Nvidia’s board is looking for a successor to its founder. The MBAs who followed Jobs, Gates, Page and Bezos offer a template, though business school research adds a warning or two.
Ask MBA applicants about their long-term goals and plenty will say they want to lead a company, and one day become CEO. Admissions committees read that ambition every year, and it’s a good one to have. But nobody walks from graduation into the corner office. The MBA gives you a grounding in finance, strategy, operations and managing people. You then spend 10 or 15 years putting it to work, learning an industry well enough that a board will trust you to run a company in it.
Who is Colette Kress, Nvidia’s interim CEO?
The interim CEO at Nvidia, Colette Kress shows how that path works. She studied finance at the University of Arizona and earned her MBA at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business in Dallas. After early roles at Texas Instruments she spent 13 years at Microsoft, 3 at Cisco and 13 as Nvidia’s chief financial officer. On 12 November, after Jensen Huang resigned as president and CEO with immediate effect, Nvidia’s board named her interim chief executive. She keeps the CFO job while the board searches for a permanent successor, considering internal and external candidates.
The role is interim, and Kress may not be a candidate for the permanent job. It still makes her the first woman to lead any of the “Magnificent Seven” tech companies. Research by Michelle Ryan and Alex Haslam, which began at the University of Exeter, coined the term “glass cliff” for women who are handed leadership at a moment of crisis. Kress takes charge after a fall of around 30% in Nvidia’s share price since its October high, with her first earnings call as CEO on 17 November.
Do MBA CEOs lead differently than founder-CEOs?
Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and ran it for 33 years, taking a graphics chip maker for gamers to the first company valued at $5 trillion. Nvidia has no chief operating officer, Huang had dozens of direct reports, and investors have long treated the man and the company as one. The worry on Wall Street is that Nvidia will struggle without him.
Business school research gives that worry some weight. Rüdiger Fahlenbrach, now a professor at EPFL and the Swiss Finance Institute in Lausanne, studied large US companies still run by the people who founded them. Founder-led firms spent more on R&D, had higher capital expenditure and made more focused acquisitions. A portfolio of founder-CEO firms earned 8.3% a year above its benchmark between 1993 and 2002, and 4.4% a year after controlling for firm, CEO and industry characteristics.
The research on MBA chief executives is less kind. Danny Miller of HEC Montréal and Xiaowei Xu of the University of Rhode Island studied 5,004 CEOs of major US public companies between 2003 and 2013. CEOs with MBAs were more likely to manage earnings upwards and hold down R&D spending, and their companies’ market valuations fell afterwards. An earlier study by the same pair looked at 444 CEOs who had appeared on the covers of Businessweek, Fortune and Forbes. Companies run by MBAs declined faster after the cover story, while the MBA CEOs saw their pay rise about 15% faster than their peers’.
Miller and Xu are careful to say they can’t prove the degree causes the behaviour. People drawn to short-term financial targets may simply be more likely to apply to business school. For Nvidia, whose next generation of chips and CUDA software depend on heavy research spending, the warning still applies. Reports this week suggested that Kress, as CFO, pushed back on some of Huang’s bigger AI investments. That kind of discipline protects a balance sheet. The board will also want to know that whoever gets the permanent job will defend the research budget.
The MBA successors who beat expectations
The best counter-evidence comes from the four companies Nvidia is most often compared with. Each was once led by a founder or a figure the market saw as irreplaceable, and each is now run, or was until very recently, by an MBA.
Tim Cook took over from Steve Jobs in 2011, when many investors assumed Apple’s best years were behind it. Cook earned his MBA at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and joined Apple in 1998 to run its operations. Apple’s market value rose more than 20-fold on his watch, to about $4 trillion, before he handed over to John Ternus on 1 September 2026.
Satya Nadella became Microsoft’s third CEO in February 2014, after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer. (Ballmer had left Stanford’s MBA programme in 1980 to join Gates.) Nadella holds a master’s in computer science and an MBA from Chicago Booth, and had worked at Microsoft for 22 years. The company was worth just over $300 billion when he took over. It passed $3 trillion in 2024.
Sundar Pichai studied engineering at IIT Kharagpur, then took a master’s at Stanford and an MBA at Wharton. He joined Google in 2004, became its CEO in 2015 when Larry Page and Sergey Brin created Alphabet, and took over Alphabet itself in 2019. In January 2026 Alphabet joined Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple in the $4 trillion club.
Andy Jassy joined Amazon in 1997, the year he finished his MBA at Harvard, and built Amazon Web Services before succeeding Jeff Bezos in July 2021. Amazon was worth $1.8 trillion on the day Bezos stepped aside. On 3 August 2026 it passed $3 trillion for the first time.
What do successful successor CEOs in big tech have in common?
Cloud computing and AI lifted all 4 companies, and Nvidia’s chips are integral to much of that growth. The 4 CEOs also share a long apprenticeship inside the company before the top job: 13 years for Cook, 22 for Nadella, 11 for Pichai and 24 for Jassy. Each ran a large part of the business and knew its customers and technology well before facing its shareholders. Nadella and Pichai trained as engineers before going to business school.
They also kept spending on the future, which is the behaviour Fahlenbrach found in founder-led firms. Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon are among the biggest investors in AI infrastructure in the world. Jassy expects Amazon to spend about $220 billion on capital projects this year, and has said that still won’t meet demand. On Miller and Xu’s measures, these 4 behaved like founders.
That gives Nvidia’s board a fairly clear brief. Huang has said he hopes the next CEO already works at the company, and the names mentioned so far include Kress, sales chief Jay Puri and Ian Buck, who leads hyperscale and high-performance computing and was behind CUDA. An insider who knows the technology, the customers and the money would fit the Cook, Nadella, Pichai and Jassy pattern. Apple, choosing its own successor this year, picked Ternus, an engineer who joined in 2001.
Dream big with your MBA, and always keep learning
The fear that Nvidia can’t thrive without Huang is understandable. Investors said much the same about Apple without Jobs, Microsoft without Gates, Google without Page and Brin, and Amazon without Bezos. In each case a long-serving successor with an MBA took the company to record valuations.
For anyone writing “CEO” in an MBA application essay, the lesson is about patience as much as ambition. Kress spent close to 3 decades in finance roles before a board asked her to run the most closely watched company in the world, even on an interim basis. Cook, Nadella, Pichai and Jassy each spent more than a decade learning their companies first. The MBA is where that preparation starts. The research is a reminder of what to watch for once you get there: protect the R&D budget, and judge success over 5 or 10 years.
So dream big. And keep learning long after graduation.