Biography|Mark Ein — The MBA Across the Charles at Baker Library

Harvard Business School sits on the Boston side of the Charles, in Allston, not in Cambridge.

Baker Library, finished in 1927 to a McKim, Mead and White design, is the campus's civic front: a Georgian Revival block with a tower, named for the banker George Fisher Baker.

Ein arrived after Wharton and took an MBA here, finishing in 1992.

The library was already the school's memory palace by then.

Case-method classrooms in Aldrich Hall and the older houses around the lawn were the daily rooms.

He had not yet founded a fund.

The next jobs were the standard ones that the school funnels people into: an analyst stint at Goldman Sachs, then private equity at Brentwood Associates and at The Carlyle Group back in Washington.

Carlyle, founded in 1987, was still a young Washington firm when he worked there in the 1990s.

The decision that split him from that path came later, in 1999, when he started Venturehouse Group to work fewer companies more closely.

Baker Library is the pin because it is the public building a visitor can walk into.

The Bloomberg Center addition on the south side dates from 2005 and was not there in 1992.

What stands in the photograph is the 1927 hall he would have known.

Photo: John Phelan, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons