The Finance Fellows for 2024-25. L-R, clockwise: Tianie Scott, Vrinda Bansal (middle row), Toby Levy, Tyler Lawrence (middle row), Jacob Channell, Dominik Gorecki (middle row), Vincent Ding, Thiago Macarenh, Shivi Lakhtakia, Rachael Abayomi, Vaneshia Reed, and Maria Marino Parada. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small
For Vaneshia Reed, MBA 26, the road from the culinary world to business school aligned with her mission to help build more sustainable and equitable food systems.
“Working in the industry and realizing how broken our food system is, and also thinking about who has access to capital, got me excited about private market investing and being able to democratize access to capital and fund a more resilient future of food,” said Reed, one of 12 Berkeley Haas Finance Fellows.
“Working in the industry and realizing how broken our food system was, and also thinking about who has access to capital, got me excited about private market investing and being able to democratize access to capital,” Reed, one of 12 Berkeley Haas Finance Fellows, said.
Fellows are chosen based on their career experience, clarity of their goals, and their career plans. As fellows, the students receive a scholarship award and are assigned mentors—Haas alumni working in finance, including recent graduates and senior executives.
The 2024-25 Finance Fellows include:
Investment Banking: Rachael Abayomi, Tianie Scott, Vincent Ding, and Tyler Lawrence, all MBA 26.
Entrepreneurial Finance: Dominik Gorecki, MBA/MPH 26; Vaneshia Reed, MBA 26; Toby Levy, MBA/MCS 26; and Maria Marino Parada, MBA 26.
Private Equity and Investment Management: Shivi Lakhtakia and Thiago Mascarenh, both MBA 26.
C&J White Fellows: Vrinda Bansal and Jacob Channell, both MBA 26.
This year was one of the most competitive rounds for the fellowship, according to William Rindfuss, managing director for strategic programs for the Haas Finance Group.
“There was a big increase in applications, especially for our longest-running fellowship, the investment banking fellowship, now in its 19th year,” he said. “The number of our MBAs in investment banking recruiting right now is 30% greater than the past two years. That gives us more of the scale that brings bankers to campus to recruit, particularly for our key Bay Area IB market, where we consistently hold the top market share for IB Summer Associates launching their careers.” This year’s fellows hail from around the United States and the world.
Tyler Lawrence, MBA 26, who worked in client and account management at companies ranging from Meta to Salesforce, moved from New York to pursue a career in West Coast technology investment banking at Haas.
“Given I’m making a pretty significant career pivot, the fellowship really helps me get priority access to courses in finance that will help prepare me not only for an internship, but also in developing a long-term career in the industry,” Lawrence said.
Vrinda Bansal, MBA 26, who was awarded a C&J White Fellowship, believed that engineering was her calling, but changed her mind as an undergraduate.
“When I came across an economics and finance club in my undergrad college, I was just so fascinated,” said Bansal, who established SheBlooms, a nonprofit in India that has helped more than 100 women without educational access to gain financial literacy.
“SheBlooms is a part of my career that I feel extremely positive about, and I would love to continue with it in the longer term,” she said.
Berkeley Haas Product Management Club members at the club’s recent retreat.
Berkeley Haas has a thriving community that cares deeply about product management. Among that group is Ansu George, EWMBA 25, who aims to make it even stronger in her role as president of the new student-run Product Management Club (PMC).
With a collaborative team of 13 MBA students, George is now gearing up to host the inaugural Haas Product Con on Oct. 26 at Chou Hall’s Spieker Forum.
“This will be a landmark, full-day event for the Haas community,” said George, the lead product manager at B2B software company RollWorks, a division of NextRoll. “We’re expecting 250 attendees, with 20 speakers, and participants ranging from students to seasoned product professionals across the Bay Area. It’s a chance for us to unite, learn, and support each other’s growth in product management.”
The day will include hands-on AI product experience workshops, personalized coaching sessions, speed networking, and sessions on navigating the job market in today’s economy—along with lightning talks on gaming and healthcare tech.
A panel discussion about product management internships at the recent PM Club boot camp/retreat.
The Product Con event will feature influential industry speakers including Todd Yellin, former head of product at Netflix, Ami Vora, chief product officer at Faire and former vice president of Product at Whatsapp, Shreyas Doshi, product coach, leader, and founder of High Leverage Labs, Tatyana Mamut, co-founder and CEO of Wayfound, Hubert Palan, founder and CEO of Productboard, Navnith Ramkrishnan, director of product management at Tanium, Rupa Chaturvedi, founder of the Human Centered AI Institute and a partner with Reforge, Ajit Ghuman, co-founder and CEO of Monetizely, and Ashwinder (Ash) Ahluwalia, a former product management head at Google and chief product and UX officer at Findem, among others.
Last month, the PM club hosted its first retreat, a half-day boot camp attended by more than 70 people. George and Sri Josyula, EWMBA 25, opened the retreat, which featured an interactive panel of Haas students who shared product management pivots from careers in the U.S. Army, consulting, design, and engineering. The panel, moderated by the club’s VP of careers, Riddhish Doshi, EWMBA 26, was followed by a session on PM internships moderated by co-president Shilpa Gopal, MBA 25, and closing remarks from Sparsh Agarwal, EWMBA 25, director of product at Salesforce.
A recent Product Management Club happy hour held in Mountain View.
A PM Speaker Series also launched this year, kicking off with organizational theorist and management consultant Geoffrey Moore, author of “Crossing the Chasm,” Marty Cagan, founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group and author of “Inspired,” will join the group Nov. 19. Cagan built products for Hewlett-Packard, Netscape Communications, and eBay.
A challenging pivot
Ansu George pivoted to become a product manager while working at Yahoo!
A former software engineer, George pivoted to become a product manager in 2019 while working at Yahoo!
“I went through a full year of struggle to make that pivot happen,” she recalled. “At the time, my resume purely read ‘software engineer,’ with no projects or specific PM skills to showcase.”
Drawn to product management because it calls for solving a diverse array of problems on a daily basis, George said she pitched Yahoo’s VP of product, asking for an opportunity to work on a project. “That project was a success,” she recalled. “It opened the door for me to lead the launch and development of a product called Business Maker for Yahoo Small Business.” She left the company as a product manager.
The club has made significant progress over the past year. “I am especially grateful to Henry Hercock and Prachi Mehta, both EWMBA 24, who initially pitched the idea of forming this new club focused on product management,” George said. “Their vision came at a time of growing interest in the field, and their efforts laid the foundation for what the club has become today.”
Swetha Kalyanaraman, MBA 25, who holds a master’s degree in biotechnology, has found the club to be a great source for connections and career advice as she navigates a pivot to product management. She said she was inspired by a product management class she took earlier this year and that she’s now particularly interested in finding a role in the medical device space.
“There’s a lot of science involved in product management in this space, which enables you to talk to surgeons and doctors and medical practitioners,” she said. “The digital health space is also coming up right now.”
Part of George’s role with the club, which is open to all MBA students, is to help students like Kalyanaraman make the career change. ”If the club helps even a few students to pivot to a first-time product manager job or if we help a product manager become a chief product manager that’s a big win,” she said.
Haas Voices is a first-person series based on interviews with diverse members of the Haas community.
Hayden Estes
Hayden Estes, MBA 26, a member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, plans to focus on creating intergenerational wealth for Native American tribes after he graduates. An established accountant before he came to Haas, Estes will be one of the first Berkeley Haas MBA students to receive full-tuition aid next year under the new University of California Native American Opportunity Plan.
“My father grew up on the Luiseño Indian reservation. As a kid, he would put a stick in the ground and draw a line in the sand. My grandma would go to work and would tell him that when the shadow crosses that line, you start walking to school.
The Luiseno tribe lives just outside of Escondido, about an hour east from the coast. Our tribal land used to be located more to the west, but we were pushed a little more east, and there’s definitely a temperature change. It can get hot there.
There are many areas across the U.S. that are tough to live in, and a lot of reservations are in those areas. Ours is right by Palomar Mountain, which is beautiful, and a lot of people will hike there or travel through to go to the desert. They’ll camp or go off-roading. Neighboring towns include Temecula, which is wine country, and Julian, which is famous for pies and apple picking.
People drive through reservations today, and it’s really just kind of a pass through. I would love for reservations across the U.S. to be destinations.
My ideas about giving back to the Native American community come partly from visiting my grandpa, who still lives on the reservation. He didn’t have internet access until two years ago, and he got a cell phone last year. It will get to over 100 degrees, but he’ll only turn on the AC at certain hours to try to save money here and there.
My father left the reservation for college when he got a baseball scholarship to play for Chico State. Athletics were a big part of his life, and getting the scholarship was really his only opportunity to go. Both he and my mom earned education degrees at Chico State. There were job opportunities in Colorado in the early 1990s, so they made the move and ended up working for the same public school district. I grew up in Broomfield, Colorado, between Boulder and Denver. With parents for teachers, I think there’s a certain standard that you don’t really want to cross. They definitely instilled a value of education.
Hayden Estes (left) with his family. His father left the Luiseño Indian reservation to attend college.
I have a younger sister at the Colorado School of Mines studying geology and a younger brother in Denver who graduated from Denver University and is a social activist. I’m more interested in funding my causes, whereas he’s more boots-on-the-ground. The dinner table definitely got a little contentious at points, but I think we always want to achieve the same thing.
As an undergraduate at the University of San Diego, I thought I wanted to major in biology. My dad was a biology teacher, and my mom taught seventh-grade science. But when you get your first C-minus in an intro course, it’s eye opening. Growing up, I loved numbers and puzzles, Monopoly and Sudoku. So when I had to choose a major, I thought accounting would align because it’s part of everyday life.
After I graduated, I established myself as an accountant at KPMG, but I hit this point where I asked what else was out there. Applying to business school was on my checklist for a long time.
So I applied to Haas through The Consortium, a great program that’s enhancing diversity and inclusion in business schools. Through The Consortium, you’re able to look at the different member schools and choose which ones you’re really interested in. I didn’t know much about Haas, but a second-year student reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, I’d love to chat with you if you have any questions.’ It was impactful for me to talk to her and get her insights. She told me about the focus on diversity and inclusion within the school and the Bay Area and the great alumni base. It’s super exciting to have a football team, too.
Estes (with puppy, Daisy) wants to use his MBA to alleviate problems on reservations. “The question for our tribes is: How do we create our own opportunities? Do you build casinos? What do you try to do to help the people of your tribe without losing that culture?”
When I learned this year about this program that the UC system established to pay Native Americans’ tuition, I thought it was phenomenal opportunity, considering that I worked three jobs during undergrad — as a barista, at a surf-bike shop, and as a waiter to pay for school.
It’s just so hard to start off in debt. It’s like starting off a game of Monopoly with debt instead of collecting $200 when you pass ‘Go’. It makes everything so much harder. And it can be particularly tough for Native folks who want to go back to their tribes to start a business with $100,000 in debt.
The retention rate is also low for Indigenous students. It’s so hard to go from a tight-knit community on your reservation to a big school like Berkeley. So, I am interested in increasing the graduation rate for Indigenous students. At the start of the year, I reached out to Patrick Naranjo, the director of the American Indian Graduate Program, to ask if there was anything I could do for our undergrads, whether that’s teaching accounting or helping with accounting classes.
