Harvard's Judgment Professor: Numbers Don't Make Decisions; People Do

In this episode of Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing, Motley Fool contributor Rachel Warren sits down with Reza Satchu, Harvard Business School senior lecturer and six-time company founder, for Part 1 of a conversation. He:

• Unpacks why judgment -- not intellect or data -- is the scarcest asset in the age of AI.
• Whether it can actually be taught.
• The real story behind walking away from a billion-dollar buyout offer on his student housing company, only to sell it a year later for $1.7 billion.

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on Sept. 13, 2026.

Reza Satchu: Judgment is not something that you can observe or that you can learn through osmosis. It has to be done by actually exercising it and making decisions, stepping into risk, and thinking about what the consequences are of those.

Rachel Warren: That was Reza Satchu, serial entrepreneur, investor, and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, on why judgment, not numbers, is the thing that most investors overlook. I'm Motley Fool analyst Rachel Warren. Reza has built six companies across multiple market cycles, achieving billions in exits, and teaches two of Harvard Business School's most popular courses, the founder mindset and founder launch. I sat down with Reza to talk through why judgment is becoming the scarcest asset in the age of AI, whether it can be taught, and how he personally walked away from a billion-dollar buyout offer and made it pay off. We hope you enjoy Part 1.

Welcome back to Motley Fool Conversations. I'm Rachel Warren. When we evaluate businesses to buy and hold for the long term, we often spend hours poring over income statements, balance sheets, cash flow trends, and that's important, but numbers don't make decisions. People do. Our guest today argues that investors often spend more time studying a company's numbers than evaluating the judgment of the people deciding what happens to those numbers next. Reza Satchu is a serial entrepreneur, investor, and senior lecturer at Harvard Business School, where he teaches two of the university’s most popular courses, The Founder Mindset and The Founder Launch. Over Reza's career, he has built six companies across multiple market cycles, achieving billions in exits. He is the founder and managing partner of an investment management corporation and the host of Harvard’s The Founder Mindset podcast. Reza, welcome to the show.

Reza Satchu: Thank you, Rachel. Thanks for having me.

Rachel Warren: I want to lean a bit into this core idea that investors often spend so much time studying a company's numbers, but maybe not so much evaluating the judgment of the people deciding what happens next. I'd love to hear your thoughts on why do you think that the investing community or the markets in general tend to be so hyper-focused on the math, but often ignore that human judgment as driving it.

Reza Satchu: I think it's a great question, Rachel, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about this. In fact, if you think about the courses I teach, some would say, Well, Rachel, why are you so focused on the mindset and not on the venture? Because, ultimately, what I'm trying to help is students launch their ventures. What I would tell you is, having done this, this is my 24th year teaching, there is far more traction and learning and improvement and probability of success that I can have by evaluating and improving one's mindset. As opposed to spending a whole bunch of time evaluating their business. What that means is, what is that characteristic in the mindset that we're looking for, and it all comes down to judgment.

I'd say it's even more important in the age of AI, where so much can be replicated other than judgment. There's no question that judgment is something that investors, employees, customers are desperately trying to evaluate. The question is, how do you evaluate it? How do you build it? What I would say is that judgment is not something that you can observe or that you can learn through osmosis. It has to be done by actually exercising it and making decisions, stepping into risk, and thinking about what the consequences are of those. I think, first of all, everyone agrees I think people would agree that judgment's very important. I think the reason the market shies away from it is because it's so hard to evaluate it. It's very hard. It's this nefarious thing that you can't actually put math around. But if I had to say, what is the single most important thing that I'm looking for when I make an investment in a business or whether to spend time with a founder or not, it is my evaluation of their judgment. Invariably, what that is is evaluating previous decisions that they've made and understanding how they calibrated risk and trusted their judgment in that decision.

Rachel Warren: That leads me into this idea. How do you define the anatomy of good judgment? What are the differentiating factors you look for?

Reza Satchu: The first thing is, let's just say, you can live a life where you never make a decision. You let things happen to you, and the status quo stays the same. Most people, frankly, see an idea and just assume that there’s no way that they could possibly think that could be a real idea because they don’t have the resources, and I’d say, every business, if a founder felt that way, that business wouldn’t exist today. Meaning I often say to people that you want to be opportunity-driven and not resource-constrained.

