
Bryan Chao
5.0
(7)
Building unique, differentiated applications. MIT Sloan / UPenn
Studied at MIT Sloan School of Management
Works at oiler.ai
Not currently taking new clients
Bryan’s MBA Qualifications
100+ people coached for MBA
I help MBA applicants find the story that makes everything make sense. My specialty is connecting the dots — personally, professionally, and strategically — so your application reads as a coherent, compelling story rather than a collection of disconnected achievements. I am especially strong at helping applicants find their unique voice and differentiation. This is not a Mad Libs approach, and it is not a factory or template. I help you uncover the most powerful unifying storyline behind your life, career, decisions, ambitions, and future direction. Why this path? Why now? How does everything you have done so far logically lead to what you want to do next? What is the deeper pattern behind your experiences? What makes your candidacy feel not just impressive, but inevitable? Over the past 12 years, I have advised roughly 100 applicants, most targeting top 10 MBA programs. My coaching style is intense, direct, and highly detail-oriented. I am a perfectionist about narrative coherence. I push candidates to go beyond surface-level achievements, uncover the strongest themes in their background, clarify credible short- and long-term goals, and translate their experience into essays and interviews that feel specific, mature, and authentic. The final application should not sound manufactured; it should feel honest, distinctive, and unmistakably yours. I am particularly helpful for candidates with complex, international, technical, finance-heavy, startup, or non-linear backgrounds. If your story has many moving pieces, I can help you connect them into a compelling admissions narrative: where you have been, what shaped you, what you are building toward, and why an MBA is the right bridge. My background combines education from MIT Sloan MBA / undergrad at UPenn, international business experience across the U.S. and China, and years of advising students and professionals on applications, essays, interviews, and career positioning. I have worked across strategy, operations, venture capital, M&A, clean tech, and startup commercialization, which gives me a practical understanding of how ambitious candidates should frame their leadership potential, career goals, and personal differentiation.
Bryan can help with:
Application Strategy
Cover Letters
Ding Analysis
Editing
Essays
Financial Aid & Scholarships
General Exploration
Interviews
Networking Strategy
Recommendations
Resume
School Selection
Secondary Review
Supplementary Materials
Testing & Assessments
Waitlist Strategy
About Bryan
I have spent most of my career working at the intersection of strategy, technology, startups, and international business. Originally from Houston, Texas, undergrad at University of Pennsylvania in their Management and Technology Program (M&T). I worked across M&A, venture capital, corporate development, and startup operations, helping technology companies grow, commercialize, and expand across markets. Much of my work has sat between the U.S. and China, which has shaped how I think about business: not just as strategy on paper, but as execution across different customers, cultures, teams, and market realities. I have worked on transactions, partnerships, commercialization plans, and operating problems across sectors including enterprise technology, clean tech, energy, and industrial innovation. I went back to school at MIT Sloan because I wanted to (1) go from the general tech world and focus in energy/cleantech and (2) get a refresh on current trends and deep learning tech. MIT also gave me the chance to step back, connect the different parts of my experience, and learn more about myself and leadership Since then, my work has continued to focus on helping ambitious people and companies make sense of complexity: how to enter new markets, how to position a business, how to commercialize technology, how to tell a credible story, and how to turn scattered experience into a coherent direction. In many ways, that is the through-line of my career. I am drawn to messy, high-potential situations — startups, career pivots, new markets, technical products, non-linear stories — and I like helping people find the structure, strategy, and narrative that move them forward.
Why do I coach?
I coach because I love the moment when things finally click. There is a specific kind of eureka moment that happens when someone stops seeing their experiences as scattered pieces and starts recognizing the deeper pattern behind them. I love helping people get to that point: the moment when their mission becomes clearer, their direction feels more concrete, and their story starts to make sense not just to others, but to themselves. I have always been interested in what makes people tick. I like understanding why someone made certain choices, what motivates them, what they are proud of, what they are still trying to figure out, and what kind of future would actually feel meaningful to them. Coaching gives me the chance to turn that curiosity into something useful: helping people translate who they are into a story, a strategy, and a path forward. I also love the human side of the work. I get to meet people from all over the world, with different backgrounds, ambitions, insecurities, and dreams. No two people are the same, and no good story should feel copied from someone else. The best part of coaching is helping someone find the version of their story that feels honest, distinctive, and powerful. At the core, I coach because I like helping people achieve things that matter to them. But just as importantly, I like helping them understand why those things matter in the first place.
Work Experience
Vice President Commercialization
oiler.ai
June 2025 - Present
AI powered optical gas imaging (OGI) to detect and quantify VOC emissions. Ask me how I can help you capture fugitive emissions [email protected]

