but also very, very values aligned. We care deeply about being down to earth and raising our kids to have some perspective,” Lindsey says. And this summer, Lindsey and Theresa traveled to South Africa with their children. “So that’s full circle,” Lindsey says.
Satoko Wakasa, MSx ’22, and Sho Wakasa, MSx ’26
Mountain View, California
Satoko Wakasa and Sho Wakasa, who dated as undergraduates in Japan, were drawn to each other’s outlooks on life. “She had an adventurous spirit,” Sho says. And Satoko found Sho’s optimism refreshing. “I thought that this might be someone who could give me different perspectives and help me be the best version of myself,” she says. The pair both joined the Japanese conglomerate Mitsubishi out of college, then married in 2013; for long periods, they lived apart as they were each transferred to different global offices.
In 2021, Satoko hit what she calls an “inflection point,” hoping to leave corporate life and work with early-stage companies in the sustainability space. Plus, “we wanted to have kids, but it was difficult with that type of lifestyle,” she says. Compelled by the MSx program’s emphasis on forging your own path, Satoko learned how to “be yourself, tell your story, and be influential in ways other than climbing the ladder” through GSB courses like Paths to Power and Strategic Communication, she says.
The couple also embarked on another life change: Satoko became pregnant at the start of the program; Sho made her lunches every day. Their son was born right after she attended the Touchy Feely weekend retreat. “It was a big transition period for us, but a very happy one,” Satoko says.
Working in Silicon Valley for Mitsubishi at the time, Sho saw how much Satoko was learning and yearned for his own entrepreneurial pivot. Coming from a more structured Japanese corporate culture, Stanford GSB opened up possibilities. “Spending time at the GSB really makes you think about things like: How do you want to spend your life? What are your important values?” Satoko says of the sentiments she and Sho share.
Spurred by his goal to start a venture studio, Sho followed Satoko to Stanford GSB a few years later, a second child in tow. He took an independent study class with Professor Charles O’Reilly, focusing on how to thrive in the world of AI. And in Startup Garage, he practiced his interviewing techniques with Satoko. “She was probably one of my toughest critics!” he says. Graduating from the MSx program this past June, Sho still keeps her feedback in mind as he works through ideas for his company. “Mentally I always imagine, ‘What would she say?”
Akshata Murty, MBA ’06, and Rishi Sunak, MBA ’06
London
Before Rishi Sunak and Akshata Murty became the UK’s first couple, they were students at Stanford GSB. The pair first met in the Schwab Courtyard during orientation weekend. “Rishi and I were simply buddies early on,” Akshata says. They ran the Loop together (“Akshata used to cringe when I would turn up in a pair of cargo shorts and old, battered gym shoes,” Rishi says), attended LPFs (casual Friday events) together, and grabbed salads and club sandwiches at Arbuckle Café for lunch.
Their mutual attraction grew gradually, but steadily. “We challenged ourselves by really engaging in each other’s interests,” Akshata says. “I took classes in game theory, and he took brand management courses with me. We loved learning from and with each other.” Rishi had a slight secondary motive, however. “I took that brand management class mainly to spend more time with Akshata,” he says. “But it really expanded my horizons and helped me think about companies and investing differently. It is typical of how Akshata has made me a better version of myself.”
Those everyday interactions deepened their understanding of each other. “Rishi had a way with people and made them feel special,” Akshata says. “I specifically remember when he helped me with mock interviews for summer internships, and it felt like it mattered as much to him as it did to me to get an offer.” Their shared passion for service and impact also became clear. “I realized, over the course of our time at Stanford GSB, that Rishi and I had the same set of values,” she adds.
The two were just 26 when they graduated, and while their connection was strong, they decided to focus on their professional growth ahead of making any long-term personal decisions. Akshata moved to the Bay Area for a brand management position and Rishi returned to the UK to pursue an investment role. To keep the relationship alive, they met a couple times a month in New York. Then, on a trip to Half Moon Bay, where they had often escaped to study, Rishi proposed to Akshata. They wed in 2009 and had a family ceremony in Bangalore and a celebration in New York for international friends and colleagues. “I wouldn’t be exaggerating by much if I said that most of our guests were GSB alums,” Akshata says.
