The Personal Touch

HAAS FINANCE FELLOWSHIPS

Mentee: Shivi Lakhtakia, MBA 26
Mentor: Jerry Weintraub, BS 80, MBA 88, owner, Weintraub Capital Management

When Shivi Lakhtakia, MBA 26, began her mentorship with Jerry Weintraub, BS 80, MBA 88, she was looking for more than career advice: She wanted perspective. After nearly a decade in global investing, Lakhtakia sought help thinking differently about leadership, networks, and purpose. What she found was not just a mentor but a passionate coach who takes a teamwork approach, working the Haas Alumni Network—including his past “mentee tree”—to achieve a goal.

Lakhtakia entered her Haas Finance Fellowship with a clear aim: to join an asset manager that aligned with her long-term investing philosophy and offered meaningful ownership of ideas. When she began exploring internships at major asset managers, Weintraub, the founder of Weintraub Capital and a Haas mentor for over a decade, connected her with former mentee Ray Xu, BA 15 (economics), MBA 22, now an investment officer at the San Francisco Employees’ Retirement System. Xu helped Lakhtakia connect with a recruiter at Capital Group, one of the world’s largest active fund managers with over $3 trillion in assets under management.

After receiving multiple offers, Lakhtakia worked with Weintraub to prioritize the opportunities, eventually deciding to intern at Capital Group. “Jerry gave me the confidence to make thoughtful, values-aligned decisions rather than defaulting to the obvious choice,” she says. 

Weintraub also encouraged Lakhtakia to sharpen how she structured investment assessments, connecting her with Xavier Jefferson, MBA 24, an equity research analyst in software and fintech at Bailard Inc. Jefferson helped add to Lakhtakia’s toolset to assess companies with very high valuations. 

Weintraub’s combination of coaching and teamwork transformed Lakhtakia’s mentorship experience into a shared practice of learning and leadership. “I can always count on Jerry for direct, candid feedback,” she says. “He’s someone I genuinely look up to—not just for his personal accomplishments but for how he maintains meaningful relationships. That’s something I want to emulate.”

Amid today’s AI-tailored learning experiences, that kind of person-to-person mentorship is becoming more important than ever. Adobe’s 2023 Future Workforce Study of over 1,000 early-career Gen Zers at mid- to large-sized companies in the U.S. found that only 52% of respondents reported having a mentor despite 83% saying they consider it crucial for their career. Fortunately for the Haas community, mentorships form in numerous ways. And unlike algorithms, Haas mentors like the many profiled here offer a combination of empathy, experience, and connections that machines can’t match. 

What results is an experience that benefits both mentee and mentor alike. “There’s a great reward in being a mentor,” says Weintraub, a member of the Haas School Board. “Just to watch as these younger adults navigate the challenges of their early career and to have the pivotal discussions that help them along the way gives me great intellectual and emotional joy.”

A disciplined approach 

William Nguyen, a proud YouTube content creator, has never thought of himself as an athlete. But to achieve his childhood dream of becoming a Google software engineer, he needed the sports-minded approach his mentor, Branndon Marion, brought from his years as a hurdler for Cal’s track and field team. 

“There’s no way I’d be where am I today without Branndon,” says Nguyen, a first-generation student. “He gave me the discipline and accountability I needed to stay on track.”

HAAS STUDENT-ALUMNI MENTOR PROGRAM

Mentee: William Nguyen (left), BS 25 (business/electrical engineering & computer sciences)
Mentor: Branndon Marion, BS/BA 21 (data science), MIDS 25 (information and data science), data scientist, Vanguard’s Advanced Development & Technology Leadership Programs

With a packed senior year: 20 units in the dual-degree Management, Entrepreneurship, & Technology (M.E.T.) program, involvement in three clubs, a campus job, and aging parents he supports, Nguyen wasn’t sure he had enough stamina to even endure the recruitment gauntlet software engineers face: A series of problem-solving, coding, and behavioral tests over multiple days culminate in a final “super day” of five interviews. Fortunately, Marion had already run that race. He’d secured a software engineering position with series seed fintech platform Pave Finance after graduating from Haas and was in another recruitment cycle for his current position at Vanguard. 