MIT MBA
MIT Sloan School of Management
June 2023 - May 2024
• Select coursework: Hands-on Deep Learning, Analytics for Operations, Advanced Corporate Finance, Pricing, Energy Economics and Policy, US Energy Policy, Entrepreneurial Strategy, Branding Select projects: • MIT Energy Initiative Practicum with Shell Techworks (externship): Techno-economic analysis for a 1.5GW aluminum plant into renewable generation, using a combination of solar, wind and battery at 95% and 99% coverage • MIT Energy Conference Organizer: Panel host for Net-zero Commitments and Strategies, From MIT to Energy • Advanced Corporate Finance: Evaluate project finance structuring cases for PDVSA and Calpine plants • Hands-on Deep Learning: Artificial intelligence carbohydrate prediction using InceptionV3 transfer learning • Term Paper: “Drivers and Differences Between the US and EU on Climate Policy, and New Bridges for the Future” • Research Paper: “Day 0: the Potential, Commercialization, and Trajectory of Fusion Energy”

Vice President, Operations
Red River Technology Center
August 2021 - March 2023
Enterprise solutions for blockchain infrastructure Series A startup ($30M raised from Prosperity7, Bangkok Bank); creator of the Blockchain Service Network and Universal Digital Payments Network (central bank digital currencies) • Brought on by the lead investor and CEO to run sales and operations • Initialize B2B and B2G sales structure for the company, growing bookings revenue from inception to significant revenue over 2 years • Orchestrating cross-team communication across a 35-person team of pre-sales, sales, product management, partner and ecosystem development, and customer support. • Foster ecosystem with strategic partners, channels, and developer communities; grew developers ecosystem to 10k+ • Left role to matriculate into MIT MBA program

BD & Operations Consultant
RWE Clean Energy
October 2019 - September 2021
AI-powered sustainability startup focused on energy supply/demand forecasting and industrial maintenance • Collaborated closely with the CEO, offering strategic guidance on international business development, sales, marketing, and funding efforts • Curate investor materials and financial model, assisting in a successful $20M Series B fundraise led by Alibaba • Analyzed the needs and potential for an automated carbon accounting/ESG platform for the Chinese market

Director of Operations Strategy
Treehouse Finance
March 2018 - May 2021
China’s largest real-estate transaction and housing lending platform; IPO on NYSE August 13, 2020 (BEKE) • Recruited by the CEO of Beike Finance division (ex-Dianrong.com CTO) to incubate consumer finance business • Led a business operations/strategy team of 15, catalyzing cross-department company efficiency and operations • Grew business from inception into a team of 1000+ • Innovated a digitized loan approval process, cut approval times by 80%, and optimized organizational efficiency • Co-authored the BEKE IPO prospectus that raised $2B for IPO, achieving a $40B valuation at IPO
Education
MIT Sloan School of Management
Master of Business Administration - MBA, Sloan Fellows MBA Candidate
2023 - 2024
MIT Sloan Fellows MBA program

University of Pennsylvania
BS, Electrical Engineering and finance
2000 - 2005
Activities and societies: Jerome Fisher Program in Management and Technology
7 Reviews
Overall Rating
5.0
Bryan has helped clients achieve these scores on the Executive Assessment
170
Bryan has helped clients achieve these scores on the GRE