Meet the Class of 2026: Aurora Straus 26MBA
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This year, we are celebrating the incredible achievements of Goizueta Business School‘s Class of 2026. As commencement approaches, we’re highlighting outstanding graduates from each program who have made their mark during their time at Goizueta. Meet Aurora Straus, a graduating Two-Year MBA student whose journey is shaped by bold ambition, unconventional thinking, and a drive to redefine the future of motorsport. In this Q&A, she shares how Goizueta helped her sharpen her business acumen while building P1 Motor Club, empowering her to bridge racing and entrepreneurship as she works to make the industry more innovative, accessible, and globally impactful.
Hometown: Cold Spring, NY
Current Job Title: Professional Race Car Driver
Current Company: Founding Partner of P1 Motor Club
Previous Education: Harvard University, BA
Previous Employment: Consultant, Bain & Company (NYC office)
Clubs/Activities: MBA chair of Robson Program for Business, Public Policy, and Government, Goizueta Women in Business
What initially drew you to Goizueta Business School?
Goizueta’s intimate class size and student-to-faculty ratio initially drew me in. When I visited schools, I asked every student the same question: What makes this program worth it? At other programs, answers clustered around rankings, recruiting, and social cohesion. At Goizueta, along with all the other metrics, students almost universally named a professor who had changed their lives. As someone with an addiction to learning, that told me everything.
What has been your most memorable experience during your time at Goizueta?
I got married on New Year’s Eve 2025 with some Goizueta classmates attending, so that one’s easy!
A close second is helping plan the Robson Conference both years I was at Emory. Professor Jeff Rosensweig is the embodiment of “pay it forward,” and those events connected students at individual dinner tables with C-Suite executives and political changemakers from around the world.
How has your Goizueta education prepared you for your next career step?
I’m to lead business development and partnerships at P1 Motor Club — a role I’ve held throughout the MBA — so I’ve been doing the job in real time while building the frameworks to do it better.
Goizueta added precision, particularly for financial modelling. I was quite literally in the middle of evaluating a $200 million financing offer while I was taking relevant classes (Venture Capital & Private Equity, Real Estate Finance) at Goizueta. The tools from those classes made me that much faster at interpreting the deal on the table.
What advice would you give to incoming students in your program?
Don’t be afraid to continue the cold call, especially to professors! Because the program is intentionally small, faculty and alumni often have bandwidth to invest in you — but you have to initiate. And if you’re not from Atlanta, the depth of business opportunity and entrepreneurial energy here will surprise you.
What’s one piece of advice you received at Goizueta that you’ll carry with you throughout your career?
Lean into what makes you weird! If you can articulate what you want with precision, Goizueta will find a way to support it. I came in from consulting — the inverse of the standard MBA path — and I’m leaving as a race car driver and entrepreneur. It makes no sense on paper, but this program gave me my first real opportunity to step back and analyze how to connect my career in motorsport to something larger.
How do you plan to stay connected with the Goizueta community after graduation?
I’m moving to Florida after graduation to continue building P1 Motor Club, but leaving is bittersweet. We LOVE the area near P1, but my husband and I have also fallen in love with Atlanta, so we are planning on visiting a lot. We’re already planning recurring annual vacations with some of our Goizueta friends, and it helps to have a racetrack in Florida that we can use to entice our friends to come visit us!
What are your long-term career goals, and how do you see yourself making an impact in your chosen field?
My long-term goal is to reinvent the motorsport industry. Most fundamental infrastructure behind racing is similar to how it ran 20-30 years ago. I’ve spent my adult life accumulating a strange combination of credentials – pro driver, track operator, business owner, strategy consultant. This has given me a unique dual lens insofar as I can be a successful pro driver, but I can also understand the business architecture behind my industry well enough to see exactly where we are broken.
The intersection of motorsports and luxury is where I’m starting, because it’s where I have the deepest operational knowledge as a sponsored athlete for luxury brands and the operator of private motor clubs. P1 Motor Club is going to set the standard worldwide in this respect.
But my ambition is ultimately larger. Motorsport sits at the intersection of technology, luxury, performance, and identity — and it is, by almost every measure, a massively under-optimized industry. Everything has gotten heinously expensive, even at go-karting levels for three-year-olds. The logistical models are outdated, business models are not data-driven, and tracks are being bulldozed and replaced with data centers. The fan experience hasn’t kept pace with what’s possible. And most importantly for me personally, motorsport has become inaccessible financially and demographically, and I want to permanently expand who feels like they belong in this world well past the end of my own racing career. I see 50 different entry points for reinvention, and I intend to pursue them systematically.
Learn more about Goizueta’s Two-Year MBA program.
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