Mentorship Moment: 
There might be different hurdles or challenges students face to achieve their goals, but seeing them overcome those and watching them succeed—that’s really rewarding,” Marion says. “And sometimes, the advice I’m giving is exactly what I needed to hear myself.”

“I looked at it like training,” Marion says. “You just need to go through your reps and be prepared.”

For Nguyen, that meant spending full days doing nothing but interview prep—algorithm problems, skill proficiency, and practice tests—to the point that he started having coding nightmares. “A lot was riding on these interviews,” Nguyen says, “so I was sacrificing everything.” 

But while discipline and accountability were key to Nguyen ultimately becoming a “Noogler” on the YouTube Shorts team, Marion gave him something even more powerful: an enduring confidence boost strong enough to turn his coding nightmares into a dream come true. 

Breaking down barriers 

Claudia Carrillo is no slouch when it comes to self-starting. A high school student leader, entrepreneur, and athlete, Carrillo is one of the first four Berkeley Haas undergraduate students named as Spieker Scholars in the four-year Spieker Undergraduate Business Program. But when it came time to move forward with her sustainable fashion startup plan, she felt stymied. 

Mentorship Moment: 
Thanks to McDaniel, Carrillo now sees herself becoming a mentor one day. “I feel that being a mentor can be so rewarding, especially in the way that you learn from your mentees.”

“As a first-generation student, I was afraid of navigating the whole networking scene,” she says. “I lacked the resources and faith that I would do well in such an innovative industry.” 

The program paired her with Aaron McDaniel, BS 04, a serial entrepreneur, bestselling author, speaker, and faculty member with years of experience—which Carrillo found exciting but also daunting. 

McDaniel quickly boosted her confidence and got her entrepreneurial engine running again. Soon, she was seeing her startup idea in a new light. “Students often have these mental barriers,” McDaniel says. “Mentorship can really help break through those.”

SPIEKER SCHOLARS PROGRAM

Mentee: Claudia Lizeth Carrillo, BS 28
Mentor: Aaron McDaniel, BS 04, co-founder, Global Copilot; Haas faculty member

For example, Carrillo was intimidated by the thought of formally addressing her target audience to validate her concept. So McDaniel suggested she first talk to her friends about their attitudes toward sustainable fashion. 

One of the most helpful things McDaniel did was simply share his failures. “By being vulnerable in that way, he taught me something really important,” Carrillo says. “Because I thought that I needed to build a perfect product. I didn’t even know what it meant to be an entrepreneur.” 

Overcoming tunnel vision 

Until he met his mentor, Trey Jackson had tunnel vision about his first year in the MBA program and upcoming internship with the healthcare technologies giant Abbott. 

“It was helpful for someone very much in the throes of finding an internship, finding a job, and taking classes to be reminded that this really does all lead to something,” says Jackson, who met Naoko Miyamoto in person when she returned to Haas for her 10-year reunion. The two quickly bonded over a shared love of CrossFit, nutrition, and weightlifting. 

Mentorship Moment: 
Miyamoto recognizes that in addition to embodying the Defining Leadership Principles, mentorship is a natural extension of the school. “The culture that Haas continues to build—the culture that I love—makes it so much easier for students and alumni to connect,” she says.

Miyamoto tapped into her years at Deloitte to help Jackson prepare for and make the most of his internship at a large corporation. For example, she helped develop a strategy to connect Jackson with Abbott’s new direct-to-consumer biowearable division, Lingo, which was separate from his internship. 

“I was able to meet with many people from the Lingo team and learn about their business, along with the opportunities and challenges of starting a new venture within one of the largest healthcare companies in the world,” he says.

MBA ALUMNI-STUDENT MENTORSHIP PROGRAM

Mentee: Trey Jackson, MBA/MPH 26
Mentor: Naoko Miyamoto, MBA 15, corporate operations consultant, Ionis Pharmaceuticals

Jackson now counts Miyamoto as a senior adviser on his “board of advisers.” “It’s really valuable talking to someone like Naoko, especially when it comes to things like high-stakes internships and trying to figure out how to make a good impression in a short period of time,” he says. “Just knowing that I have someone I can turn to if I come up against something is really helpful.”