I want to find a way to alleviate problems on reservations. The question for our tribes is: How do we create our own opportunities? Do you build casinos? What do you try to do to help the people of your tribe without losing that culture?
A lot of first-years have drive and passion for sustainability, and I am here to figure out how we can generate sustainable energy for tribes through solar. There’s so much opportunity to set up solar panels and wind turbines on reservations across the U.S.
I’ve been talking with my classmates, which is helping me gain the confidence to work on these solutions. I’m also interested in understanding more about real estate investing. I’m learning new skills through my core class in negotiations, which ties into negotiating real estate deals.
A lot of tribes have casinos, which generate income. But now, with legalized online gambling, you can just pull out your app in a lot of states to gamble. That definitely is a hit to casinos. So, it’s now just about trying to find other ways for tribes to get sustainable perpetual income. The thought would be to have all tribes pool their money together with the purpose to acquire real estate in metropolitan areas such as Albuquerque, Denver, and Phoenix.
An MBA at Haas will help me develop the skills and leadership expertise needed to make a more meaningful impact on my community. And once that rental income is coming in every month it will go right back to the tribes to build parks and community centers and schools.”
Vlad Silchenko, MBA 26, created a support hub for Ukrainians in Kyiv.
Volodymyr “Vlad” Silchenko, MBA 26, was running an up-and-coming restaurant company in Kyiv when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
As many people fled the country, Silchenko closed his business, Capital Food, for a few months, transforming it into a support hub for all of the community.
“The restaurant became more than just a business—it turned into a shelter for the displaced and refugees since it was in the city center,” he said. “It became a support hub for the local community, providing hot meals and electricity, which was rare. We managed to have power at my business by using generators and a special kind of internet fiber.”
Within the chaos of war, Silchenko solidified his role as a startup founder who uses innovative ideas to address real-world community problems. That startup pivot stands as his proudest accomplishment, for which he received an “Unbreakability Point” honor and a certificate of appreciation from Ukraine’s 43rd Artillery Brigade, which played a pivotal role in defending Kyiv.
“You can really feel the DNA of Haas when you read those Defining Leadership Principles and the principle of Beyond Yourself resonates deeply,” Silchenko said. “It aligns with how I’ve approached both my personal and professional life, especially in times of crisis.” UC Berkeley’s reputation as top in the world for generating startup founders whose ventures get funded was also a big draw, he said.
Vlad Silchenko (right) poses with Tony Fadell (left), iPod & iPhone inventor. Fadell spoke at a recent Dean’s Speaker Series event at Haas. “The biggest lesson I took away? Persistence,” Silchenko said.
Today, Silchenko guides his company from Berkeley. Since the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine war, the company has hosted more than 100 charity events to raise money for the Armed Forces of Ukraine. “The business has not stopped, not even for one day, despite the constant rocket attacks and power shortages, with half the national electricity infrastructure destroyed,” said Silchenko, who was born in Crimea.
Broadening horizons
Silchenko first experienced life in the United States while at boarding school in Virginia on an academic scholarship. There, he became the only Ukrainian student on the school’s varsity football team. “I bulked up 60 pounds in six months to switch to linebacker and was the only international student on a 100-player team,” he said. The experience, he added, both “broadened my horizons and laid the foundation of my national outlook.
As an undergraduate student at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, where he also received a master’s degree, Silchenko studied international economics. While working on a restaurant startup, large-scale national Democratic protests erupted throughout Ukraine—after the country’s president failed to sign a free trade agreement with the European Union, instead moving closer to Russia. Throughout a national revolution in 2014, 21-year-old Silchenko navigated the chaos and currency depreciation of 300%. “I managed to build a successful business, luckily,” he said.
“An entrepreneurial exploration phase”
Now a first-year student enjoying a stable, supportive environment at Haas, Silchenko plans to dive into entrepreneurship through programs like Berkeley StEP, Berkeley’s 10-week entrepreneurship program, the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program (BHEP), and at the new Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Hub (eHub), which is set to open this fall just steps from the Haas campus.
Silchenko (left) chats with Ann Ukadike (right), MBA 25, who is co-president of the of the Africa Business Club. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small.
“I’m in my entrepreneurial exploration phase, looking for opportunities to create innovative solutions, any solutions that can make a really significant impact—not just in Ukraine, but globally,” he said. “An MBA program is the perfect place for this because it allows you to play on an absolutely higher level.”
He said he’s also looking forward to sharing with both students and faculty all that he learned while building a company with a social purpose in a challenging environment. “Everything was going south, but somehow I was managing to find new possibilities to expand the team and help my community,” he said. Silchenko added that the chaos of conflict made him more resilient and adaptable, while also creating a need to build something lasting and impactful.
The community at Haas is special, as it emphasizes both community and inclusivity, he said. “I wanted like-minded people around me and to live in this bubble of people who share similar goals. I’m really proud that I chose the school, and I’m looking forward to doing great things with these people around and supporting them as well.”
Members of the First-Gen (1G) Club gathered at Haas.
As the first person in his family to go to college, Damon Wiley, MBA 25, arrived at Haas knowing he’d meet other students who shared a similar background. But as the months passed, he began to wonder how first-gens, who comprise 20% of his class, could support each other better.
“I wanted to build a space that was just strictly for folks that are first-gen to be able to be in community together,” said Wiley, who also serves as co-president of the Black Business Student Association and as a board member of EGAL, the Center for Gender, Equity, and Leadership.
Last spring, Wiley got to talking with Viridiana Santacruz and Yvonne Mondragón, both MBA 25, about everything their shared experiences being first-gen. “We started having conversations around topics like, ‘What does it mean to be first generation at an MBA program?’” Santacruz said. “What does it mean to come from a different socioeconomic background, given that socioeconomic status is so taboo in business school?”
The trio went on to found and co-lead the first First-Gen Club at Haas, or 1G@Haas.
Quick growth
Since launching last spring, 1G@Haas has grown to 50 members and held several social events. In April, they held a kickoff First-Gen/Low Income Club Student and Alumni Mixer, followed by another mixer in partnership with the the Black Business Student Association (BBSA) at Haas, ALMA, Berkeley’s Hispanic serving organization, and Stanford’s first-gen organization, BBSA and Hispanic Student Association.
This year, the club will continue working to develop its two missions: helping first-gen Berkeley Haas applicants during the admissions process and building a community of first-gen students and allies.
“We want to be a safe space for first-generation and low-income students to have vulnerable conversations around struggles or things that they may be facing, while at the same time also creating awareness across the university and providing ways for allies to be part of the community,” Santacruz said.
Damon Wiley, MBA 25, is a “double Bear,”
Some students in the first-gen group are members of the Consortium for Graduate Study in Management, which supports underrepresented students, and groups that support students who belong to specific ethnic affinity groups at Haas. But there are commonalities among first-gen MBA students that transcend those categories, Wiley said.
Some of those commonalities include first in the family to have a white collar or professional job, said Kiana Rahni, MBA/MPH 25, who is the club’s VP for admissions. “We might be navigating things like how to network, how to build resumes or cover letters, and how to present yourself in formal interviews,” she said.
Fear of being judged or of standing out from the “norm” can lead to people hiding their identity, Wiley added.
“There’s a lot of belittling that happens with telling folks that you are first-gen,” said Wiley, who also earned his undergrad degree at UC Berkeley, where he was a three-time All-American rugby player. “People think, ‘Oh my god, you don’t have parents. You have one parent. You’re low income. None of your family went to college. You don’t know how to navigate the colleges system or how to get a job.’”
Creating something special
First-generation is typically defined as a child of a parent or parents who have not completed a bachelor’s degree. But the first-gen club expanded that definition to include people who are the first in their family to go to college in the United States, considering that these students may also lack the kind of support many other students take for granted.
Wiley said he expects the club to thrive in the coming years.
“I want folks to know that we’re here to not only support the current students on campus, but our future students and our alumni,” he said. “We’re trying to create something very special here, where we have an almost generational pipeline of support—this is a family first community.”
The club’s officers include Rishabh Gupta, Hector Alamillo, Lucas Costa Machado, Rodolfo Rodrigues da Costa, and Ritika Rastogi, all MBA 25.
It was a bit of a surprise when David Bravo, MBA 25, found himself in Thailand last May presenting a strategic plan to the CEO of a Japanese international footwear brand.
“The company’s headquarters had heard that we were doing a good job so they managed to get us in a room for an hour so we could present our recommendations to the CEO,” Bravo, an international student from Medellin, Colombia, said.
For Bravo, a project through the International Business Development (IBD) program at Berkeley Haas led the team to pitch the CEO. A long-standing first-year elective, IBD allows full-time MBA students to work as professional management consultants on international, high-level strategic projects. Working on teams in places ranging from Senegal to Java to Helsinki, students are connected to corporations, nonprofits, entrepreneurs, social impact organizations, universities, and government departments worldwide.
“IBD gives real-world experience like no other course,” said David Richardson, the program’s executive director.
The IBD class, which students take the semester before they travel to a client country, is structured and intense and includes project management and consulting training.
“The projects are challenging but within students’ scope, giving them the chance to create a strategic plan that has real-world implications,” Richardson said. “Some of our projects are with high-end technology companies that are very focused on profits, but they can also be with social impact entrepreneurs who are trying to make a difference in communities outside of the U.S.”
Students learn their client assignment at a reveal during the first day of class, said Whitney Hischier, IBD’s faculty director. “They have a week to get up to speed, and within that week, they usually schedule their first client call,” she said.
MBA students in the IBD Program gathered to find out their 2024 consulting project assignments.
The class culminates with two weeks in the field as students travel to meet with stakeholders in person and present their plans. One project this year came from a Finnish natural berry puree and fruit juice company looking to grow in new markets.
“Our students did a great job of prioritizing which cities and products to lead with, and the key points to emphasize in messaging,” said Judy Hopelain, a faculty mentor with IBD.
Student perspectives
Sarah Beth Intoccia, MBA 25, had neither consulting nor international business experience when she started the IBD class. With her team, she worked with a tech company in Brazil that was looking to move into financial services.
“It gave me a different perspective on how problems are solved in a different culture,” she said. “I had only worked with American companies, so I had to understand how the Brazilian market is different from the American market. What are different challenges in the technology space and also the finance space?”
Not only was it fascinating and challenging; the class also gave her tangible, transferable skills, Intoccia said.
Travel is an essential component of the course. Each May, students spend two weeks with the client, doing further work and presenting results. IBD faculty and staff try to not assign students to a project in a country where they have already lived or worked for a substantial period of time.
Photo courtesy of the IBD Blog. Post written by Danni Yang, Gabi Moreira, Niveda Kumar, and Luis Sante who worked with Z-Works.
For Niveda Kumar, MBA 25, traveling to Tokyo was the best part of the experience. She said she and her team had great contact with her team’s client, tech startup Z-Works, throughout the semester, which deepened when she went to Japan with her teammates Luis Sante, Danni Yang, and Gabi Moreira.
“When we were in-country, you could sense the trust,” she said. “It felt like a barrier had come down between us and the client.”
Despite the language barrier, Kumar said they were able to have conversations with co-workers using a mixture of the basic Japanese they had picked up using Duolingo, coupled with a little English, and a generous number of gestures. They also used Google Translate and Chat-GPT to create a Japanese version of their workshop slides.
Built by a Haas alum
JoAnn Dunaway, MBA 92, created IBD 32 years ago to expand MBA students’ experience in international business. The program was one of the first of its kind at a top-tier business school.
Since 1992, about 1,900 students have worked with IBD in 89 countries. For students, it’s an amazing resume builder, and for clients, it’s a way to tap into the smarts of the Berkeley Haas MBA community, Richardson said.
“It turns out that when you assemble a team of four or five hardworking, energetic, and motivated Haas MBA students to solve a strategic business problem, clients find themselves amazingly impressed by the deliverables the students produce,” Richardson said.
MBA students in the IBD program working with Softplan in Brazil.
Guilherme Quandt, chief strategy and marketing officer at Brazilian software company Softplan, said participating in IBD as a client “can be a game-changer.”
“The team produced a first-rate study to validate our plans and guide our strategy,” he said. “Hosting the team was an incredible and highly recommended experience.”
Hischier said the course can help students to refine their career goals.
“We get students who come back and say, ‘I love that, I want to work in consulting,’ or ‘I want to work abroad when I graduate,’” she said. “Others come back and say, ‘I now know consulting’s not for me.’”
Kumar, who had consulting experience at Deloitte in Chicago before coming to Haas, encouraged anyone interested in consulting to “jump at the chance.”
“I would say this has been the most rewarding academic experience for me at Haas so far,” Kumar said. “I think if you’re curious about consulting and you’re curious about real international work experience, this is the class for you.”
The full-time MBA class of 2026 has arrived! Photo: Katelyn Tucker
Berkeley Haas welcomed 295 new full-time MBA students to campus last week for four jam-packed days of orientation before fall classes begin.
“Today marks the beginning of a 22-month journey that will transform your lives and careers,” Wendy Guild, vice dean of MBA programs, told the class of 2026 gathered in Andersen Auditorium.
Under a revamped FTMBA orientation held Aug. 7-23, international students arrived on campus first to learn about academic and career support services tailored to their experience. The entire class then came together for WeLaunch, where they got a big-picture overview of the school, learned about the academic program and the career management team, got to know classmates, and received advice from second-year students. Finally, students participated in ACE (Academic & Career Essentials) Week to prepare them for classes, which begin Aug. 26.
“I think our big win this year was the way that we restructured orientation into three sessions to give students more time to settle in and build community before they start classes,” said Jenn Bridge, executive director of the FTMBA program.
The new FTMBA class was given more time to get to know each other this year before class starts. Photo: Katelyn Tucker
Building community
While the orientation schedule was busy, students still had plenty of time for courtyard chats, music, meditation, and mingling at social mixers.
“One of my favorite things about orientation so far is getting to authentically know my classmates, going deeper beyond the surface-level conversations,” said Amy Wu, MBA 26, who was joined in the Haas courtyard by Delaney Overton, also MBA 26. Overton said she’s also enjoyed getting to know her classmates and learning about what everyone hopes to get out of the next two years.
Throughout the orientation, students learned about how important leadership and communication are in all aspects of their business school experience. They heard from Haas leaders in sustainability and diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. They also learned more about the school’s Defining Leadership Principles—or DLPs—from UC Berkeley Chancellor and former Berkeley Haas dean Rich Lyons.
Students in the new class heard asked Haas leaders questions during the full-time orientation at Andersen Auditorium. Photo: Katelyn Tucker
All new students are assigned to cohorts, groups of students who stay together while taking their core classes. In a welcome address to the new class, Interim Dean Jenny Chatman asked members of each cohort to shout out one of the DLPs, which include Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself.
“If there’s one thing I really want you to take away from this week, it’s that these aren’t empty words here at Haas,” Chatman, a renowned researcher on organizational culture, said. “You heard from Chancellor Lyons about how important the Defining Leadership Principles are and why we codified them and what they mean to us. These are the guiding stars that will help you navigate the complexities of business and life. We hope you will make them your own as you turn your insight and knowledge into action.”
A diverse, global class
The new class is perhaps the most diverse ever, with 29% identifying as students from historically underrepresented groups, including Latinx, African American/Black, and Native American. Nineteen percent of the class identifies as LGBTQ+, 15% are first-generation college students, and 7% are military veterans. Forty-two percent of the students are women.
Women represent 42% of the FTMBA class of 2026. All students are assigned to cohorts (with T-shirts) during the first week of orientation. Photo: Katelyn Tucker
Reflecting the school’s global footprint, 38% of the class is international, including students from 35 countries; the top two nations represented are India, with 22 students, and China, with 17.
The Berkeley Haas admissions team praised the new students’ talent and flexibility. “This class of students is well prepared to make an impact in an ever-changing business environment,” said Eric Askins, director of full-time MBA admissions. “They have such a broad array of skills and abilities that they bring to the classroom from a wide range of professional backgrounds and academic disciplines. They are prepared for the pace of change.”
The average student in the class is 28 years old with 5.7 years of post-undergraduate work experience before coming to Haas.
Sergio Cruz, MBA 26, is among 20% of students who join the class from the technology sector. Cruz worked for the digital commerce company Flywheel as a channel director before he arrived at Haas, where he is hoping for a career change. “I want to try my hand in the media and entertainment industry, so I am looking to see if the MBA can help me do that,” Cruz, who is from Bridgeport, Connecticut, said.
About 24% of the incoming class formerly worked in consulting. Vince Nguyen, MBA 26, who is from Chicago, worked as a senior associate at KPMG on healthcare technology and supply-chain projects before coming to Haas. Nguyen said he hopes to pivot from health care to a career in the education sector.
Thirty-three students in the incoming class are pursuing dual degrees, with 12 enrolled in the new MBA/MCS (climate solutions) program, 11 in MBA/MPH (public health), nine in MBA/MEng (engineering), and one in the MBA/JD (law).
Clockwise from top left: Interim Dean Jennifer Chatman mingles in the dean’s suite with Haas leaders; cupcakes for the celebration. Photos: Jordan Joseffer.
Professor Jennifer Chatmanmarked her first day as interim dean at Berkeley Haas during a celebratory gathering today with school leaders.
“The Chatman era begins!” said Courtney Chandler, Senior Vice Dean and Chief Strategy & operating officer at Haas, as Chatman entered the dean’s suite today.
Chatman, who served as a co-acting dean when Ann Harrison was on sabbatical in 2023, was appointed after Harrison announced in May that she wouldstep down at the end of July and continue to teach half-time at Haas.
“I am deeply honored to step into the role of interim dean,” Chatman, a renowned researcher on organizational culture, said. “I look forward to carrying on Dean Harrison’s extraordinary work.”
Chatman said her immediate focus will be to assure the school’s financial health, support its growing and diverse faculty, and perfect the student experience across degree programs.
Mike Rielly, CEO of Berkeley Executive Education, said he admires Chatman’s vision and goals, which he called “inspiring and achievable.” “Her clarity of purpose allows us to focus on immediate buy-in and execution,” he said. “We’ve chosen the right leader, and she’s hitting the ground running.”
“There’s a sense that the transition is seamless with Jenny,” added Erika Walker, senior vice dean for instruction. “I’ve seen firsthand her deep care, extensive knowledge, and genuine pride in our school. These qualities will undoubtedly make her a remarkable leader.”
‘A triple threat’
A Double Bear with an 80-year family connection to UC Berkeley, Chatman is a longtime Haas faculty member and a former associate dean of Academic Affairs.
Wendy Guild, vice dean of MBA programs, called Chatman a “triple threat” as “an amazing scholar, an accomplished leader, and a respected teacher.”
Alongside former Haas dean and current UC Berkeley Chancellor Rich Lyons, Chatman helped to create and build out the Haas Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself.
Abby Scott, assistant dean of the Career Management Group and Corporate Partnerships, said Chatman’s deep understanding of the companies that employ so many students and alumni is invaluable. “She understands corporate culture so well and will be such an asset,” Scott said. “I’m so excited to reconnect her with many of our alumni employers in the Bay Area and beyond.”
Living with Lyme disease made Barbara Rion, MBA 25, aware of the toll that a chronic health condition can take. A military analyst with the CIA before she came to Berkeley Haas, Rion spent a lot of time after she contracted the infection figuring out how to relieve her symptoms through diet and lifestyle changes and physical therapy.
Barbara Rion, MBA 25
Although Rion is well today, that intense journey is partly what drove her to help restart HaasAbilities, a student club for MBA students with disabilities, and their allies.
But in reviving HaasAbilities, she and co-chair Cynthia Brzezinski, MBA 25, wanted to expand the definition of disability beyond those that are typically discussed to include less visible, but equally impactful, conditions such as infectious disease, dietary allergies, or ADHD.
“I wanted the club to be a place for everyone and to offer resources for everyone,” Rion said. “Haas has a lot of the right resources. The challenge is getting students informed about what’s available.”
The pair developed three goals when they took over last spring: to foster a community for students with disabilities, to invite allies in to promote understanding of disabilities, and to advocate for new MBA students with disabilities. The club now has 55 members and a nine-person board, comprising students with disabilities and allies.
UC Berkeley was one of the first college campuses in the United States to begin accommodating students with disabilities, a response to student activism in the 1960s. Despite Berkeley’s role as a leader in the disability rights movement, both Rion and Brzezinski say entering MBA students often don’t know where to go when they need help. That’s why one of the club’s priorities is to raise awareness about the UC Berkeley Disabled Students’ Program (DSP), which includes information about campus resources and support services.
Cynthia Brzezinski, MBA 25
Brzezinski’s former roommate, for example, suffered a concussion after a car crash at the beginning of the school year and struggled to navigate classes after the accident. Recognizing the need to get centralized information out about available support, a HaasAbilties board member put together a list of resources for the Haas community. Rion also pointed to the number of students battling COVID-19 or the flu who wanted accommodations for taking their exams but were unaware of the campus’s program. “We talked to the program office about this and they started putting the DSP link into communications so that people can access it a lot easier,” she said.
Lupe Alonzo-Diaz, EWMBA 26, BA 97 (political economy), said that serving as a vice president on the HaasAbilities board “is near and dear to my heart,” providing support to her as both an ally to her 9-year-old son, who is autistic, and an MBA student navigating her own disability.
Alonzo-Diaz, who suffered a concussion several years ago, said she now processes information differently than before the accident, making studying and time management much more challenging than when she earned a separate master’s degree in her 20s. But as president and CEO of Physicians for a Healthy California, she said she’s encouraged by how open the younger generation is about discussing challenges with neurodivergence.
“I applaud their bravery in disclosing,” Alonzo-Diaz said. “I applaud that folks who are neurodivergent are embracing their identity and that they are actively looking to be part of organizations that embrace this and all parts of themselves.”
Lupe Alonzo-Diaz
Brzezinski said her interest in allyship is rooted in watching her mother struggle with psoriatic arthritis, a chronic inflammatory condition that causes pain in joints, tendons, and ligaments.
While at Haas, she is working at two healthcare startups and is particularly interested in caring for seniors, an often socially invisible population, with many suffering from chronic conditions. “This was an opportunity to improve my immediate environment with my friend, Barbara,” she said.