Rishi and Akshata appreciate being married to a partner who understands their way of thinking. “The GSB gave us a shared language; not management speak, but a common way of looking at the world,” Akshata says. They now work together at The Richmond Project, the philanthropic organization they founded in 2025 to improve numeracy skills across the UK, while also running their joint private office that focuses on projects across technology, culture, business, and education. “We are each other’s force multipliers,” Rishi says. “We challenge each other’s thinking, and I like to believe that our conversations sharpen and deepen each other’s perspectives.”
Grover Burthey, MBA ’12, and Leslie Emmons Burthey, MBA ’12
London
Leslie Burthey and Grover Burthey have enjoyed friendly competition throughout their relationship, which began when they were frosh at the University of Pennsylvania and continued while Grover worked post-grad in Hong Kong and London. Moving back to New York to be with Leslie, “[Grover] came home one day and said, ‘I think I’m going to apply to business school,’” Leslie remembers. “I said, ‘Well, if you’re applying to business school, I’m applying to business school.’”
The couple got engaged right before applying to Stanford. “I used to joke, ‘Yeah, you had to lock it in before we actually submitted the applications,’” Leslie says. “We ended up both getting into Stanford and it was wonderful.”
The two arrived at Stanford GSB eager for the full experience. “We actually tried not to take too many classes together,” Grover says. “We wanted to give each other some space.” They married after their first year, and when they returned to campus for the second, they chose to live in a shared house on Manuela Avenue with roommates. “It was Grover and four women,” Leslie says. “Everyone names their house, and around that time there was a show on HBO called Big Love, so everyone knew our house as Big Love.”
Work and Family was a class Leslie and Grover intentionally took together. The couple, who now have three young children, credit Professor Myra Strober’s lessons for helping them manage a household. Leslie says the discussions around resource management helped alleviate guilt about their decision to hire help. Maintaining two careers — he is a portfolio manager at PIMCO and she is the marketing director at OurHouse Clubs — involves “trusting that we’re respectful of each other’s time,” Grover says. “Sometimes it feels as if we communicate through meeting planners, but it works,” Leslie says. “If I have something, the first thing I do is put it on the calendar so he knows not to book over me and one of us can be home for the kids.”
Having spent most of their adult life as a couple, “We’re very fortunate to have met each other very young,” Grover says. “We kind of captured each other in our youth, so we can maintain that youth over time.”
Cheryl Morrison, SEP ’24, and Jeremia Venter, SEP ’24
San Diego
“Happy now, getting married for life.” That was the six-word poem Jeremia Venter read aloud in Professor Jennifer Aaker’s Humor: Serious Business course. “He was so embarrassed!” recalls Cheryl Morrison, his classmate and the poem’s subject. “The whole class was silent at first, and then they were like, Oh my God. And it clicked for everybody,” Jeremia says. “I can’t believe I did that.” “It was pretty cute,” Cheryl says.
Cheryl Morrison and Jeremia Venter met during a dinner Stanford GSB hosted at Nobu, a Japanese restaurant in downtown Palo Alto, during their first on-campus session for the Stanford Executive Program. They sat directly across from each other at a big round table, but didn’t get a chance to talk until after the meal ended. Cheryl and a friend were taking a selfie when Jeremia photobombed the shot. “I just popped in the back,” he says. “That’s our first photo together ever. It’s so comical because clearly that was us just joking around.”
Sitting on the patio, they began swapping life stories, “the good stuff, the bad stuff — we were just very openly talking about just everything,” Cheryl says. She described growing up in Sacramento, feeling stagnant in the corporate world and joining SEP to break into entrepreneurship; he relayed his upbringing in South Africa and how he came to Stanford GSB to make more of an impact through his work. Suddenly, hours had gone by. “The world just stood still,” Jeremia says. Their classmates asked if they wanted to move on to the next location, and they looked at each other and simultaneously said no. “Everything changed that night,” Jeremia says. By the time they returned for the next on-campus session, they were a couple.
Since each SEP cohort takes the same courses, Cheryl and Jeremia spent a lot of time together. They would meet for coffee at Coupa Café at Stanford GSB before classes and joint group study sessions. And even though they were often on different teams in their classes, they’d help each other with presentations. With each interaction, they learned from each other. “I was in awe knowing that somehow we got to a similar solution, but we approached it so differently,” Jeremia says. “It’s taught me to be more open in the relationship,” Cheryl says.