But to your question around, what does it look like in terms of how do you know how do you actually build or exercise judgment, at the end of the day, it's around, are you putting yourself in situations where you're making real decisions. Are you actually feeling the risk calibration? I also would say to you that there's, there's so much of human psychology here where human beings massively overestimate their downsides, typically, in terms of what they're capable of when they actually commit to things and underestimate the upside notes. What ends up happening is I have a phrase which says, if in doubt act. Now, some people would say that's very reckless. I'd say it's not reckless at all. I just I may decide to stay with the status quo, but I'd much rather say I'm making an active decision, trusting my judge to go with the status quo, as opposed to what most people do, which is a deer and headlight approach, where you just freeze or get paralyzed and just stay the course. I think this active learning by doing where you've got someone who's actually, frankly, living a life where they're constantly stepping into rest, seeking risk, and calibrating it, and making decisions is what I look for.

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Rachel Warren: That's interesting, as well. I'm curious, as you meet with founders and in your experience, you think leadership judgment is something that can be taught? Do you think it's an innate trait?

Reza Satchu: Yeah, this is a great question. Rachel, what I'd say is, I would have wasted 24 years of my life if I thought you were born with it. It would have just this whole 24-year teaching adventure of mine would be an exercise in futility. What I would say is I have now taught thousands of students I can look at my own life, and I believe much of this is learnable. Meaning I don't believe that people are born with this certain trait that allows them to lead or to found. Meaning I've seen too many stories of people have come from backgrounds and situations where you just think, wow, they are not going to be able to rise up and lead. Frankly, sometimes it's precisely because of that adversity that they've been able to lead, but my point is I do think that it's teachable. I do think people can choose to learn it.

I will give you an example. You could imagine in today's day and age, you could almost think about what is learning today? It used to be memorization. It used to be listening to a professor lecture. Would actually say all of those skills are replicated far better by AI. Learning today is making consequential decisions that you are accountable for. Because it's in those moments where you're calibrating risk and trusting your judgment. I believe judgment is much more like a bicep than it is this thing you get at birth, meaning I believe the more you exercise it, the bigger it gets. What it means is you must seek risk. You must seek discomfort. You must push yourself into situations of uncertainty where you are being forced to test and trust your judgment.

Rachel Warren: One thing that's interesting that you mentioned briefly earlier this idea that executive judgment becomes drastically more important in the age of AI. There's so much data is commoditized. I'd like it if you could lean a bit more into your thoughts on that.

Reza Satchu: I think, actually, how you've articulated is dead on, which is that data is becoming more and more commoditized. There is no differentiation when it comes to math and numbers and raw intellectual horsepower. The differentiation is in taking that data and figuring out what are you going to do with it. What are the judgments you're going to make around that? I often say that when I look at the lens from a founder, which is no different from a CEO of a public company. If I had to say, what are the differences in terms of when I evaluate founders versus a CEO of a public company in this day and age, it's around if I had a crystal ball, if there was one trait I could measure in order to give someone a dollar it would be judgment. It would literally be judgment.

What I'm constantly asking founders is tell me how you're exercising your judgment. Tell me about time, what you learned from flawed judgment. Tell me how you benefited from actually stepping into the arena and making these decisions. I think the first thing about judgment is you have to actually want to exercise it. The thing about judgment is there's a downside to judgment. There's a downside in that you may get it wrong. That's why it's a judgment. It's not costless. But I'd also say that it is incredibly arrogant, to think that you could have any outperformance or impact without calibrating and seeking and operating with risk. The world is too efficient to do that. It's become a world where it's judgment that becomes the marginal differentiation.

The fascinating part here, Rachel, is how do you evaluate it? Like, how do you know when someone? Because there's no Excel spreadsheet, that's going to give you the answer to this. It's your own judgment on someone else's judgment. But here’s what I will say, and you see it with people like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Michelle Zatlyn at Cloudflare, which is, I also believe, judgment isn’t linear. I think it's exponential, meaning, I think the reason you can see Mark Zuckerberg's never managed anyone and suddenly builds Facebook and at the age of 30 is managing 10,000 people or whoever it may be, it's because of the cumulative decisions that he or she is making in that arena. That's leading to better and better judgment, precisely because you're effectively going to the gym more often. You're effectively exercising that judgment more often. But I do think the impact of AI is just massive efficiency. Massive commoditization, to use your word, which therefore will only leave in terms of outperformance, will lie in people’s interpretation and judgment of data that otherwise looks available to everyone.