Last spring, the club hosted a story share, which left some students in tears. “That was honestly the best and most impactful event that I went to at Haas last year,” Brzezinski said.
Gearing up for the new school year, the club is planning to host a second story share, along with workshops that teach students how to advocate in the workplace and how to be supportive managers for people with disabilities.
“Managers shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel,” Rion said. “That’s why we are trying to get the future leaders at Haas educated on that before they leave.”
The first Thrive Fellows cohort gathered to celebrate finishing the program on June 8 at Spieker Forum. Photo: Jim Block.
A new Berkeley Haas program that’s helping students navigate acceptance into top-tier MBA programs celebrated its first cohort of graduates last weekend.
The June 8 ceremony capped the inaugural year of the Haas Thrive Fellows MBA pipeline program, which brought together students, many of them Latinx, and professionals for a year-long deep dive into the intense MBA admissions process—everything from prepping for entrance exams to mapping a career trajectory to developing a personal narrative to applying for financial aid to bolstering interviewing skills.
“I have nothing but good things to say about Thrive,” said Amy Camacho Mayorga, BS 24, who as a 2024 Thrive Fellow recently applied to the full-time MBA program at Haas under Accelerated Access, a program that allows a two- to five-year deferment period for professional experience. “I felt like I was being seen and everything was so empowering.”
Mayorga was among a cohort of seven undergraduate seniors, like herself, and 20 working professionals who completed the program, which included free GMAT test preparation and test sitting, along with an application fee waiver for Haas graduate programs.
Anthony Whitten, director of Diversity Admission at Berkeley Haas, founded the Thrive Fellows Program to encourage more Latinx students and professionals to apply to MBA programs. Photo: Jim Block
Tackling application hurdles
The program’s goal is to encourage more Latinx candidates to apply to MBA programs at a time when fewer students from underrepresented racial groups are applying nationwide. This year, less than 8% of Berkeley Haas MBA students identified as Hispanic or Latino.
“Applying to a top tier business school has its challenges, but is a manageable process with support,” said Anthony Whitten, director of Diversity Admissions at Berkeley Haas, who launched Thrive Fellows last fall with the help of a seed donation from Adrien Lopez Lanusse, MBA 99, and two successful rounds of crowdfunding. “From test prep to interviewing to essay writing and recommendation letter gathering, there are a lot of boxes to check.”
The benefits of earning an MBA from a top-ranked business school are profound, Whitten said. An MBA program allows students to explore new industries or functions, accelerate their career paths, increase their life-long earning potential, and expand and diversify their networks.
UC Berkeley Chancellor-Elect Rich Lyons, former dean of Haas, called Berkeley an “astonishing social mobility engine.”
UC Berkeley Chancellor-Elect Rich Lyons, former Berkeley Haas Dean, congratulated the students in a video played at the ceremony in Spieker Forum. Lyons emphasized the role an MBA plays in changing a person’s life and identity, something he said that students don’t understand before they earn the degree. While neither of his parents held a four-year degree, Lyons noted that he graduated from UC Berkeley and went on to earn a PhD. “Many of you, not all, are (part of a) first-gen advanced degree group,” he said, noting how UC Berkeley opened possibilities for him and that the school is an “astonishing social mobility engine.”
A growing program
For Gina R. Garcia, senior associate director with the Berkeley Haas Career Management Group who helped develop the Thrive Fellows program, graduation provided a moment to reflect on the program’s growth over the past year. “It’s wonderful to think that I was a part of this important moment for our founding fellows,” said Garcia, who is also first-gen in her family to go to college and earn an advanced degree, and serves as the chair for the UC Berkeley Cal Women’s Network (CWN). “It’s a huge deal and I couldn’t be more proud.”
Jorge Rodriguez, a first-generation college graduate with eight years of career experience in public policy, said he found applying to an MBA program daunting before becoming a fellow.
“I didn’t know what it took, in terms of the year-long process of prepping for the test, crafting a story in a way that makes sense to be competitive, and to be seen as a strong candidate,” he said. “As a first-generation college student, it’s a world that I knew nothing about.” Rodriguez’s work paid off; he will enter the Berkeley Haas FTMBA class of 2026 this fall.
Mayorga, also a first-generation college student, said part of what empowered her as a Thrive Fellow was being in a room with people like her.
“It allowed us to be vulnerable with each other,” she said. “People shared very personal experiences they’d faced in the workforce or in school. I feel like that allowed us to have more authentic conversations.”
Monica Mendoza (in yellow) celebrates completing the Thrive Fellows program. Photo: Jim Block
The Thrive Fellows program aligns with UC Berkeley’s 10-year plan to become a Latinx Thriving Institution, by enrolling and educating more Latinx students.
Whitten is now accepting applications for a second Thrive Fellows cohort. Applicants need not identify as Latinx to participate. “Ultimately, our focus is centered around empowering, enabling, and really allowing people to achieve their aspirations or goals, regardless of whether or not they’re at Haas or another top business school,” he said.
Ann Harrison will step down as the dean of the Haas School of Business on July 31, 2024, remaining a half-time faculty member. The decision will allow her to spend more time with her New York-based family and focus on her research, she said.
“It has been an incredible honor and joy for me to serve as dean of Haas,” Harrison said in a note to the Haas community sent this morning. “I am proud of what we have accomplished together.”
Harrison has served as dean of Berkeley Haas since January 2019, the second woman to lead the school. Her deep ties to UC Berkeley—where she earned her bachelor’s in economics and history and served as a professor in the College of Agricultural and Resource Economics for 10 years—have allowed her to make far-reaching changes in a short time, said Ben Hermalin, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost for UC Berkeley, who announced the news today.
“We thank Dean Harrison for her incredible leadership and numerous accomplishments during her term as the dean,” Hermalin said. “For anyone who has had the pleasure of working with her, Ann is wonderful to partner with. She is full of innovative ideas that go beyond Haas; hence, not only has she made Haas better, but she’s also made the campus better. Her leadership will be sorely missed.”
A sustainability mindset
Harrison said becoming a half-time ladder faculty member will allow her to spend meaningful time with her husband and two daughters, who live in New York, while staying connected to Haas and continuing her research.
“I will be able to remain at the school I have been truly passionate about since I first set foot here as a freshman at Berkeley in 1977,” said Harrison, a renowned economist who is one of the most highly cited scholars on foreign investment and multinational firms. “I am especially excited to have more time to focus on my research into the gender pay gap and what makes industrial policy work.”
Harrison’s top priority at Haas was to embed a sustainability mindset in all of the school’s programs and operations. This resulted in the creation of a sustainability certificate and a dual master’s degree program in business and climate solutions with the Rausser College of Natural Resources, as well as a summer minor in sustainable business and policy.
Courtney Chandler, Senior Vice Dean of Haas, said Harrison’s accomplishments have had school-wide impact—from growing the faculty, to fundraising, to growing degree programs, to infusing innovation, sustainability, and inclusion into business education.
“She believes in Haas’ potential and strives to further strengthen the school’s reputation by setting an ambitious vision for Berkeley Haas,” Chandler said.
During her tenure, Harrison appointed the school’s first-ever chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer and the first chief sustainability officer. She orchestrated a major diversity, equity, inclusion, justice, and belonging (DEIJB) effort that broadened the profile of the school’s faculty, board, and student body, and created learning opportunities and anti-bias training for the entire Haas community.
“Grateful for her leadership”
Professor Jennifer Chatman, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, said Harrison’s leadership over the past five years created cultural changes at Haas that have made the school “more diverse, more harmonious, and more collaborative than ever.” “Dean Harrison’s leadership style has set us up for an immensely bright future, and I am deeply grateful for her leadership,” she said.
(L-R) Ben Hermalin, Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost for UC Berkeley; UC Berkeley Chancellor-Elect Rich Lyons; Prof. Jennifer Chatman, Associate Dean of Academic Affairs, Dean Ann Harrison; Prof. Don Moore and Erika Walker, Senior Assistant Dean for Instruction, attending the Berkeley Haas 125h Anniversary Celebration in the Haas courtyard. Photo: Jim Block
Harrison’s focus on innovation and entrepreneurship resulted in a new faculty group and an entrepreneurship hub—slated to open this fall. Harrison envisions the hub as a central clearing house for students who wish to learn about all entrepreneurship activities across the Berkeley campus. The hub now has a faculty director, as well as an executive director.
In addition, Harrison expanded the school’s degree offerings with the Flex hybrid MBA cohort and worked closely with the Berkeley School of Public Health, the School of Engineering, Biological Sciences, and the School of Law to bolster their joint programs.
Harrison, a chaired professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School before joining Haas, hired 40 new tenure-track faculty during her five-year tenure, 19 of whom are women. She also nearly doubled the number of faculty positions that are funded by Haas or by philanthropic funds.
Stepped up fundraising
Under Harrison’s leadership, Haas has also significantly stepped up fundraising and raised $236 million since 2019. This includes the largest single gift in the school’s history—$30 million from alumnus Ned Spieker, BS 66, and his wife, Carol, BS 66 to turn the upper-division undergraduate business program into a four-year program.
When naming her “Dean of the Year” in 2023, the publication Poets & Quants called Harrison’s tenure an “unimaginable and nearly breathtaking record of achievement.”
“What really motivates me both as a leader and soon-to-be faculty member are the transformational opportunities we provide for our students, staff, faculty, and alumni,” she said. “We provide opportunity for everyone, at a scale that is unequaled among the private schools. What a powerful mission.”
Hermalin will announce details about the appointment of an interim dean shortly. Hermalin said the goal is to begin the search for a permanent dean in early fall 2024, conduct interviews in late fall and/or early spring, and announce the new dean in spring 2025, aiming for a July 1, 2025 start date. The interim dean will likely serve through June 30, 2025, while a national search is underway.
The Full-time and Evening & Weekend MBA classes of 2024 graduated May 17 at the Greek Theatre. All photos: Brittany Hosea-Small.
Under sunny skies, the class of 2024 Berkeley Haas Full-time and Evening & Weekend MBA students were urged to never stop learning, to consider the strength of their character throughout their careers, and to stay connected long after they leave Haas.
Dean Ann Harrison welcomed the crowd of 423 graduating MBA students, along with their families and friends, to the Greek Theatre. She urged students to help each other after they graduate, give back, and draw on their resilience and determination.
“You are not just walking away with an MBA,” she told the graduates. “You are walking away with the business version of a superhero cape—power and influence. Not the kind of power that lets you leap tall buildings in a single bound. No, this is a real-world superpower: the power to change the world—one insightful conversation, one strategic hire, and one ethical decision at a time.”
Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small
Harrison introduced Monica Stevens, the 2024 commencement speaker, describing her as “a person of uncommon distinction and a great citizen of Haas.” Stevens urged graduates to dive into difficult conversations, collect “curiosity partners”—people who challenge you and open you up to new ideas—and be open to unlearning the things that we’ve learned in life.
“Please, repeat after me,” Stevens, who is an executive search consultant with Spencer Stuart and recipient of the Raymond Miles Service Award in 2017 for her work in supporting and improving diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives at Haas, said. “‘Uncomfortable conversations are not my enemy. They are my secret weapon.’ I hope you take that to heart because, in today’s world, I know it is hard to have uncomfortable conversations about race, politics, gender, religion, identity, or what is the best business school in the world. It is a must-have skill, and guess what? You have that skill.”
Commencement Speaker Monica Stevens urged students to dive into difficult conversations. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small
EWMBA student speaker Katherine Zepeda Arreola, a double Bear who immigrated to the United States with her family when she was 7 years old, called the class of 2024 “the best class Haas has ever seen.” Zepeda Arreola, who is heading to work at Apple after graduation, gave a shout out to each of the EWMBA cohorts, including her own—the blue cohort. “Thank you for being an incredible group of people,” she said, before switching to Spanish to thank everyone who supported them during the program.
Zepeda Arreola emphasized the importance of continuing to build character throughout their careers by showing up on time, doing what you commit to doing, and speaking up when it’s hard. “Not only is our MBA a great accolade; there’s something else that will speak volumes wherever we go: our character…it is what people will remember.”
FTMBA student speaker Xavier Jefferson, a first-generation student who came to Haas to pivot from working as a financial advisor to an investor, told the class to never stop investing in friendships.
“We’ve laid the foundation for a long-term investment,” he said. “But we must recognize that not every investment will turn out like Nvidia. Some might even crash and burn like FTX. But that doesn’t mean you stop investing, especially after we ascend to those offices with pristine downtown views. Don’t hesitate to text that person you thought about on your morning commute, to press accept on that random FaceTime, to make time when you are in town. I might be cooking.”
Jefferson’s speech received a standing ovation before all of the students walked the stage, tossed their caps, and headed to the courtyard for a reception.
Diarra White, MBA 24, who is joining McKinsey after graduation, said the day was bittersweet, but she’s ready for the next chapter. When asked for a phrase to describe her Haas experience, White said, “full of love.”
(left to right) Dean Ann Harrison with Madhu Gupta and Paolo Gutierrez, both MBA 24, and Patti Poppe, CEO of PG&E. Photo: Katelyn Tucker
Patti Poppe, current CEO of PG&E and the first female chief executive to have moved from one Fortune 500 company to another, shared her extensive career journey at a recent Dean’s Speaker Series talk.
Long before she was leading California’s largest energy corporation to reduce its wildfire risk, Poppe got her start in engineering and production planning at General Motors. After 15 years of traveling around the world to learn various manufacturing techniques, she made the transition to energy by taking a job at DTE Energy in Michigan. From there, she went on to work in operations at CMS Energy, where she became the company’s first female CEO in 2016.
(Watch the DSS interview with Patti Poppe)
Poppe shared that, for a large portion of her career, she never imagined being a CEO. Having taken on challenging roles and working hands-on in the energy field as a front line supervisor, she was originally set on being a plant manager. In fact, it wasn’t until her own supervisor told her that she needed to aim “bigger” that she considered pursuing a career as an executive.
“I often say there’s two kinds of careers. There’s one that’s like a destination in mind, and there’s one that’s full of interesting assignments,” Poppe said. “Imagine a soccer field, and you have the goals on one end. You’re here at this goal, and you want to get to that goal. If you’re really clear about what that goal is, and if it’s CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the shortest path is a straight line. But it rules out a lot of interesting assignments because, as I was coming up the ranks, I needed to do very important things to prepare me to compete to be the CEO.”
She noted that this direct experience in the industry has been crucial for her to not only be able to lead successfully but gain credibility and trust among teams. But even with all of her industry and leadership experience, Poppe described PG&E as her hardest job yet.
Taking over as CEO amid PG&E’s 2021 crisis following the Dixie Fire, Poppe was faced with the challenge of rebuilding employee and customer trust in the face of negative press and feedback. By employing her own philosophy of “leading with love,” she emphasized community and invested in the workers who had stayed with the company through its darkest times.
“The team had been under a tremendous stress…and needed healing, so I knew love was an essential ingredient,” Poppe said. “A utility is a uniquely human kind of company. People often say we’re an engineering company or an energy company. I say we’re a people company, we are people serving people.”
With love as the “essential ingredient,” Poppe adapted a tool she learned while working in the automotive industry: lean manufacturing. She has since made this methodology—which brings visibility to company problems and helps individuals take ownership of their work—to her playbook to improve PG&E’s safety and efficiency. In the face of climate change, she noted that the company’s current goals are to invest in infrastructure that will be able to withstand future conditions, in addition to lowering energy costs for customers.
Poppe was interviewed by MBA students Paolo Gutierrez and Madhu Gupta, both MBA 24.
Read the full transcript:
– [Dean Ann Harrison] Good afternoon, everyone. I’m Ann Harrison. I’m the dean at the Haas School of Business. Welcome to this afternoon’s Dean’s Speaker Series. We are so fortunate today to have Patti Poppe join us. She is one of 52 women Fortune 500 CEOs. This is just so incredibly exciting. Patti began her career by using her engineering degree in production planning and engineering roles at General Motors. As she rose through the ranks at General Motors, she adopted her philosophy of lean management influenced by her time on the company’s global task team, where she traveled around the world to learn lean manufacturing techniques. She started working in energy in 2005, starting at DTE Energy in Michigan, and then she became the first female CEO of CMS Energy Corporation, which supplies electricity and gas to nearly 70% of Michigan’s residents. By the way, I had this incredible opportunity to hear her speak yesterday at a rival school called, I think it’s called Stanford. Yeah. And she told us that she feels much more comfortable in a hard hat than she does in a business suit, which is hard to believe. But she was really amazing talking about being out there in the field. So Michigan, 70% of the residents. As I was saying, through all these roles, Patti developed a track record of supporting renewable energy development and implementing a strong safety culture. It should come as no surprise that, after all this foresight and determination, that led to her appointment as CEO of PG&E—after PG&E had had all those incredible crises in 2021, she was brought in. Incredible story. Patti’s current company goals are to strengthen trust in PG&E by improving safety and embracing technology to put the company on a course toward cleaner energy. I was delighted to learn yesterday that Patti has her very own defining leadership principle, leading with love, and I’m sure she’ll talk about that today. Thank you so much, Patti, for taking the time out of your incredibly busy schedule to come and speak with our students today. Some quick housekeeping before we start: You should all have a note card on your seat. If you have a question now or anytime during the event, please write the question on the card. Please be sure to include your name and the program you’re in, and my colleagues will collect them for the Q&A portion of the fireside chat. So I’m now going to turn over today’s Q&A to Paolo Gutierrez and Madhu Gupta, and they will moderate today’s discussion. Thank you so much.
– [Interviewer] Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you Patti for joining us today. We were just talking to Patti in the back, and she is so much fun. So we’re going to have a great, great hour with her. We want to start the conversation today talking a little bit about your journey, which Dean Ann Harrison just talked about. So you had a fun and fulfilling career in the automotive industry when you were working for GM, and then you decided to go into the energy industry. What prompted you to make that change, and how did you align that with your passion and your interests?
– [Patti Poppe] It’s a great question. I wish I had this really sophisticated answer to give to you, but I would say, and my husband by the way, and my mother-in-law is here. The original Pat Poppe is here. I have the privilege of having the same name as my mother-in-law and my husband, Eric. And just one other introduction, Laurae Campbell is here, who is a Cal grad, so give it up for Cal in my office every day. But my husband and I both worked for GM, and he still does, actually. But at that time, we had been moving around a lot, and we were about to move to Korea, and I had a friend of mine who had left GM and went to DTE Energy, and he just asked me if I would think about DTE, and I didn’t even know what they did. I was like, “What do they do? No, I’m moving to Korea.” Next thing we know, I got a job offer from DTE, and it gave us an opportunity to… We were moving around a lot, and we had young children. We had two daughters who were in, I guess third grade, and we decided to take a decision for the family and moved back to Michigan and plant what we thought were permanent roots there. Life unfolds in different ways. We didn’t know, at the time, that that was going to be such a consequential decision in our lives, but it was truly made for family at the time. And then, it turned out to be a great professional move, and I can’t imagine not having made that decision back then.
– [Interviewer] So many of us here are graduating in about a month, which is really sad. And with that comes big career pivots. So were there moments in your transition where you were questioned, or maybe you were questioning yourself? And how did you navigate those situations and kind of building that credibility in winning over others’ trust?
– [Patti] So many times, so many times. But I do think that, and this is a really important thing as you embark on your careers and continue your careers to really be able to find it in yourself to believe in yourself. And I remember this moment, my first day in an assembly plant. These are big factories. And here I was, this girl with a ponytail and my blue jeans. And walking down the aisle, I didn’t know where I was or what I was doing. And these guys pulled up in this golf cart and they said to me, “What are you doing here?” And I was like, now just freeze-frame for a moment. Like, in my mind I’m thinking, “I have no idea. Like how do I get to column number B80?” I had no idea what I was doing, but if I had said that, I mean, I would’ve lost all respect from these people. So instead, out of nowhere, I blame it on my high school math teacher. I feel like she infused me with confidence. And so, I just look at these guys, and I said, “I got a job to do. Don’t you have a job to do? Don’t you think we should get back to work?” And these guys go, “Oh, you want a ride?” I go, “Yes, I do. Can you please take me to B80?” And I just think about, like, don’t count yourself out. You walk in the room, every person in that room is wondering what they’re doing there. I can assure you, all of us have these questions about what’s happening. We don’t know as much as we pretend to do. And you just have to be honest with yourself, and it gives you permission, then, to actually admit when you don’t know and to ask for help and get support from people that you’re working with that do know more than you. No one’s going to expect you. They’re going to know you’re smart. I mean, you went to Cal, you went to Haas, they’re going to know you’re smart. But they’re going to expect you to want to learn more and learn from them. And so, one of the best ways to overcome not knowing is by being curious and learning from those that actually do know more than you do and let them teach you.
– [Interviewer] We were talking in the back how you’re one of two two-time female CEOs, which is amazing. But also, it means we have a lot of work to do. We’re curious to know, you went from a plant manager, you always loved working in the field, which is, it’s a tough place to be in. How did you kind of know that you were going to be in that CEO track, and then, that you wanted to be a CEO?
