Leland+ Content Library

Home for Ambition #20 — Weekly Live Show [8/19/2026] (Recording)

Home for Ambition is a weekly live show, hosted by Leland CEO, John Koelliker, for people trying to stay ahead as work, learning, and opportunity keep changing. Each episode tackles a handful of timely, high-signal topics across AI, careers, education, and the future of work. We expect thoughtful debate, unique perspectives, and practical takeaways you can actually use. It is not a typical interview show or a generic news recap. It is a live roundtable built to help ambitious people make sense of what is changing, understand what matters, and leave with a sharper point of view on how to navigate what comes next.

Investment Banking 101: Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Analysis [7/13/2026] (Recording)

This session is designed for rising college sophomores. We will walk through a DCF from first principles, using a simple business example to understand how investors estimate future cash flows and convert them into a present-day valuation. Students will learn the intuition behind each component of a DCF. The goal is not to memorize formulas, but to understand why a DCF works and how finance professionals use it to determine what a business is worth. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to: Understand the key components of a DCF model. Explain the concept of discounting future cash flows. Understand how assumptions impact valuation. Calculate a basic DCF valuation. Interpret the results of a DCF analysis. Prerequisite: Familiarity with basic income statement concepts is recommended, but no prior modeling experience is required.

Resume Revolution: The ATS-Proof Blueprint [6/9/2026] (Recording)

Is your resume disappearing into the application black hole? Up to 75% of resumes are filtered by software before a human ever sees them. Join this free, dynamic workshop to gain the insider strategies you need to beat the system. Leveraging my background as a recruiter and sourcer, I'll teach you how to stop listing duties and start showcasing metrics-based achievements that grab a hiring manager's attention. This workshop is for you if you want to: - Master keywords to score highly with the ATS. - Pass the recruiter's 6-second review test. - Transform your experience into quantifiable impact. Stop submitting resumes and start submitting applications that convert to interviews!

How to Make IB Technicals Stick [8/11/2026] (Recording)

Many candidates spend hours reading technical guides but struggle to answer questions when the wording changes or the pressure increases. The problem is often not effort. It is the way they are studying. In this session, we'll cover how to begin preparing for investment banking technical interviews in a way that builds real understanding and recall. We'll discuss what to study first, how the major topics fit together, and how to move from passively reading answers to delivering them clearly out loud. You'll leave with a practical technical-preparation system that you can continue using throughout recruiting. You'll learn how to: - Study technical concepts in the right order - Build a foundation in accounting, valuation, M&A, and LBOs - Replace passive memorization with active recall - Practice answering questions clearly and under pressure - Diagnose gaps instead of repeatedly rereading guides - Create a realistic technical study plan for recruiting

LinkedIn Launchpad: Profile to Profit [8/11/2026] (Recording)

You're invisible to recruiters. Not because of your skills, but because of your discoverability. Recruiters don't browse profiles. They query them, filtering by skill, title, and location through Recruiter Seats. If your profile isn't a high-density match for their search, you don't exist in their results. Join me for LinkedIn Launchpad: Profile to Profit, a live workshop built around the 3 pillars that turn a passive profile into an authoritative brand: Discoverability The LinkedIn Skills Graph and how to hit the 50 targeted skills threshold that gets you ranked in recruiter searches. Positioning Why your profile is a landing page, not an obituary. The formula for headlines and how to transform it into magnetic search real estate. Networking The mindset shift from "favor" to "value" that turns cold outreach into real connections, and gets actual replies. We'll close with a profile audit, applying all three pillars in real time, plus your personalized 2026 roadmap for what comes next. Come ready to work. You'll leave with a rewritten headline, a strategically dense Skills section, and a clear plan for your profile.

AMA/Office Hours with Former Stanford GSB Admissions Director [7/15/2026] (Recording)

I spent more than 16 years working at Stanford GSB, including five years as Executive Director of the school's Center for Leadership, where I helped revamp the MBA leadership curriculum, and more than a decade as Director of the Stanford MSx Program and Director of Admissions. I taught electives, advised students, strategized with the deans, and read thousands of applications. If business school is your objective, I'm happy to offer any insight I have to the admission process and how to maximize its value proposition.

Hear Straight from Admissions Directors

Want to hear directly from the people who help shape MBA classes? This session offers a unique opportunity to learn how admissions directors evaluate candidates and what stands out in today's competitive application process. Whether you're just beginning your MBA journey or preparing to apply soon, you'll leave with a clearer understanding of what top programs are looking for. Join live for this special MBA Week session, presented in partnership with Poets & Quants, featuring a panel of MBA admissions directors. Bring your questions and gain firsthand insights that can help you approach your applications with greater confidence and clarity.

