Annual feature celebrates graduating business students for achievement and influence

SAN FRANCISCO, May 3, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Poets&Quants, the leading news source for graduate business education, has released its 11th annual Best & Brightest MBAs feature, which honors 100 of the most accomplished full-time MBAs from the Class of 2025.

“This year’s class could be described as more female and more international, with a stronger military presence,” says Jeff Schmitt, Poets&Quants’ senior writer, who launched the series in 2015. “What really distinguished Best & Brightest students this year was that they built things. They launched ventures early in their careers or started clubs or events at their business schools. They weren’t trying to maintain what already existed or follow the usual paths. They were creating something new – and they provided others with enrichment and opportunities as a result.”

This 2025 class features MBA graduates including Wharton School’s Simi Shah, a successful entrepreneur who has been invited to the White House twice and made the 2025 Forbes “30 Under 30” in Media. Mark O’Connell, a graduate of the University of Michigan’s Ross School, helped re-write the U.S. Maines combat training curriculum – and Ohio State’s Kyle Schembechler did the same for the U.S. Field Artillery School. At the University of Virginia’s Darden School, Amanda Golden has transitioned from covering the 2020 presidential election for NBC News to becoming a venture capitalist. By the same token, Evan Rizvi made the leap from opera singer to strategist at Boston University’s Questrom School.

To compile this year’s Best & Brightest MBAs, Poets&Quants reached out to 82 top graduate business schools worldwide to nominate their best candidates for the honor. Responses were judged by P&Q editorial according to four criteria: extracurricular involvement, academic and professional achievements, insightful responses, and faculty recommendations. Ultimately, P&Q received 220 nominations, including submissions from elite institutions ranging from INSEAD to the University of Chicago’s Booth School. By gender, Best & Brightest women outnumber men by a 60-to-40 margin, with 54 students hailing from outside the United States. The Boston Consulting Group also hired 8 Best & Brightest MBAs from the Class of 2025, the most of any employer.

As part of this feature, each MBA receives an in-depth profile, which covers subjects ranging from their proudest achievement to their favorite business movie. Over the coming months, Best & Brightest will also spotlight the best student responses related topics like their favorite faculty members, biggest school myths, and most interesting school traditions. 

The “Best & Brightest MBAs” is the second of a four-part series recognizing the world’s top business students. In April, Poets&Quants For Undergrads unveiled its 100 Best & Brightest Undergraduate Business Majors of 2025. This summer, Poets&Quants will also recognize its “Best & Brightest Executive MBAs” and “Best & Brightest Online MBAs.” In the fall, P&Q will continue its “Meet the Class” series that highlights the top incoming full-time MBA students at over 40 top business schools.

To read about the “100 Best & Brightest MBAs: Class of 2025”, CLICK HERE.

Poets&Quants, a part of Times Higher Education, is the leading resource for complete coverage of graduate business education. We feature multiple tools and authoritative content, including consolidated business school rankings, news and in-depth features, videos, podcasts, searchable directories, and events, empowering our community with information needed to make decisions along their journey from pre- to post-MBA.

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Deribit, the world’s largest crypto options exchange, is weighing an entry into the US market, encouraged by what it sees as a friendlier regulatory climate under President Donald Trump’s administration, according to a recent Financial Times report.

The Dubai-based exchange, which processed $1.3 trillion in notional volume last year, is “actively reassessing potential opportunities” in the United States, CEO Luuk Strijers told the FT.

He cited the “recent shift toward a more favorable regulatory stance on crypto in the US” as a key motivator behind the decision.

Deribit’s potential plan to expand into the US comes amid reports that Coinbase is in advanced negotiations to acquire the platform.

In a March 21 report, Bloomberg said both companies have notified regulators in Dubai, where Deribit is licensed. If the deal is finalized, the license would need to be transferred to Coinbase.

The move comes as competitors like Kraken also pursue growth in the derivatives space, with its recent $1.5 billion acquisition of NinjaTrader.

Bitcoin perps on Deribit. Source: Deribit

Report: Deribit options exchange is evaluating buyout offers: Report

Crypto firms target US expansion

Deribit joins a growing list of European and Asian crypto firms exploring US expansion.

The shift comes after a period of regulatory hostility during the Biden administration, following the collapse of FTX in late 2022.

That era saw an aggressive crackdown from the SEC and DOJ, prompting many firms to withdraw from US operations. However, the narrative appears to be shifting under Trump, who has pledged to “make the US the crypto capital of the world.”

Since Trump’s election victory, the SEC has dropped or paused over a dozen enforcement cases against crypto companies.

Additionally, the Department of Justice recently announced the dissolution of its cryptocurrency enforcement unit, signaling a softer approach to the sector.

Related: Tether CEO to take ‘cautious’ approach to US expansion, eyes larger profits

This hands-on approach appears to be boosting industry confidence.

OKX, for example, has announced plans to establish a US headquarters in San Jose, California, just months after settling a $504 million case with US authorities.

On April 28, Nexo, which left the US at the end of 2022 citing a lack of regulatory clarity, revealed that it is reentering the US market.

Switzerland’s Wintermute and Dubai’s DWF Labs are among other major crypto players that have shown interest in exploring US expansion.