– [Patti] I was just thinking about this. There was a large part of my career I never would’ve imagined being a CEO. My singular focus was to be a plant manager. That was my dream. I had a great plant manager who I loved dearly, who made my life better because he was such a great leader, and I wanted to do the same for others. And so, all of a sudden, I was awfully close to that goal, and I was with one of our vice presidents, I remember, and he said, “Patti, what are your career goals?” And I said, “I want to be a plant manager.” And he said, “I have bad news for you.” I was like, “Oh, oh no, really?” He’s like, “You gotta think higher.” I was like, “Uh-oh, what do you mean?” I said, “I want to be a plant manager.” He’s like, “No, no, you’re too young. Like you’re going to be plant manager like in a year. You need a bigger goal.” And a blessing, at the time, I was in business school. And so, it gave me a time to reflect and imagine something beyond being a plant manager. And that was the first time I ever said out loud to anyone, like, “Maybe I’d like to be a CEO someday.” And I have to tell you, it’s really important at some juncture to get clear with yourself about what you do want from your career. Being a CEO is the most amazing job, but it comes with a lifestyle that you have to not think that you can skirt. I did really hard jobs to get prepared to do this very hard job. And so, being willing to make those choices, I often say there’s two kinds of careers. There’s one that’s like a destination in mind, and there’s one that’s full of interesting assignments. And I’ll just tell this real quick. When you have a destination in mind, it helps weed out choices. Somebody actually just said this today, and so, I’m going to use his story. Imagine a soccer field, and you have the goals on one end. You’re here at this goal, and you want to get to that goal. If you’re really clear about what that goal is, and if it’s CEO of a Fortune 500 company, the shortest path is a straight line. But it rules out a lot of interesting assignments because I needed to, as I was coming up the ranks, I needed to do very important things to prepare me to compete to be the CEO. Nobody ever promised me a CEO job, but to compete for that, and frankly, it happened sooner than we expected. The person I was succeeding got sick. And so, my HR person came to me and said, “You ready?” I was like, “Shouldn’t Dan do it?” He’s like, “No, you should do it, you do the job.” I wouldn’t say I knew I was ready, but I had prepared, and I had taken the tough assignments to get me prepared. But you can also have a very rewarding and fulfilling career doing interesting assignments. But it’s really important to know which you really want. And so, what I watch a lot of young people do, they make a mistake of choosing their own career paths and choosing these interesting assignments. And they may or not prepare you to compete for the job you really want. And if you all of a sudden find out you just spent the last 10 years doing stuff that isn’t getting you to where you want to go, you’ll be disappointed. So, doing interesting assignments, I had this friend Janet, who always had the most interesting jobs, but she got to this point in her career and she wanted to advance, and she didn’t have the requisite experiences, and she was disappointed. Now, if I might, my husband had no interest in being the big boss and managing a bunch of people. That was never his interest. He wanted to solve the toughest problems. And so, he always chose the roles that had the toughest problems, but that wasn’t necessarily going to lead him to be CEO of General Motors. He didn’t want that. And so, he was never disappointed with that choice. He was fulfilled by his choice of doing really interesting work all the time. I just don’t want you to make the mistake of thinking you’re on a destination path, but you’re actually setting yourself up for these kinds of interesting assignments. So my best advice on that is, study the people who have the job. If you have a destination in mind, first of all, be honest with yourself about that. Don’t apologize. Not everybody wants that job. If you are wired that you want that job, have that in mind. Then, study the people who have that job or similar jobs. and prepare like they did. Take the tough assignments, do those hard jobs that aren’t glamorous and aren’t going to get you on the cover of a magazine. They’re going to prepare you to compete for that top job that you’re really after.
– [Patti] Thank you. That’s really helpful advice for all of us graduating. I want to pivot a little bit to talking about PG&E. So you came to PG&E in 2021, and when you made that decision, you had the big task of fixing the company’s culture and operations. And in one of the interviews or speeches that I watched as I was preparing for this, you said that Larry Culp, the CEO of GE, called you the day after it was announced to say, you’re the only one with a harder job than me in America now. Which is—
– [Patti] That is a true story.
– [Interviewer] Very scary. Part of your strategy in tackling this challenge was bringing in the lean management methodologies and also your philosophy of leading with love. Why did you choose these two, and how did you get the stakeholders you coming in as a new CEO to believe in that and to take that culture and run with it?
– [Patti] Yeah, it’s such a great question. I remember thinking earlier in my career, I would look at these CEOs and wonder, “How do they know what to do?” And then I became one, I’m like, “Oh no, now I do actually need to know what to do.” But when I took the PG&E job, I did have the benefit of experience. And so, when I talk about preparing for these tough jobs, I had been the CEO of another utility. It happened to be a really wonderful utility that was performing very well but had had its own turnaround. And I had been present for it and actually led our customer trust transformation. We were lowest in customer satisfaction. And actually, in my time, we became No. 1, and I knew what that took, and I knew how to rebuild trust, and I had experienced really challenging turnarounds also at General Motors. And so, I actually knew what to do. And it’s a little uncharacteristic for me ’cause I consider myself a more participative leader. I like to engage the team in deciding the path. But we were in a crisis. We had just come out of bankruptcy. We literally had had four CEOs in the matter of a year. The team had been under a tremendous stress and catastrophe and needed healing. So I knew love was an essential ingredient. In business today, I think that’s too often we dehumanize it and turn work into a work-pay transactional relationship, and even companies as transactions, with our customers. A utility is a uniquely human kind of company. People often say we’re an engineering company or an energy company. I say we’re a people company, we are people serving people. The only difference between my utility and every other utility in America is the people who work there. We all have pipes and wires and customers. At PG&E, the only difference is the people who are there. And so, tapping into the human spirit of the people who work at PG&E and regaining their confidence in the face of a lot of negative press, a lot of negative feedback, people who had stayed at this company through our darkest days needed to believe in themselves and believe in what we were up to. So love was essential, but then let’s get some tools. Lean manufacturing is a wonderful system that I had deployed, I learned in automotive, but deployed in the utility for the 15 years or 20 years before I joined PG&E and had developed a playbook that worked to make problems visible, to bring out the best ideas, to help people own their work and their business. And we had a very important body of work to deploy. And that was our wildfire mitigation plan in 2021. We were still reeling from a series of significant fires and our bankruptcy, and an essential ingredient in the legal construct here in California is a wildfire mitigation plan. And so, I knew wildfire mitigation plan is the most important thing. And teaching lean, we can do those two things in the same way. So every time we went to the wildfire mitigation plan review, we were learning lean and doing the plan, doing the work, learning lean every time. In fact, I just had a meeting with my team today reminding us that every meeting we are in has two purposes: Number One, to teach our performance playbook; and Number Two, to do the work so that we can have a sustainable management system that teaches people at all parts of the company from the front to the back what it means to deliver excellence and improve our work every single day. And it’s working, I’m happy to report. We have reduced our wildfire risk by 94%. That is not a make-believe number. That is calculated by the risk exposure that we have. And the remaining 6% we’re improving every day and is backed up by our situational awareness, which includes, I have over 80 former firefighters who work for PG&E who help us mitigate our risk every day and respond when an ignition occurs. Cal Fire and the state of California have dramatically invested in their capabilities. We have 1,500 weather stations across our service area that’s from basically Oregon down to Santa Barbara and Bakersfield. Those weather stations have real-time data that communicates, we’ve divided the entire service area into 2-kilometer blocks. Real time, every minute of every day, we know the temperature, the wind speeds, the moisture levels. If there’s a tree in strike distance to the line, we know what color that tree is, we know how many feet it is from the line. We know the angle to the hill. We know the last time we inspected those. And we have a huge data engine that uses artificial intelligence to prevent the risk in every one of those 2-kilometer blocks. And we take operating measures and actions every single day, every hour of every day to make sure that an ignition, if it occurs, because electric equipment in fact does spark by design, we make sure that it’s not going to cause a catastrophic wildfire. That was delivered through our lean operating system.
– [Interviewer] That’s incredible.
– [Patti] Thank you from the PG&E plants in the audience.
– [Interviewer] So you are facing, day in and day out, the effects of climate change with wildfires, pressure on the grid. And as natural disasters continue to get worse, that’s putting pressure on your operations, which oftentimes means investing in better technology, better operations, safety management, and can lead to rise in prices. I think many of us here are going to be facing similar challenges as we grow in our careers and think about how do we make certain decisions. So how do you think about affordability in the utility sector while maintaining that commitment to investing in safety and sustainability? And how do you get the leaders in your company to follow your lead?
– [Patti] Well, first and foremost, it’s always about our customers, and we have to be willing to put our expertise to work, to make decisions on behalf of the people that we serve. And when we make a decision to make an investment, I’m going to make a pitch for the investor-owned utility model here for a minute. So if any of you have studied it or have questions about it, let me just tell you my perspective about this. The original formation of an investor-owned utility model was when we were building out this electric infrastructure for the first time because we were powering America and the world. And we needed to figure out how to get the most power to the most people at the lowest cost. And so, the investor-owned utility model emerged as a winning model because it spread the costs of the build out of that infrastructure over more people and more years by attracting capital from the capital markets and not expecting all customers to pay upfront for the build out of that infrastructure. And over time, as that investment and use of then, that product grew, the unit price declined. So in the original days we were building out infrastructure, and every year the unit price of electricity was going down. Well, now we’ve reached the stage that we have to replace that infrastructure for two reasons: its age, and two, our changing climate conditions. Our infrastructure was not designed to withstand the extreme drought, wind, floods, this is a worldwide problem. And so we have to, at this juncture in our nation, invest in that infrastructure, and then make it safe under future climate conditions, not today’s climate conditions, and all the while reducing carbon emissions so that we can thwart the speed and pace of climate change. Now, here’s the great news. A lot of people are worried about this. They think it’s just going to be too expensive. Well, one of the best things is the confluence of decarbonizing through electrification. While we are building out this new infrastructure, actually, we’ll grow load just like we did way back when growing load while we’re making these investments, thereby lowering the unit cost of energy as we go forward if we do it right. But annual expenses and maintenance, continuing to only do maintenance, it’s like owning a car. You can’t continue to Band-Aid the problem. There’s a point that you reach where it’s more expensive to continue trying to maintain the car than to invest in a new car payment to spread out the cost of that new car over time. It’s the same idea with our infrastructure of all kinds, bridges, roads, but particularly the electric grid. And the benefit the electric grid has is new demand. Electric vehicles, building electrification, decarbonizing our economy can in fact be done at a way that it lowers household spend on energy. Electricity is a more efficient fuel than gasoline, and we can then transition from natural gas to electrification. We’re going to be proving all this out here in California first. PG&E is at the heartbeat and the forefront of delivering this future and showing that it is possible. And thankfully, California is not going to get weak need about this. It’s going to be a major issue politically across the nation. And fortunately, California will stand our ground. And PG&E is essential to that clean energy transition, decarbonizing our economy at the lowest societal costs. And I could not be more excited to lead the team at PG&E to make that happen.
– [Interviewer] That’s incredibly helpful context, Patti. Thank you. Before we shift gears to talk about the future of energy, let’s discuss some of the challenges that PG&E is facing today. As we all know, decarbonization has been a major goal for PG&E. What is the biggest hurdle you see to achieving your goals, and how do you hope to combat these challenges?
– [Patti] That is a great question, too. I’d say there’s two big hurdles. One is our willingness to believe as a society that it’s possible. And that’s, again, why I’m excited about California. I think there’s a lot of people who want it to be true but don’t know the path. And we get to show the path, we get to show the world that it is in fact possible. And I had dinner just not too long ago with the Secretary of Energy, Jennifer Granholm, she and I go way back. It’s a very interesting twist of fate that she was governor of Michigan, and we passed really important energy legislation when she was there and I was at running a utility. And so, we go way back, but she and I were having this conversation that there’s a whole lot of people who talk about this subject, and there’s only a handful who are actually going to do something about it. PG&E gets to do something about it. You need us to do something about this. So my biggest concern is that people will back off, or get afraid, or it’ll become too politicized, and we won’t make the important investments in the infrastructure so that it’s possible. And then two, there’s going to be a lot of behavior change. We’re going to need everybody’s help to make this change. In fact, we’re mapping out our net-zero plans for the state and for when we get real and we’re like, “OK, what are we going to do to meet San Jose’s net-zero 2030 goal?” That’s a million people are going to have to have electric heat. How are we going to do that? That’s a big human behavior, actual challenge. We’re going to have to convince people that it’s in their best interest to switch fuels and to drive an electric car. And 2030, hello. Tik tok, that’s six years from now. So, all that to say, we have a lot of work to do, and so, do we—time is not on our side, but really I think when any great innovation happened and when we built this grid out in the first place, people had to have faith that building this infrastructure was going to be worth it. And I don’t know about you, but saving the planet feels like a pretty darn good reason to make a change. And so, we’re all in.