Bring Your Best Self: Mastering Behavioral Interviews

After this session, you will know how to structure behavioral responses that hold up under follow-up questions, identify which stories from your experience map most cleanly to common competency frameworks, and recognize the specific signals that tell an interviewer you are self-aware and coachable. We will work through the STAR method not as a template but as a thinking tool, so your answers feel honest rather than rehearsed. Attending live means you can bring a real answer you have been working on and hear direct feedback on what is landing and what is getting in the way, which a recording simply cannot replicate. The coach works with candidates on behavioral interviews regularly and will share the patterns that consistently separate strong responses from forgettable ones, giving you a clear picture of how this thinking applies to your own preparation.

Wharton Moelis Essays - Financial Inclusion and Community Impact

Essays answering Wharton's prompts on “What do you hope to gain from the MBA?” and “How do you plan to add meaningful value to the Wharton community?” focusing on building a fintech venture to expand credit access to young earners without credit histories.

3 Tips to Calm Test Anxiety

A one-page guide with three science-backed nervous system tools to use before and during a test, plus why each one works. For anyone taking the GMAT, GRE, LSAT, or any high-stakes test who wants fast, practical tools to calm anxiety and think clearly when it counts.

Product Case Interview Prep: Fav Product

After this session, you will know how to structure a compelling "favorite product" response that demonstrates product thinking, not just feature knowledge. We will cover how to choose the right product to talk about, how to articulate a clear problem and user insight, and how to walk through your reasoning in a way that signals PM maturity to interviewers.

PM Coffee Chats: How to Network Like a Pro

Networking is one of the most powerful ways to break into product management, but most people approach coffee chats without a clear strategy. This session is for aspiring PMs who want to build meaningful connections, stand out in conversations, and turn networking into real opportunities. You’ll learn how to reach out effectively, ask thoughtful questions, and make lasting impressions that can open doors in the PM world.

Developing Product Sense

Everyone tells you product sense matters. Almost no one tells you how to actually build it. In this workshop, part of PM Week, we're breaking down product sense into something you can actually practice, not just a vague trait some candidates seem to have and others don't. You'll learn the frameworks experienced PMs use to evaluate products, how to spot the gap between a good answer and a great one in a product sense interview, and the daily habits that build real intuition over time. This isn't a list of tips. It's a working session on the skill that decides whether you get the offer.

Build a Winning Product Management Application Strategy

Landing a product management role takes more than submitting applications. The strongest candidates approach the process with a clear strategy for positioning their experience, telling their story, and standing out in a highly competitive market. This session is for aspiring PMs who want to sharpen their application strategy and improve their chances of landing interviews. You’ll learn how to craft a compelling resume, communicate product thinking effectively, and highlight the experiences that matter most to hiring teams.

Standing Out in PM Recruiting: AI Side Projects

AI side projects are everywhere. Most of them will not help you stand out in a competitive PM hiring process. In this session, you’ll learn how to build an AI side project that demonstrates real product thinking, not just technical curiosity. We’ll break down how to choose the right problem, scope a project around the PM skills hiring managers care about, and avoid creating an overbuilt demo with no clear user or purpose. You’ll also learn how to turn the project into a compelling story across your resume, LinkedIn, portfolio, and interviews. We’ll cover what separates projects that signal strong product judgment, customer insight, prioritization, experimentation, and execution from projects that recruiters and hiring managers quickly skip. You’ll leave with a practical framework for deciding: What to build and what not to build Which PM competencies your project should demonstrate How to scope the project so you can actually finish it How to position the work so its value is immediately clear Whether you already have a project underway or are starting from scratch, this session will help you create something that strengthens your product manager profile.

Back-of-the-Envelope Math: A System Design Cheat Sheet Guide Video

A guided tour of the Back-of-the-Envelope Math cheat sheet. We price a photo-sharing startup from scratch: traffic, bandwidth, storage, and the monthly bill, using the sheet one row at a time. Watch it once, then run your own estimate with the sheet beside you.

Back-of-the-Envelope Math: A System Design Cheat Sheet

The System Design estimation numbers that are worth memorizing. Current latency numbers, cloud costs, LLM inference speeds, QPS and storage shortcuts, and availability math, plus a five-step method and worked examples. Built for system design interviews and useful long after them.

Big-O Complexity: A Coding Interview Cheat Sheet

All the major Big-O complexity prep you need for a coding interview, on two pages. The growth ladder, what n fits in one second, data structures and sorting costs, graph algorithms, and a chart showing how the curves diverge. It ends with a five-step method for analyzing your solution out loud, with worked examples.

Failure Math: A Software Reliability Cheat Sheet

A useful guide to how often hardware, clouds, and deploys actually fail, with real fleet data. Annual failure rates, GPU failure math from the Llama 3 training run, availability tables, and the composition rules that set your uptime ceiling. For system design interviews and for on-call reality.

The Path to Your First Booking

New to Leland and wanting to level up? Learn 5 strategies to build your business on the platform and walk away with a 30 day calendar to get you going.