Stanford GSB Graduates Its 100th Class of Leaders

Under an auspicious blue sky, families, friends, faculty, staff, and fellow classmates celebrated the newest alumni of Stanford Graduate School of Business at the school’s June 13 commencement ceremony at Frost Amphitheater. Laurene Powell Jobs, MBA ’91, entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist, gave the graduation address to the Class of 2026.

Powell Jobs spoke from the heart about her own entrepreneurial journey, starting with her arrival at Stanford GSB in her “ancient Volkswagen Cabriolet” after a cross-country road trip. Though her post-business school path wasn’t linear, Powell Jobs pivoted when she realized her organic food company was “25 years too early.” Her passion, curiosity, and appetite for change led her forward. “What I had learned at the GSB was not only how to build a company,” she told the audience. “The lessons were far broader, more enduring, and more inspiring. I had learned to think like an entrepreneur. And when you combine an entrepreneur’s mindset with a bold idea and determination, you can create almost anything.”

Powell Jobs explained how that mindset drove her to launch College Track, a nonprofit that provides academic support and mentorship to high school students. With those learnings, she created Emerson Collective, an LLC that combines philanthropy, investing, advocacy, and partnerships to engage with business, government, and civil society in new ways to address complex societal challenges.

In an address that wove together topics of entrepreneurship, impact, innovation, and art, and referenced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Claude Monet, Powell Jobs inspired the audience with her own experiences, along with a message of hope and human resilience.

“The challenges you will face and the opportunities you will find may be shaped by technology, but they will ultimately be rooted in the instincts and actions of being human,” she said. “Our ability to shape a better future will depend on how we learn to see both what is broken and what we can fix.”

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SF Photo

In her commencement remarks, Sarah A. Soule, Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean at Stanford Graduate School of Business and Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior, encouraged the graduating class to embrace the school’s values of excellence and community as they step into a swiftly changing future.

Celebrating 100 years of Stanford GSB, Soule spoke about how the Class of 2026 had spent their years at the school learning and developing leadership skills to better confront the challenges and opportunities ahead. Leadership develops through the accumulation of classmates’ experiences, shared moments, and classroom conversations, she explained.

“Great ideas, and great leaders, are not formed all at once. They are built over time, piece by piece, like a mosaic,” Soule said. “At the GSB, you have not simply accumulated knowledge. You have helped shape one another.”

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Dean Sarah A. Soule | SF Photo

This process was attributed to two defining values of Stanford GSB: excellence and community. Excellence means engaging rigorously with challenging issues, Soule said; community encompasses the people and relationships that help define Stanford GSB. She urged the graduating class to consider themselves stewards of this community moving forward, building something new while acknowledging and strengthening what came before.

“The first century of the GSB was built by individuals who stepped into uncertainty with purpose, and as a result, created, led, and sustained something much larger than themselves. They built the mosaic you inherit today. Now you will add to it,” Soule said. “You leave here with the tools, the judgment, and the community to navigate what lies ahead.”

The diploma ceremony for the Class of 2026 featured 516 graduates who earned degrees:

• 418 MBA

• 80 Master of Science (MSx)

• 17 PhD

• 1 Master of Arts in Business Research

Thirty MBA students earned joint degrees:

• 22 MS in Environment and Resources

• 6 MA in Education

• 2 JD (Law)