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In a move that hopes to challenge Big Tech’s grip on artificial intelligence, AI agent protocol Thinkagents.ai has launched a new open-source framework for building onchain agents that operate autonomously across decentralized networks.

While traditional systems aim to restrict data ownership and platform abilities for their users, Thinkagents.ai is creating an interoperable ecosystem owned and controlled by its users. For Mike Anderson, core contributor at THINK, the Think Agent Standard is the future of AI.

Anderson and his team developed the Think Agent Standard to enable millions of autonomous onchain AI agents to transact and communicate. The protocol now has over 70 companies, like Arbitrum and Yuga Labs, on board to help out. 

The platform is now live, allowing developers, enterprises and Web3 communities to experiment with the framework.

“There was always this idea that it’s so much harder to [build AI] and so much more expensive when you have to build a thousand custom ways of doing it,” Anderson said during an exclusive interview with Cointelegraph. “By standardizing demand — the way people want to receive AI — you can get the whole market to line up because they want customers, and getting customers in AI is really difficult.”

Following the release of Meta’s Llama 2 a few years ago, Anderson and his team decided that if the future of decentralized AI ever manifested, they needed to ensure that consumers could easily use graphic processing units (GPUs) without spending billions of dollars.

“We watched as this whole ecosystem started to grow, with people saying, ’I’m going to build this part of the stack,’ and others saying they’ll ‘build that part of the stack,” almost as if Amazon Web Services (AWS) showed up with each department, with one saying they’ll do the data and another saying they’ll do the networking,” Anderson said.

We found that the problem isn’t having enough builders, it’s aligning them around an actual use case.Mike Anderson, core contributor at THINK. Source: THINK

Developing the AI standard

The Think Agent Standard was launched by THINK protocol, in partnership with the Independent AI Institute, with the initial use case around Anderson and his team defining an AI agent (a place on a blockchain that has access to a computer and can make decisions), and the AI agents playing the video game Street Fighter 3 against each other. The use case brought nine different companies to work together for an audience of 30,000 viewers last summer.

That validated the idea that we could unite all of these infrastructure companies, provide a better product to customers, and do it in a way where users owned their information, data, keys, and encryption.

Because if owning and controlling AI agents is to remain in the hands of users, the decentralized AI agent platforms need to be simple, user-intuitive, well-designed and deliver on a user experience that could have changed the way we use and understand social media.

Related: How Meta’s antitrust case could dampen AI development

“Imagine if we’d had the foresight in 2003 to see social media as a way to organize our lives,” Anderson said. “Instead of having accounts on MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter, what if we had a standard where your accounts follow you—where all of your data and everything you’d posted in the past is something you’re providing to them. It’s a very different thing if users owned their accounts and data and could have opted into seeing ads where they would benefit from them. That’s what we’re building.”

The future of AI agents

Just as the ERC-20 standard enabled the tokenized economy, the Think Agent Standard introduces a modular, permissionless and composable system that allows AI agents to function as sovereign digital entities: Owning wallets, interacting with smart contracts and transacting seamlessly across every blockchain.

Each Think agent is powered by Non-Fungible Intelligence™ (NFI), a digital identity layer that establishes ownership, memory, and authentication, with the core genome palette residing on The Root Network and subsequent layers deployed to any connected network natively. 

The agents are composed of three core elements: The Soul (NFI), which provides a persistent, self-sovereign identity; the Mind, which governs behavior and decision-making; and the Body, which allows interaction across platforms and environments.

The first platform built on the Think Agent Standard is SOULS, a personal AI agent that users can own, train and customize. SOULS connects to thousands of open-source applications and evolves over time by integrating the best available intelligence without compromising user privacy or ownership.

Related: Crypto projects prepare to battle for privacy in Switzerland

Leading organizations in gaming, infrastructure and generative AI, including Yuga Labs, Futureverse, Alchemy, Render, Venice.ai and Magic Eden, are actively integrating the standard into real-world applications, further validating its potential across use cases.

“AI agents are the new interface to technology,” Anderson said. “What we’ve been able to do successfully is partner with consumer brands — like Bored Ape Yacht Club — to actually have distribution into a consumer’s end point, and we’ve been able to build all the systems so that they can actually access consumers.”

We’re helping people transition to the AI age by owning their intelligence instead of renting it from someone else.

For Anderson, a personal AI agent is like a personal dashboard that acts as an extension of your real self. If the information contained within your AI agent were to leak, the results could be personally catastrophic. That’s why Think is standardizing the system the agent can interact with, backed by cryptography, no matter what chain the agent is on. If a safe and successful standard exists within the user-owned AI agent industry, big tech will have a harder time controlling it.

It’s why users can own their data through their Think agent, eliminating the need for their data to be copied and live on some external third-party server. In this way, Think agents also hope to address the issue around data ownership by putting users in control of who they share their information with.

“When a social company goes out of business, all of that data gets sold to the highest bidder,” Anderson said. “23andMe is the most egregious example of this. They didn’t give you your DNA data and then delete it from their servers, their business model was actually to sell your data to others. Now, who knows who the highest bidder is. Is it an insurance company? The Chinese government? Who is it? Your data exhaust is more valuable than your DNA.”

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