Creating Our Seats at the Yale Table

Remarkable leaders visit Yale’s campus all the time, but in a large and busy campus community, students can’t always connect with them directly. As a GBS student at Yale SOM, I wanted to create a smaller and more intimate space where the top 1% of founders and investors could sit down with the school’s student builders—not to lecture, but to talk. What if, instead of chasing access, we created it?

That question became the Yale Table, a group that curates private, invitation- and application-only dinners where elite founders and investors engage in open, off-the-record conversations with up to 10 students. Unlike traditional fireside chats, which are often larger and more formal, Tables are intentionally small, unscripted, and communal.

The Yale Table is a student-run initiative that operates independently of SOM, and an affiliated group of the university’s entrepreneurship accelerator, Tsai CITY. I’ve worked with a group of amazing peers—Vini Rupchandani ’28, Martin Vakoč ’26, Apolline Thaler ’26, and Francis Krauch ’26—to build this alongside our alum team in San Francisco, led by Vanessa Li ’25 and Austin Cai ’25. Their work is the backbone that makes each Table possible.

Everything that happened after we launched the group exceeded our expectations.

Since launching three months ago, we’ve hosted 12 Tables and two fireside chats, each drawing over 100 attendees. More than 500 people, including founders, investors, students, and alums, have joined our growing network, drawn together by a commitment to turn ideas into companies and conversations into momentum. The energy around what we’ve built is unbelievable to watch and be part of. We adopted a Latin motto, Audere est vincere (“To dare is to win”), because it captures a belief I hold with stubborn conviction: take the shot, go for it, and don’t waste time worrying about failure. Nearly every guest who joined us did so because of cold outreach I conducted, inviting them to a seat at the Table. If there’s one thread running through all these dinners, it’s the quiet idea that daring is often the first step toward anything worthwhile.

By hosting events with the Table, I’ve learned that breaking bread together creates a feeling of intimacy and camaraderie quickly. The insights surfaced and connections formed at these events have felt remarkable. Two attendees met and are now building a company together. Another landed a VC job through a connection made that night. These were not planned outcomes; they were the natural result of creating a room where people actually talk.

One highlight of the year was the lunch with Keith Rabois, an early-stage executive at LinkedIn and Square and now a managing director at Khosla Ventures. One of the most respected figures in tech, he has almost never been wrong on a deal. We also hosted a talk and dinner with Samir Vasavada, who dropped out of high school to build Vise, an AI platform that automates investment management and has raised over $130 million from top investors like Sequoia and Founders Fund. He spoke about grit, relentless self-questioning, and the discipline it takes to build something that lasts. What hit hardest for everyone was how real and honest he was the whole night.

Our most unexpected partnership was with the venture capital firm General Catalyst. Hemant Taneja, the firm’s CEO, sent us copies of his latest book, The Transformation Principles: How to Create Enduring Change, which we distributed to Yale students ahead of a roundtable with him in the spring. General Catalyst now manages more than $25 billion and has backed many of the defining companies of the last decade, including Stripe, Airbnb, and Deliveroo. Taneja is widely regarded as one of the architects of the modern tech ecosystem. Few voices have as much influence on what the next decade of technology might look like, and exploring his principles around a Table felt perfectly aligned with what we’re building.

One guest I was determined to bring to the Table was Ryan Petersen, founder and CEO of Flexport. Petersen is the entrepreneur who dragged global logistics into the software age, raised more than $2 billion, and became one of the most consequential builders in the industry. While he responded warmly to my first email, he explained that he wouldn’t be traveling to the East Coast this year and couldn’t join us in New York or New Haven. So I decided to bring the Yale Table to him in San Francisco! We planned a week of events in the Bay Area, partnering with Stanford Founders and Berkeley’s Deep Tech Innovation Lab. In one wild week, we hosted eight Tables across the Bay, drawing primarily students and recent graduates of Yale, Stanford, and Berkeley.

It was hectic in every possible way. We ran Tables with top partners from Andreessen Horowitz, Pear VC, and Bessemer Venture Partners, along with leading founders like Wei Deng, CEO of Clipboard. The conversations were sharp, transformative, and grounded; the food was great; and the energy from builders and investors across the Bay was unmistakable. It was clear: this model worked anywhere there were people willing to talk honestly.

Founding the Table has become one of the defining parts of my SOM experience. SOM gave me the perfect launchpad: my professors encouraged experimentation, and the SOM entrepreneurship center supported us early. The school’s culture of access, generosity, and builder energy made it possible not only to imagine something like the Table, but to actually execute it.

It started with an idea, a few emails, and a belief that if you build the right room, people will come. The Yale Table isn’t just about dinners or speakers; it’s about what happens after: the doors unlocked, the startups born, the late-night brainstorms, the new jobs, the belief that maybe, just maybe, we can do more than we thought. One thing I’ve learned through it all is that the best way to get a seat at the table is to build your own.