The story of a management consultant with 12 Master’s degrees who never wanted to go to university
Pratheepkumar Subramani did not intend to do a DBA. He had 15 years of management consulting behind him, work across over 140 countries, and 12 master’s degrees to his name — collected not for the credential, he says, but because the knowledge was the only thing he actually wanted. His partner, whom he had met through a mobile game called Clash of Clans, thought he should do something more.
He looked at PhD programs but everything he found was theoretical — years of academic study producing research that would sit in a journal and accumulate citations. “A waste of time,” he told her. She told him that solutions to problems are not always obvious so he kept looking.
He found the Doctor of Business Administration. One phrase stopped him: scholar practitioner. The academic side applied to a practitioner setting. That, he thought, was worth something.
The test came from an unexpected direction. A client organization needed a valuation framework for web3 digital assets — a way to assign defensible value to domain architectures in an industry so close-knit that reliable data barely existed. His team ran the problem through every business approach they had but arrived at a dead end. “That’s when I decided,” he says, “let’s do things more academically.”
Using existing academic literature as a foundation, he built a formula. His organization trialed it with clients. Within months, the prototype — still technically unfinished — had generated $150,000 in client value. In one case, a client used the valuation as collateral for a loan of $300 million. Major financial institutions accepted it.
“Once they accepted the proposal,” he says, “it was all good to go from there.”
Across all his degrees, Pratheepkumar had never attended a graduation ceremony. Distance, timing, other countries, other commitments; something always intervened. San Francisco was his first.
He describes the DBA as something that found him, rather than the other way around.
Pratheepkumar Subramani completed the Doctor of Business Administration through Golden Gate University’s online DBA program — a fully accredited, fully online doctorate for working professionals.
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