– [Interviewer] Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. Now, like in any industry, utilities too needs to adapt their business model and their strategy to evolving customer preferences. And we are interested in how you are navigating such shifts. Specifically, what is your view on decentralized energy generation and microgrids, and what is the subsequent impact to your business model?
– [Patti] Yeah, well I think we have the benefit of the distributed energy resources that exist in our system, but we today are blind to them. And so, they are not optimized. Our energy system today is not optimized. We’ve got big bulk power and distribution equipment and transmission equipment that is designed for that big bulk model of delivering the highest volume at the lowest cost. It’s like the big Walmart of energy. The grid is just a big centralized system by design. Plugging in all the distributed resources has been done so far very much to the benefit of the individual at that premise. We now need to fully leverage the benefit of those distributed resources. And the only way to do that is by complementing them with storage, both bulk storage and localized storage. And if we can store that energy that’s produced, we have too much energy produced in the middle of the day today in California, it’s way more than we need. And so, adding more generation capacity at noon is a waste of money. We need to add storage resources. If we’re going to invest in something when we look at the system as a whole, invest in the storage resources so you can store that energy at noon and then start to spread out supply and demand and start managing demand for the first time ever. We didn’t have devices until now. The energy grid has been a demand taker just by definition. By definition, the grid that we’ve all lived with all our lives has been built for peak demand plus, say, 15%. We’re now at plus 22%. So peak plus 22. In California, it’s about five days a year that we come close to that peak. Every other day of the year, we have way more power, and the whole system is way bigger than it needs to be. We have the chance with increasing demand to more fully utilize those existing resources, actually optimize demand in the form of EVs. First dynamic load we’ve ever had. Air conditioning comes on when it’s hot, lights come on when it’s dark. There’s not a lot of choice to that. Refrigerators run all the time. Those are the three biggest users of electricity today. And then factories. Run when the factories run. We have the opportunity to charge cars at the right time and then discharge those cars on the peak. Today, on our roads in PG&E service area, we have 6,000 megawatts of capacity in the form of vehicles. That is three of my Diablo Canyon Power Plants of capacity driving around the roads today. If we could only turn that power around to the grid, they’re not designed for that today. But the newest EVs, the Ford Lightning, the Cadillac LYRIQ, some of the other Cadillac products, or the GM products coming out, are bidirectional. That’s going to be both a supply and a demand on the grid, but we’re going to have to optimize all those resources and optimize the grid. And I just think that’s going to take the most innovation that this industry has seen in our lifetimes.
– [Interviewer] Thank you for sharing your perspective on this topic. Now, not so long ago you mentioned that PG&E is in the people business, and I loved that. So just to talk a little bit more about that, I think one of the bigger responsibilities we have today in the transition to clean energy is to make sure we bring everyone along. Now, of course, lower-income communities may not have the same access to programs, incentives, or resources perpetuating maybe energy poverty and environmental injustice. How do you as a leader, and PG&E as an organization, empower vulnerable populations and make sure they’re not left behind in this transition?
– [Patti] This is one of the things that we spend a lot of time on. Another pitch for the investor-owned utility model, our obligation to serve, which is the law is actually a privilege. It’s a privilege to serve and assure that no one is left behind. If we had, whether it’s small local companies that don’t have the scale or profit maximizing companies that are purely motivated for maximizing profits without an obligation and a privilege to serve, you can imagine that people would be left behind. So when we advocate for the right kind of pricing for distributed energy and specifically rooftop solar, when we are advocating for the right price, this is why we are doing that. I think, a lot of times, we get painted with a brush that we’re anti-solar, we are anti-solar, we are anti-no-one-left-behind. We are anti-cost shifts. Today, there’s a $34 a month cost shift from people who don’t have solar to people who do. So people who don’t have solar, most likely apartment dwellers, people who can’t afford the upfront cost to invest in distributed solar. They are getting left behind, and we are fighting hard to make sure that doesn’t happen. And the CPUC made an important proposed decision in the last week to add a flat rate to the bill to more accurately distribute the costs, not new costs, but the existing costs to people equally so that anybody who uses the grid should pay for the maintenance of the grid and pay their full freight. We would’ve argued that might have been more, should have been applied, but it’s a good starting point to try and get the cost allocated properly so that no one is left behind.
– [Interviewer] Thank you. It’s really encouraging to hear PG&E’s efforts toward a more fair and just transition. Looking ahead, of course the world overall is changing at such a rapid pace, and for businesses to tackle climate change effectively, it needs to be a concerted effort that requires collaboration. However, one might argue that the energy ecosystem is not set up for collaboration, starting with the fact that we have such a fragmented power grid. So I’m curious, Patti, how do you see collaboration between public, private, and cross-sector entities evolving as we continue to put pressure on our grid?
– [Patti] It is one of the most important ingredients. You’re completely right about that. When I knew I was coming out to PG&E and started imagining my time at PG&E, I was so excited about the access to the innovation and technology that exists here and the privilege to serve the Bay Area and Silicon Valley. I mean, any utility in America would be proud and excited to serve the customers that we get to serve. And so, I started engaging in the innovation ecosystem here. And I got very resounding feedback. And it was this, “Patti, PG&E is killing us death by pilot.” They would say, “Wait, how many pilots do we have to do?” Like, it’s crazy. We’re a little company, we can’t afford to do all these projects to prove ourselves. We don’t have the funding to do that, so we took a completely fresh look at how innovation can plug into our system. And what we realized is that often people have a solution, and they’re hunting for the problem as opposed to having a problem and finding the right solution. So we came at it to say, my team looked at our 10-year strategy and our clean energy plan, and they came up with 70 problem statements that defined the gap from where we are today to where we want to be in 10 years that we can’t solve by ourselves. And we held an innovation summit last year, and we invited the world to come help us solve these very specific 70 problem statements in a variety of areas. Wildfire was one, but 24/7 decarbonized energy was another one, how to transition the gas system was another area, full utilization of EVs. And so, we put out all these problem statements. Three thousand people joined us that day, which I was so stunned and excited. We limited the in-person to 300, and that filled up in like a day. And Elon Musk spoke at our event, which people really felt like that was the big news that he makes news everywhere he goes, which was fine with me ’cause we wanted to make news that day. But the real news, what actually happened that day that was so important in addition to all of these innovators getting access to PG&E and being able to realize, “Here are the problems that need to be solved” and matching their technologies, their ideas to the problems that we had, we made an announcement with Schneider Electric and Microsoft that we were launching the first distributed energy resource management system on the cloud with these incredible technical partners and would be the first company in the world to be able to optimize all these distributed resources. That was actually the news that mattered that day. And since then, we had 300 submissions and 60 finalists, and we’re narrowing down to 50 to figure out how to partner with each of these technologies that are ready to scale. And we’re not going to invest in the companies, but we’re going to be their No. 1 customer, which every startup needs both. They need seed capital, but then, they need a great customer. And so, it’s a really great role for PG&E to play.
– [Interviewer] Awesome, thank you. And now, as our final question. Given the context in which we’re living in with the shift toward sustainable energy systems, the need for resilience in the face of climate change, and of course, the imperative to address equity along the process. I’m sure you see both innovation and setbacks on a daily basis. So with that, what keeps you up at night? What keeps you going, and what are you most excited about as you think about the future?
– [Patti] Well, there’s no doubt safety is what keeps me up at night, the safety of my workforce, and the safety of the communities that we serve. And so, we put a lot of effort around that. And I think about it all the time, and we have systems that have dramatically improved the safety. But of course, I think about it all the time. What was the second one?
– [Interviewer] What keeps you going?
– [Patti] Oh yeah, what keeps me going? Oh, the people of PG&E that I have the privilege of working with and the customers that we serve. I mean, I just love what we’re doing. We know that we are changing and changing that culture and leading with love has been such a galvanizing force for us. And it’s been just a real challenge, but a lot of fun. And then, I’m excited about being able to deliver on this clean energy transition for the world. I truly believe that we are at ground zero here in the Bay Area in California to show the world that it is possible. And there’s a lot of people who have been working at it for a long time, and maybe they’re getting tired, and there’s a lot of opposition that’s drumming up, and we just can’t lose our faith. And I am thrilled to be able to be at the place where we’re going to do something about the world’s existential challenge.
– [Interviewer] Thank you so much.
– [Ann] Thank you so much, Patti. Thank you so much also for being willing to take questions from the audience. So the first question that I have here is, “What sacrifices have you had to make in your personal life? Do you ever question or wonder if prioritizing your career is worth it?”
– [Patti] So I get this question often in a variety of forms. I’m not going to let my husband answer it, by the way, but I will give you my version of the answer. And we were talking about this in the green room a little bit. I subscribe to a Japanese philosophy called Ikigai, and if you haven’t seen it, study it, because I wish I had studied it in my early days. But yeah, I’ve made choices in my career that have been very demanding on my time. But the four elements of Ikigai is, first, you obviously want to do work that you can sustain your family. So you want to get paid for that work. I think a lot of people, and especially many of you at this juncture in your life and in your career, please don’t stop at the place that pays you the most. You will surely miss by just focusing on getting paid for what you do. You want to get paid for what you do, but it doesn’t matter whether it’s the most, what you want to combine it with are three other elements. So yes, get paid for what you do, but do something that you’re good at. Do something you love, and those two things might not be the same. You can often be really good at something, and maybe you don’t love it, but that will parlay into and open doors for you to do what you love, and then do something that the world needs. And so, for me, I can look at my career in all my years. I was always doing something that I got paid for but that I was good at, and I learned new things and discovered new things. But I had the privilege of loving being in an operating environment, seeing the daily heartbeat, seeing what we could deliver, just really doing something important and knowing at the end of the day that we did it. And then, especially now at this point in my career, to do what the world needs means that my minutes at work and my minutes at home have full value all the time. I’m fulfilled in all my minutes. And what a blessing that is. And I would wish that for each and every one of you that you find your path, and it’s not going to be anybody else’s definition of that path for you, only, and you have to study yourself. What do you love? What do you do in your discretionary time when no one has asked you to do it? What kind of articles are you clipping? Which podcasts are you drawn to? Pay attention to that, know that about yourself, know what you love, bias your career choices to that which you love and that what you can be good at. And then, please promise me you’ll find something that the world needs, and you’ll throw yourself at it. You’re too smart and too talented to not make a difference in this world. And so, I really have high hopes that you, too, can live the blessing of a career that I have had that has not felt like a sacrifice but has felt like a continual opportunity to grow and learn and make a difference.