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Rachel Warren: Going back to this idea of operating on calibrated risk rather than fear of regret, I was reading about the sale of Alignvest student housing, the 1.7 billion dollar deal, and I was reading the story behind this that initially there was a buyout offer that exceeded 1 billion. Almost everyone around you told you to take it, you walked away, and then closed the sale for 1.7 billion dollars. How do you tell the difference between holding out for true upside, again, this idea of calibrated risk versus potentially succumbing to tons in judgment.

Reza Satchu: It's interesting. I actually taught this I teach this case to my class at Harvard Business School, and literally 100% of my students say you should sell at 1.1 billion dollars. Meaning meaning they were like, "You make a lot of money". We had both Blackstone and TPG as bidders in that business at the time. But here's what I'd say is from my perspective I'm the founder of the business, the controlling shareholder of that business. I have a lot of information. This phrase, which is, like, tension is your friend. Meaning it's like love. You've got to walk away, and it'll only close if someone chases. In this case, I think I'm a big fan of orchestrating tension in any deal. I think here, I felt like there was a lot left on the table, and my partner and I felt like that we could build more. There was risk. You could imagine that the market could turn or the buyers could go away.

But it was calibrated, meaning we were like, the upside here feels like the downside was we couldn't imagine the business trading it south of at anything worse than a five cap, which meant that our downside was that it was a billion business. Maybe we would lose 100 million dollars of equity value. But the upside was if we could actually execute on the things we could do, there could be several hundred million dollars. It felt like a very good trade. Ultimately, I think the other interesting thing I would say to you, Rachel, four of the five businesses I founded, I did not use a banker, OK, to invest in so this a billion and a half dollar deal with no investment banker.

I’m a big believer in what Paul Graham calls founder mode. I'm a big believer in founder mode, meaning, like, why would I outsource one of the most important decisions of my founder journey to a 30-year-old associate at Goldman Sachs who is completely conflicted and who just wants to get a deal done to get paid, and, frankly, will do much more business with the strategic that's going to acquire me than with me. I think the more interested so, I think, from our perspective, it made sense, and I think we sold it at the right time. But I'd also say we were getting information directly from the sellers or from the buyers, such that I could process it and make a decision. As opposed to getting it filtered through intermediaries, that may have a very conflicted situation. Meaning, I'm entirely sure that if I had a banker, at that point in time, I would have sold the business because they would have convinced me to sell it.

Rachel Warren: It's an interesting story, and I wanted to ask you about that. I think a lot of times, as investors investing in public companies or otherwise, we often only see leadership through earnings calls. I want to talk more about maybe a framework for distinguishing genuine judgment, which we've talked about a bit, of course, today, from polished storytelling. You have a personal framework for that?

Reza Satchu: I do, yes. It's a great question, and I think a lot about this because you can imagine that, especially in the public scenario, you can polish it up in a way that it's very hard to discern. The times when judgment matters most is in times of crisis. Which inevitably happens to every founder and every CEO. If I have one shot to evaluate someone's judgment, what I want to do is understand how they behaved in moments of crisis. When it felt incredibly uncertain, when the world wasn't the way it was supposed to be, when they lost that major customer or their CTO went to another competitor or there was a scandal that happened, something that was unexpected, that wasn't scripted, that they can't polish. In that moment of crisis, how did they behave. That's where I'm going very deep with someone. Same thing with the founder, where that's the moment.

The inevitable because you know leadership only shows up in moments of crisis. When there's no crisis, leadership isn't warranted. The point is you want to know how people behave in moments of crisis. The thing about leadership is you and I both know that leadership is full of crises. We're full of crises. What I'd be evaluating is, how did they behave in those crises? What I'd say I'd say the thing about a crisis is it's not just downside. There's also tremendous opportunities that crises have. I'd say you're looking not just for how they were defensive in that moment and how they protected the franchise, but also what did they do in the culture or the organization to reposition it and take advantage of whatever that crisis was such that their probability of success is better and they've emerged stronger. I think how people behave in times of crisis, how leaders behave in times of crisis is critically important to evaluating judgment.

Rachel Warren: That was part one of the discussion, tune in next week for Part 2. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about, and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool Editorial standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For the Motley Fool Conversations team, I'm Rachel Warren. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

Rachel Warren has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Blackstone and Goldman Sachs Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.