They married in November 2025 in a small ceremony in Todos Santos, Mexico. “We are soulmates,” Cheryl says. “And I think it’s pretty incredible that of all the people I could end up in a room with at Stanford, he was one of them.”
Ed Maguan, MBA ’21, and Vince Yu, MBA ’20
San Francisco
“Having this very unique shared experience unlocked possibilities for our relationship,” says Vince Yu of attending Stanford GSB with Ed Maguan. Three years apart at the same high school in Manila (where Vince had a Facebook crush on Ed), they finally met in college and learned they had many shared interests such as the Marvel Cinematic Universe and country music. “Country music was not a thing in the Philippines,” Ed says. They started dating in spring 2014, then competed together on The Amazing Race Philippines a few months later. “It fast-tracked the relationship,” Ed says. “We were always put in stressful situations and had no choice but to be together.”
Ambitious and with an eye to business school even as an undergrad, “I knew that it would be very good for my career, especially as someone who wanted to potentially move somewhere where I could get married and have kids; you couldn’t get married in Southeast Asia at that time as a gay man,” says Vince, now a product manager at Adobe. He applied to Stanford and got in. A year later, tired of a long-distance relationship, Ed followed Vince to Stanford GSB.
Their overlapping time at Stanford included the COVID-19 shutdown. “Literally every night we would play Pokémon GO for two or three hours on our phones. All we had to do was dodge the rabbits, squirrels, raccoons, and skunks,” Vince says of the wildlife roaming campus then. “Experiences like that bond us.”
They also shared many of the same business school friends, who became an important community since they initially didn’t have roots in the U.S. They remain very close today. “We can rely on them not just individually, but as a couple,” says Ed, who leads market expansion at Aspora. Though they had a small legal marriage ceremony in 2023, the real celebration was this January in the Philippines, where a third of the 100+ guests were Stanford alumni and their partners. “There’s this belief where if you’re friends with someone for seven years, you’re going to be friends with them forever,” Vince says. “I think that’s very true now for all of our GSB friends.”
Katy Roth, MSx ’09, and Jim Roth, MSx ’08
Austin, Texas
Jim Roth and Katy Roth met playing pool when they were undergrads at Northwestern. “She had recently read a Peter Lynch book, and it’s one of my favorite books,” Jim says. “I was very surprised and intrigued.” The pair, who both studied economics, started dating right away. “We really clicked and we loved spending time together,” Katy says. Jim was on the school’s baseball team and together they attended as many sports events as possible. “It’s been a theme our whole lives,” Katy says.
In 2007, Jim joined Stanford GSB from Dell as a Sloan Fellow — the previous name for the MSx program — just four months after their first son was born. A few months after Jim started, Katy, who was in the startup world, applied to the same program. “I had an idea of what Jim got to do every day in the classroom, hearing the speakers and doing the work. And I loved it,” she says.
While in school, they lived in a 750-square-foot off-campus walk-up apartment with two 60-pound dogs and a baby, “so we spent all of our time on campus,” Katy says, laughing. Sports stayed central to their shared experience. They popped their son in a BabyBjörn and took him to the Big Game, celebrated Father’s Day with a Cardinals baseball game, and watched the Lopez brothers play basketball. “We had babysitters who were student-athletes,” Katy says. Sloan cohorts consisted of mid-career and seasoned professionals, and because of this, “we had lots of good resources for parental wisdom and advice,” says Jim. “It felt like everyone we were introduced to kind of looked out for us,” Katy says. “It was a very welcoming place.”
The couple has carried the mentorship torch since graduating. Jim, now the president of customer success at Salesforce, recently started a sponsorship program at the company, and two of his employees are joining the MSx program. “I’m funding them to have this amazing experience and change their life like it changed mine,” he says. Katy serves on the leadership board for the regional chapter of the alumni association and is active in the local Women’s Circle. “The conversations that I have with people when we come together just give me that same spark that I felt when I was on campus,” she says. “It’s really important to me that I don’t lose that spark.”
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