Before Ramiro Montiel arrived at Haas two years ago, he was a rising star at HBO in New York City, moving from entry-level roles to a senior manager of marketing strategy and integrated media at Showtime.
Haas News checked in with Montiel, MBA 25, a Consortium Fellow, Management Leadership for Tomorrow Professional Development Fellow, and Berkeley Hope Scholar, as he prepared to graduate on May 23. Montiel discussed his pivot from entertainment to the tech industry, his deep involvement on campus, and how grit and resilience have become his superpowers. Here’s his first-person story.
“I’m Chicano, a first-gen, and an orphan. I am a former foster child. I entered the foster care system at the age of 3 months. My parents passed when I was 3 and 4 years old, and I lived in 24 foster homes. By the time I reached college, I had already lived a dozen lives, shifting between worlds, adapting to every background and socioeconomic class like second nature. Risk never felt foreign to me. I stared down the barrel of fear, stood at the edge of chaos. And every time, I’d take a deep breath… and leap.
Two things confirmed my choice to go to Haas. One is Anthony Whitten, director of diversity admissions. He was with me every step of the way when I was applying to Berkeley. My mentor, Sylvia Sensiper, also counseled me through the application process. For me, it was a very holistic moment when I was with Anthony and Sylvia at an event on campus. I remember looking out to one side of the football stadium surrounded by a sea of trees on the outskirts, and then to Campanile, as the sun was starting to go down. I remember feeling a unique sense of joy, a sense of belonging. I had met some of the other Consortium students that day, and I was just thinking, ‘This is it. This is my new home. I’m going to Berkeley Haas.’
Risk never felt foreign to me. I stared down the barrel of fear, stood at the edge of chaos. And every time, I’d take a deep breath… and leap.
I had two hypotheses when I began the MBA program. Either I was going down the consulting route in hopes of tackling tech projects, or I was going to go the Big Tech route. While I remain deeply passionate about entertainment and media, it was a space I had grown familiar with after seven years in the industry. I was at HBO during the early days of building the Max streaming platform, now once again branded as HBO Max. I still remember my manager saying, ‘We need the team to be more data-driven, more analytical. We need to move beyond campaign KPIs and start thinking in terms of broader business impact!’
That moment stuck with me. It became clear that in order to grow beyond the industry norm, and to stay ahead of the evolving business and technological demands of streaming, I needed to deepen my understanding of the product development lifecycle, product-led growth and design, and financial fluency, and develop a robust analytical mindset. The industry was scaling rapidly, and I knew I had to scale with it.
That’s when I made a pivotal decision: to pursue business school and shift my focus toward tech, building a more product- and strategy-oriented foundation.
During my first year, my focus was on tech recruiting. I recruited at Apple, Meta, Adobe, Microsoft, Amazon, and more. My grades took a dive in the fall—quite frankly, it was difficult to do it all in business school. And then, in the spring and in the next fall of my second year, I came back strong and just gave it 100% with academics. I was like, ‘OK, now we’re at 3.8, now we’re at 3.9 a semester.’ I made it a point to deeply engage: meeting with professors during office hours and intentionally setting up one-on-one lunches and dinners with classmates at Haas. I knew that by doing so, I’d grow in ways that extended beyond my original goals. That was the point, to learn from every walk of life, to stretch myself through diverse perspectives, and to embrace growth in its most unexpected forms.
For my 2024 summer MBA internship, I worked at Microsoft on the Copilot mobile app, strategizing and developing a measurement and attribution framework for the app, which the team and I successfully launched. It was probably one of the hardest things I’ve done in my entire career. I was new to the mobile landscape and its technical nuances, but I showed up like I have always done, with curiosity and confidence, but without an attitude, and my team embraced it. It was, ‘OK, this is what the data says, let’s discuss, and let’s test it out or let’s run with it,’ and it felt like a right fit.
I’m excited to go back to Microsoft to continue working to understand what the product is, how to adapt to customer-centric needs, and understand the technology that the company is building out. Microsoft is at the highest valuation that it’s ever been, and it’s one of the top tech companies out there.
Five to 10 years from now, if I return to entertainment, I’ll be able to say: I understand marketing. I understand the tech industry, and now that I’m in the tech sector, I understand product, and customer needs.
Entertainment is the thing that makes me smile from cheek to cheek. At Haas, I served as the co-president of the Digital Media Entertainment club (in addition, I was VP of Marketing for the Haas Tech Club, VP Admissions for the Association for the Latinx MBA Advancement, and a PMM Tech student peer advisor with CMG). Storytelling is also a big part of who I am—and so I balance those two worlds.
I’ve also dabbled with what it would look like to build my own startup. The elective courses taken by world-class faculty, across M&A, new venture finance, financial information analysis, design thinking, and new product development, provided me with a new wave of curiosity and confidence to explore my own venture. Additionally, I participated in various startup conferences and a case competition, in which my team and I secured second place against 23 teams across 17 MBA programs (MIT, Columbia, NYU, Kellogg, Darden, Yale, Chicago Booth, etc.).
Running, working out, and reading are my sanctuaries. I probably put in an hour and a half a day about five to six times a week. It’s very therapeutic. I don’t listen to music when I run 5-8 miles. I don’t listen to music when I’m working out. I listen to my heartbeat. I listen to my footsteps. The steps are a kind of metronome that I pick up acutely. I listen to my rhythm and the way I breathe. While I’m doing that, I’m thinking about my day. I’m thinking about moments that didn’t go well or things that I could improve on. It’s very symbiotic.
To be quite honest, graduation hasn’t really fully hit me yet. I think it will when I’m on the plane heading to my new home, New York City, in July, or the night prior to my first day at Microsoft, which is down the street from Times Square. I am a bit sad, but I’m also just trying to cherish the last moments I have with my classmates in the Bay Area. My MBA is one of the best investments I’ve ever made in my entire life. I’ve grown so much, both professionally and personally.
Now, I hold an MBA from the No. 1 public university in the world and from one of the top 10 global business schools. Curiosity, sheer ambition, and hard work led me to Berkeley Haas. Though, this degree is more than a personal triumph. It’s statistical defiance! Less than 1% of foster youth grow up to earn a master’s degree, and less than about 4% of foster youth graduate with a bachelor’s from a four-year university. I view my life as a man of privilege. I don’t view my life as a person who grew up in poverty and grew up with bad circumstances. I am a man of privilege, a man of intellect, a man who has a very established network, and a man who has a seat at the table, who’s able to use his network and his influence to make decisions on behalf of other people. And that in itself is privilege.”
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