For as long as she can remember, Misha Khurana has been inspired by the interplay of social impact and entrepreneurship.
School Days
At school, Misha consistently sat at the top of her class, demonstrating an irresistible drive for academic and personal excellence. Her competitive spirit extended outside of the classroom, and she developed a passion for motion theater. Her academic and other successes dovetailed into her acceptance into IIT Delhi, one of 23 Indian Institutes of Technology and a Centre of Excellence for India’s training, research, and development in science, engineering, and technology. It was the first of many accomplishments and the result of an unquantifiable desire for the highest level of success.
During Misha’s years on the IIT Delhi campus, she had her share of academic achievement, but it was the experiences in the theatrical arts that broadened her perspective beyond engineering and molded her into the person she is today. These activities allowed her to diversify her skill set and explore her talents in the arts, and they served as the impetus for a professional career oriented around social impact. She used these challenges as the springboard to develop her talents and channel her focus to eventually blossom as a director and actor in professional stage plays, discovering talents unbeknownst to her. She concluded her time at IIT Delhi with the prestigious Pride of Kailash House award, considered to be her hostel’s most prestigious honor. Her name was etched into the IIT Delhi hostel’s “lifetime board of honor.”
The Real World
Misha landed her first professional job with the Boston Consulting Group (BCG), one of the big three global management consulting firms. She was 1 of 10 selected from 90+ offices as a part of the BCG Global Social Impact Immersion Program. Her range of subject-matter proficiency and technical intelligence were on full display as she led transformations across financial services, and private and public national entities.
As a BCG Fellow of the Global Social Impact Immersion Program, she executed initiatives on behalf of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Save the Child – a project that served as her initial entry into innovative technology through her development of a predictive tech tool to forecast duration and scale of displacement.
In 2019, Misha was recruited in Geneva, Switzerland, to be a part of the Performance Delivery Team, reporting to the Executive Director of The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria. The Global Fund invests more than US$5 billion a year to defeat HIV, TB, and malaria and ensure a healthier, safer, more equitable future for all. As Project Lead of the Global Fund’s Accélérons le Mouvement en AOC’ (Accelerating the Movement in WCA), she led a team of 10 senior-level experts on the review of hundreds of millions of dollars of investments across 17 countries, and she personally directed missions in Guinea, Senegal, and Sierra Leone. She led a cross-functional dialogue with the Ministry of Health in these countries in collaboration with global and national healthcare partners.
HBS & The Next Chapter
Her diverse leadership experience with the most prominent for-profit and international partnership organizations in the world, in addition to her stellar academic record, led to her matriculation into the Harvard Business School (HBS) Class of 2022. A goal that the young Misha pontificated would come true during her school days in India.
Misha has pursed tech entrepreneurship after HBS, and she is now a Product Strategy and Operations Lead at Google in New York City.
