Columbia Business School’s 2026 Commencement ceremonies marked the close of one chapter and the beginning of another for over 1,500 graduates. “The world you’re stepping into is so different than when you were applying to school,” Dean Costis Maglaras, David and Lyn Silfen Professor of Business, told graduates. “But at Columbia Business School, we embrace the future with curiosity.”
That charge set the stage for the ceremonies’ two Distinguished Speakers: Deepak Narula ’89, founder and co-CIO of Metacapital Management, who addressed graduates in the MS and PhD programs, and Cyrus Massoumi ’03, founder of Zocdoc and Dr. B, who spoke to MBA and EMBA graduates.
The celebration also featured student speakers Carl Blaine Horton ’26, Zachary Costa ’25, Alexandra Garcia ’26, and Nathan Simantob ’26.
Narula’s and Massoumi’s messages converged around the idea that a successful, fulfilling life rarely follows a straight line. Learn from uncertainty, they suggested. Don’t panic about failure. And keep refining your path as you go. Here are some of their top takeaways:
1. Don’t optimize for a life ‘you don’t actually want’
Narula warned graduates that life’s most important choices are rarely as simple as a classroom optimization problem.
Before he attended CBS, Narula trained as an electrical engineer and brought with him a love of math and, as he recalled, “$400 in my pocket.” He did not initially know what finance was, but a professor helped spark his interest in markets. That was a major turning point in his career.
“You spent years learning models—how to analyze, optimize, and make decisions under uncertainty,” Narula said. “But here’s the catch. The most important decisions of your life will not feel like the optimization problems that you saw here. It will feel messy, ambiguous, and uncomfortable. They will be very personal. You won’t have enough data, and no AI will tell you what kind of life is worth wanting.”
Models can help evaluate tradeoffs, but they cannot define purpose. As Narula put it, “Be careful about optimizing, because you may end up very successful at something you don’t actually want to do.”
2. ‘Who you work with often matters more than what you work on’
After graduating, Narula spent years in finance, including a decade at Lehman Brothers, where he found work that matched his strengths in research, trading, and risk management under pressure. The people and environments around him proved crucial as he built his career.
“It changed my life,” Narula said. “Who you work with often matters more than what you work on. Find people who are better than you—smarter, more rigorous, more thoughtful—and hopefully want to work with you, and let them raise your standard.”
See your jobs as not only a title or steppingstone, he suggested, but also as an environment that shapes your habits of thought, expectations, and ambition.
3. ‘Focus on the quality of your effort, not the outcome’
Don’t define yourself too narrowly by outcomes, Narula said. Success can flatter, and failure can distort. Neither always reveals the quality of the work.
“One of the most stabilizing ideas” of Narula’s life, he said, was to “Focus on the quality of your effort, not the outcome.”
The point was not to lower ambition, but to direct attention toward what new leaders can control: rigor, discipline, curiosity, and the willingness to keep learning.
“Don’t rush,” Narula said. “Explore first. Find things. Make mistakes. Work with great people. Pay attention to what energizes you and what doesn’t. And when you find something that truly excites you, commit to it fully.”
The advice carried particular weight for graduates entering volatile markets and fast-changing industries. Plans will change and careers will evolve. Life, Narula noted, will almost certainly unfold differently than expected. “That’s not failure,” he told them. “That is life.”
4. Build—and keep revising—your own formula for success
As a child, Massoumi became fascinated by business after meeting an entrepreneur who later became a mentor. Early in his career, he thought he had found a winning formula: “Great people, hard work, and risk taking.” But experience complicated that view. At Trilogy Software, he saw the danger of pursuing too many opportunities at once—what he called “the cardinal sin of a gambler”: splitting a winning hand.
Focus, he realized, mattered more than risk for its own sake. And after his first startup failed during the internet bubble, he added another ingredient: time. “I needed the time to be able to go the distance,” he said, “and overcome the blips in the macro environment to succeed.”
5. Don’t mistake change for failure
After building Zocdoc into a platform serving millions, Massoumi began to ask himself what should come next. .
“Zocdoc made healthcare more efficient,” he said, “but mostly for people that already had coverage.” He continued onto a harder question: What about the millions of Americans who either had no health insurance or could not afford to use the insurance they had?
“How could I say that I was disrupting anything in healthcare if I was not disrupting that problem?”
That realization pushed him toward building Dr. B, a telehealth company designed to treat patients regardless of their ability to pay. It also changed how he thought about leadership. “Hard work actually is just a temporary thing,” Massoumi said. “It is an output. Purpose alignment is something that can last forever.”
So, his formula evolved again: “Great people, purpose alignment, focus, and time.”
Don’t simply copy his equation, though . “Your formula absolutely needs to be your own,” he said.
For Massoumi, the broader lesson was that careers and companies rarely proceed according to a fixed plan. Graduates will try things that do not work out, take jobs that are not great fits, build companies that fail, and face markets, technologies, and life circumstances that change around them.
“Do not mistake these things for failure,” he told them. “Sometimes this is the invitation. Start again, build again, and refine your formula.”