The founder’s founder

Not long ago, Isabel D’Elia was going through a founder’s nightmare that almost made her give up on her entrepreneurial dream—until she had a clarifying talk with her mentor, Lynda Negron.

“I was thinking, ‘What is this all for? Maybe I’m just not a founder,’” D’Elia recalls, when it became clear the startup she had worked on for months was entering the market too late. Now she was considering applying for an internship instead. “That was the one time that Lynda was like, ‘Stop! You are meant to be a founder. Let’s just look at the facts, sit down, and relax.’ It was very grounding,” she says.

Mentorship Moment:
 In mentoring D’Elia, Negron is paying it forward from a similar relationship with Diarra White, MBA 24. “It was so useful to have her as a sounding board,” she says. “So when Isa and I naturally clicked, it just felt like, ‘Oh, now I’m her Diarra.’”  

By that point, D’Elia and Negron were having semiweekly “office hours” at a boba teahouse. Both high-achieving, tech-savvy Latinas, they first struck up a friendship as co-liaisons for the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management Fellowship, a national nonprofit focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion in business schools. That bond evolved into mentorship when Negron helped D’Elia decide that Haas was right for her.  

PEER-TO-PEER CONNECTIONS 

Mentee: Isabel D’Elia (left), MBA 26
Mentor: Lynda Negron, MBA 25, co-founder & CEO, Resilio Energy

“There aren’t a lot of female founders and even fewer Latinas,” D’Elia says. “Just seeing someone who looks like me confidently go in that direction is inspiring.”

With Negron’s encouragement, D’Elia has doubled down on her startup goals through Lean LaunchPad, the UC Berkeley Haas eHub, and UC Berkeley SkyDeck’s Pad-13, an early-stage incubator that helped D’Elia launch GoalBridge, an AI executive assistant focused on consultants. “I feel like all the work I’ve done has finally paid off. It’s a dream come true!” she says, quickly crediting Negron. “She gave me the confidence that I belong where I am and that I can do it.” 

A moonshot

Not long after landing at Haas, Adarsh Kumar suffered from culture shock and homesickness. A rising star quant researcher at WorldQuant in Mumbai, India, he’d chosen the MFE Program as a path toward one day running his own hedge fund. “I was leaving a comfortable life, which was more or less predictable, and taking a moonshot,” he says.

But dealing with the realities of living in a foreign country, Kumar wasn’t quite ready for liftoff. “It was taking me time to settle in, and I kept wondering whether this step was really necessary,” he says. 

Mentorship Moment:
Duhoon says that being a mentor is a professional and personal boon. “With mentorship, you’re really expanding your network and making industry connections,” he says. “And trust me, it feels very good to hear back from mentees about how you impacted them.”

Fortunately, there was a bit of home—and clarity—in former-manager-turned-mentor Prakarsh Duhoon. “He tapped into the reason I actually made this decision,” Kumar says. “I was not finding fulfillment, and that would have hurt me for years to come.” 

Duhoon’s clear-eyed perspective continued to serve Kumar when it came time to choose between a lucrative Los Angeles-based internship limited to a long-only hedge fund and an internship in the Midwest for an alternative asset manager that paid far less but was more aligned with Kumar’s goals. Everyone told him to go for the money—except Duhoon.

“I showed him the reality,” Duhoon says. “When the cash register starts to ring, it’s easy to get swayed, but you have to think about the long term.” 

Kumar says Duhoon’s advice kept him on his trajectory. “Someone like Prakarsh telling me that alignment matters more than money helps a lot,” Kumar says. “You need one person you can trust.”

MFE ALUMNI CAREER COACHING PROGRAM

Mentee: Adarsh Kumar, MFE 26
Mentor: Prakarsh Duhoon, MFE 21, executive director and head of alpha research at a stealth startup; Haas career coach