The Student Who Treated His Business School Like an Investment

When Hugo Bonilla (Class of 2026) started the Part-Time MBA program at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, he was on a pretty standard track.

He was working in Northern Virginia at Capital One. Later, he moved to PenFed Credit Union. His day job was analytics, the kind of work that lives deep in the numbers behind credit and risk.

On the side, he was doing something less standard: trading call options.

Bonilla is matter-of-fact about it now. He experimented, learned, and over time found that his trading was beginning to demand more of his attention than his day job. The markets were no longer a side pursuit; they were becoming a primary focus.

“Basically, I got to the point where I could cover my living costs from my own investing,” he says. As his focus shifted, he eventually found himself doing it full-time — and has now been investing independently for about a year and a half.

Today, that independent streak shows up everywhere. Bonilla now earns his living as an investor. He’s involved with a small electric-vehicle company trying to bring an Art Deco sensibility to the EV market, a notoriously hard space to break into. He’s fascinated by early-stage companies using machine learning to help people move prosthetic limbs with their thoughts. He likes being close enough to see how ideas either survive contact with reality or don’t.

And on weeknights, after the markets close, he logs into class as a Darden student.

Professor Saras Sarasvathy teaches entrepreneurship at Darden. Sarasvathy authored the case examining an early decision facing entrepreneur Doug Lebda — a classroom discussion that left a lasting impression on Bonilla. (Photo by Andrew Shurtleff.)

A Different Kind of Night Class

The Part-Time MBA is built for people like Bonilla — people who already have careers and are adding school on top of their everyday lives. The format is hybrid, anchored in Rosslyn, with intensive residencies in Charlottesville. The cases are the same cases that Full-Time MBA students read. The expectation to speak up is the same, too.

When he talks about why he wanted to come to Darden, Bonilla doesn’t mention rankings or networks first. He talks about being forced to explain himself.

“With the case method, you can’t sit back,” he says. “You have to put a stake in the ground, and then everyone gets to poke at it.”

One entrepreneurship case landed especially hard. It was written by Professor Saras Sarasvathy and centered on Doug Lebda — who, in 1996, was a First Year MBA student at Darden debating whether to leave school to launch a new kind of online mortgage marketplace.

In the case, Lebda isn’t yet the founder of LendingTree. He’s a student with a promising but unproven idea, limited capital and no guarantee the internet is ready for what he wants to build. The web is still young. Banks are skeptical. The model doesn’t exist yet.

The case opens with Lebda walking out of a class session with entrepreneur and author Jim Collins, who has just spent the hour writing every excuse not to start a venture on the board — and then crossing them out one by one.

Collins ends with a line that stays with Lebda: “The risk is not that you’re not going to succeed or fail, but that you’re never gonna start.” As Lebda leaves the room, he’s sketching a decision tree in his head about whether to take a leave from Darden and pursue the idea.

Students reading the case know how the story eventually unfolds. Lebda leaves Darden, builds what becomes LendingTree, and years later returns to complete his Executive MBA in 2014. More recently, the Darden community mourned his passing and reflected on his impact as a visionary entrepreneur.

Inside the classroom, though, Sarasvathy keeps him frozen at the moment before any of that happens — when the outcome is unknown, and the only thing available is judgment.

“In class, you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Okay, but he doesn’t know how this ends,’” Bonilla says. “We do. He didn’t.”

That’s the part that stuck.

Sarasvathy’s work often pushes on a similar idea: you don’t wait for perfect information; you work with what you have, who you are and whom you know, and you take affordable steps forward. The case made that tangible for Bonilla.

“You can analyze something forever,” he says, “but eventually you have to live with a decision.”

Lebda’s story gave him a real person — another Darden student at a hinge point — not a myth or a polished founder profile. Bonilla wasn’t planning to drop out and start a company. But the logic of the case lodged itself somewhere useful: understand your means, be honest about your downside and don’t hide behind indefinite analysis.

That framing shows up again when he talks about his own decisions — not about launching a startup, but about something quieter and more personal.

The Sarasvathy–Lebda case isn’t ultimately about entrepreneurship. It’s about judgment under uncertainty — about what you do after you’ve gathered the facts and tested your assumptions. Whether you continue refining the model, or accept that no decision comes with full information.

When Bonilla began thinking about making a meaningful gift to Darden, he found himself in a smaller version of that posture. He could keep adjusting the structure, waiting for the perfectly engineered vehicle.

Or he could act on a conviction he had already reached.

Entrepreneur Doug Lebda, photographed in 2005. Lebda is the central figure in a Darden case written by Professor Sarasvathy that asks students to step into the moment he was deciding whether to leave business school to build what would become LendingTree.

Seeing the School as an Asset

Alongside his coursework, Bonilla serves as a director of research in the Darden Executive Fund, the student-managed fund that invests a slice of the School’s endowment. It’s one thing to trade your own account. It’s another to help decide what happens to money that belongs to an institution.

“When it’s not just your capital, you feel the responsibility differently,” he says.

That experience changed how he saw Darden itself. Not just as a place he passes through, but as something that has to be managed, strengthened and funded over time if it’s going to keep doing what it does for future students.

So when he started thinking about philanthropy, he didn’t start from a sense of obligation. He started from the same question he asks about any position: what do I actually believe in?

At first, the idea was to do something very “Hugo” — to see if his gift could be structured in a way that might nudge how the Darden Executive Fund operates, to treat it almost like seed money for a specific educational experiment. He went down the path far enough to realize the mechanics would be complicated.

He’d done the analysis. He understood the tradeoffs. He could keep tweaking the structure of the gift indefinitely, waiting for a perfectly tailored vehicle.

Or he could move.

“The thesis didn’t change,” he says. “Just the vehicle.”

Instead of trying to fine-tune a structure, he made a straightforward choice: as a current Part-Time MBA student and 2020 UVA grad — a soon-to-be Double Hoo with no previous giving history — he committed an outright $10,000 gift to the Darden Annual Fund.

That commitment places him in the Darden Society at the Leaders level — the $10,000+ tier of the School’s annual giving societies, a recognition more commonly reached by alumni further into their careers than by current students.

To Bonilla, it simply made sense.

“If I’m going to spend this much time and energy here,” he says, “it feels honest to back it financially too.”

The Sands Family Grounds in Rosslyn, Virginia, where many Part-Time MBA students attend evening classes during the week. (Photo by Sanjay Suchak.)

Why It Matters

The way he explains the decision is revealing.

He doesn’t describe the gift as charity. He describes it as making his behavior consistent with his beliefs: that Darden’s mix of pressure-filled classrooms, real debate and exposure to ambiguous, real-world problems has changed the way he thinks — about risk, about companies, about his own future.

Lebda’s case is one expression of that culture. Bonilla’s gift is another. Both are moments when someone with incomplete information decides to act anyway, based on a clear sense of what they’re willing to stake.

For older alumni, there’s something reassuring in that continuity. The tools have changed; the markets move faster; the programs now include formats like the Part-Time MBA. But the core habit — do the work, argue it out, decide and then own the decision — is recognizably the same.

For younger readers, Bonilla offers a different kind of example. He’s a 2020 grad who turned options trading, startup work and a demanding night program into more than hustle content — and who decided, before any of it fully settled, that the School teaching him how to think was worth investing in.

What matters, he says, is taking a long-term view: treating Darden less as a service you purchase and more as an institution you help sustain.

It may not be dramatic. But it is worth noticing — because it raises a simple question:

What does it look like when someone early in their career treats a business school not just as a line on a résumé, but as an asset they’re willing to own?