– [Ann] Thank you so much for that. Absolutely wonderful advice. This question, you mentioned a career of interesting assignments. Can you speak to some of your more interesting or assignments that may not have seemed so at the time?
– [Patti] Oh, that’s really good. Yeah, I can think of one in particular that comes to mind. First line supervisor. It was interesting, that’s for sure. I tell people it was the second-hardest job I’ve ever had. The job I have is the hardest job I’ve ever had. But second-hardest job was first line supervisor. And I had a career choice. I had an opportunity for a promotion, and a company car, and daylight hours, and all these things, get out of my boots and get into a suit, and maybe that would be good. And I had a boss who pulled me aside and said, “Patti, wait, wait, wait. You haven’t been a first line supervisor yet, and if you want to be a plant manager on that soccer field, you’ll have gone around a key experience.” And he said, “And someday you’ll be standing in front of a room full of people that you are leading, and they will know you didn’t do it. And you might get the job somehow, but you won’t be good at it.” Plant manager. I was like, “Oh, dang it.” So I turned down the company car, and I took the second shift trim shop supervisor job. It really sucked. But I learned so much about people, and about leading, and the union tricked me and all these things. I learned so much. And so, yes, it was very interesting, and no, there were moments I did not love that darn job. But I look back now, and it was a key pivot point. And so, don’t take the easy route. Take the tough jobs where you’re going to learn the core business that you’re in. Understand that whatever business you are in there is a core business about it. Building cars at General Motors was core business. And now, in a utility, having operational experience and understanding what it’s like to lead people, I just stood yesterday in front of a group of first line supervisors who had just graduated from a yearlong development program, and I could swap stories with them. Do you think that gives me credibility as their CEO to be able to talk shop with these guys? Yes, it does. And when I say guys, it was men and women, gender neutral there. But I think that, sometimes, you take the tough job on the pathway to a destination because you have to learn the business, and you need to know how it works and why it works on the ground floor, so you can lead it well.
– [Ann] Thank you for that. How do you handle the daily stress, the wildfires, the CPUC, the unions, the shareholders, the employees, the budget?
– [Patti] There is joy in the journey. No, I do have coping mechanisms. One of the things, this did happen, I was probably six months into this role, and the big difference about this role versus all the roles I had had before was truly the life and death aspects of it. And how, in the early days when I had just arrived here, how uncontrolled it felt, and the risk of another catastrophic wildfire was real. And it was scary. And I was about six months in, and I just was trying to come to terms with the, as I called it, the death and destruction of all of it. This isn’t like a normal quarterly earnings update CEO job. And it occurred to me, it was more military, and we have a four-star admiral on our board. And so, I thought, “Why hadn’t I called Mark?” So, I called Admiral Ferguson, and I said, “Mark, what am I supposed to do with this, all this destruction and risk?” And he said this, he said, “Oh, Patti darn it, I should have given you this talk earlier. I give it to all my young commanders.” I’m like, “Good, I’m not young, but please give me the talk.” So he gave me the talk, and the talk went like this. Two key elements. Number one, the standard is not perfection. He said, “do you know it is safer today because you are there. And because we were implementing this lean operating system and creating visibility to the key wildfire mitigation elements, and we were making progress every day and we had brought order.” I knew I had brought order to what felt like disorder. I knew it was better. It didn’t have to be perfect, it just had to be continually improving. That was a big relief. And then, he said, “Every great mission in history,” and he had studied all great military missions, and he had studied them all, he said, “had one key thread. They had a leader who refused to give up. You cannot give up. You will have setbacks, things will go wrong, bad things will happen.” And there are things that have happened on my watch that I would definitely wish had not happened. “But the standard is not perfection. The standard is progress, and you have to be tenacious, as we say, we cannot give up.” And I don’t know what it was about that talk, but it took the weight of the world off my shoulders. And he also said, he said, “In that environment, when you know you’re making a difference, and you don’t give up, that’s when real leaders thrive.” I thought, “OK, this is me thriving. I am thriving.” And I had to remind myself that I was thriving. And some days are harder to thrive than others, but you just have to believe that you matter, and I have to believe that we can do it.
– [Ann] Wow. Thank you so much. That’s great advice. So this question, and I think you already answered it, so you feel free to skip to the next one if you’d like. “How do you prepare PG&E for the massive infrastructure investments in the future while still delivering satisfactory returns to shareholders?”
– [Patti] Oh, I don’t think I’ve answered this. Let me answer this one because I think this is a really commonly misunderstood feature of investor-owned utilities. Our customers deserve better service. And again, like I said, we get to spread the cost of that service out over time by attracting capital from the markets. But one of the things I didn’t mention about our investors, who are the investors? Our investors, and investors in a utility, are not like high-rolling, fat cat profit-driving, maximum return investors. These are pension funds, teachers, firefighters, police. They turn over, they’re nest egg to a fidelity, or a J.P. Morgan, or whomever, American Funds, and they choose us to invest in, and then we shepherd their dollars by investing in this infrastructure and promising a reasonable return, not a maximum return. it’s a regulated return. We have oversight. People decide what is that return here California, we have formulas that determine what that return is. So there’s no shenanigans associated with it. It’s formulaic, and it’s designed on a reasonable return for the risk of investing in this infrastructure and doing the work. And it’s on a very actual small portion of the elements of a customer’s bill. Only about 10% of the bill is actually our profits. And so, that return to that investment community, those moms and pops, I am unapologetic about keeping our promise to those investors. They’ve entrusted to us their life savings. Of course, we’re going to provide a return that we promised, and at the same time, improve the service to our customers by making the right infrastructure investment choices and reducing the cost of doing that, improving our performance with our lean operating system and our performance management playbook. We reduced costs out of our business in a dramatic way. We’re starting to set ourselves apart from other utilities, and our ability to extract cost out of the system and accelerate our investment and make the system safer, faster. And so, there, for me, there’s no land where there’s a conflict between delivering for customers and delivering for investors or shareholders. The system is designed to deliver for both. It’s actually a unique place in the world where you can have win-win. And I find it very fascinating, there’s a lot of people who are trying to make this into a win-lose discussion. It’s not win-lose. I don’t have to pick one or the other. I can pick both every single day and know that we’re doing right by both.
– [Ann] Thank you so much for that. This is the last question. “Do you find that you have leveraged your non-PG&E and field experience as the CEO of PG&E and how have you done that?”
– [Patti] I think so because I love the work that we do, and I love being with our crews who do that work. And so, I love going out to our power plants, and our hydro facilities, our distribution teams, our gas teams, our electric teams. It’s my happy days when I get to go out and be with the team in the field. And I think it does two things. It gives me credibility with our team, so they can, I would say, for the first time in a while, trust the leadership of the company and be willing to adopt a change in their culture because they can trust their leader again. And so, because I think, in fact, my board chair when I took this, or when he was talking to me about joining the company, and I asked him, “Is this like a financial turnaround? The company just went bankrupt, is this like going to be a lot of bankers and spreadsheet turnaround, or is this like a fundamental culture and safety turnaround? Because if it’s a finance turnaround, I’m actually not interested. If it’s an operational turnaround, and if we get to change the way we do our work, and if we need to, and the case is that we need to build a safety culture, then I’m in.” And he assured me it was an operational and cultural turnaround, and he was right. The money follows. When we perform, the money follows. But I just think that the idea that I can do this kind of work, and my team knows that I love the work that we do for the sake of the work and serving our neighbors, our friends, and our families, I think I get a lot of street cred with the team because of my true demonstrated experience and passion for what they do.
– [Ann] Thank you so much for that. So there are going to be refreshments at the back, but first, I just want to thank you so much for coming here to Berkeley Haas.
– [Patti] Thank you for having me at Berkeley Haas.
– [Ann] Yeah, we’re just so impressed.
– [Speaker] Working? Can you hear me? Before you guys go for the refreshments, Patti did want to take a selfie.
– [Patti] Thank you. Thank you.
– [Speaker] Everybody in the back, kind of like…
– [Patti] Come on. Come to the middle. Come to the middle. We’re going to do an aussie. Come to the middle. Get right in here. You stand in front of me. Stand in front of me. I didn’t want you to fall off the stage. OK. Everybody ready? Say Berkeley Haas.
– [All] Berkeley Haas.
– [Patti] Thank you so much. Go there. That’s right.
For Arnaud Paquet, MBA 24, winning a top annual UC Berkeley sustainability award was the culmination of two years of climate leadership and sustainability initiatives on campus.
Paquet, one of four winners honored last month by the UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability (CACS), received an impressive 16 nominations—including recommendations from former Berkeley Haas Dean Laura Tyson, Professor Severin Borenstein, who is faculty director of the Energy Institute at Haas, and Danner Doud-Martin, director of Haas Campus Sustainability.
Paquet has been “instrumental around everything at Haas that pertains to sustainability,” Doud-Martin said. “He is everywhere. He is always connecting with people, always talking to people. Everyone knows Arnaud.”
“He is everywhere. He is always connecting with people, always talking to people. Everyone knows Arnaud.” – Danner Doud-Martin
Proof point: When Paquet attended the annual ClimateCAP conference two years ago as a Haas fellow, Doud-Martin said the organizers ran a contest to see who could track the most connections made during the conference on their phones. “He won the whole thing,” Doud-Martin said.
Paquet, who grew up in Brussels and holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in energy engineering, has spent his career working on the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy. He came to Haas planning to make new connections and go deeper into solving climate change.
One of his first moves was to join the Berkeley Energy & Resources Collaborative, (BERC), the largest on-campus organization that unites students, alumni, faculty, and industry leaders seeking to turn research toward solving energy and environmental problems. He quickly dove in, helping to organize their annual Energy Summit. Then, he took on the role of co-president, winning the Chancellor’s award, in part, for his work with BERC, which is entirely student-run and spans 11 colleges and 28 departments across UC Berkeley.
“BERC is special because it’s campuswide,” he said. “You can’t assume that climate change can be solved only through business. It’s going to be a cross-functional problem to solve. And so you need all disciplines—business policy, law, engineering, and so on.”
Paquet also spearheaded the inaugural Women in Climate event at UC Berkeley to create a platform for underrepresented members in BERC and the industry. Borenstein said Paquet showed a strong commitment to diversity by launching the conference, “giving diverse voices a platform in the climate crisis.”
Arnaud Paquet, third from left, with UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ, received the top UC Berkeley sustainability award last month, awarded by the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Sustainability (CACS).
Paquet, along with Angelina Donhoff, MBA 24, became the first co-vice president of Sustainability for the Haas MBA Association (MBAA). The pair, both members of the Haas Sustainability Task Force, helped create the new VP role by empowering fellow MBA students to vote for the change.
Now, they are working with Doud-Martin on a grant-funded pilot program studying the climate cost of airline travel—using an MBA course that requires students to travel to Denmark as a study subject. Arnaud plans to write recommendations addressing the challenge of sourcing high-quality carbon offsets for air travel and the risk of greenwashing.
He also served as a researcher and co-author for former Dean Tyson and venture capital firm Angeleno Group in a forthcoming article on innovations in climate finance for the California Management Review.
A startup plan
Outside of Haas, Paquet has worked for multiple Bay Area climate-focused startups, including Twelve and Granular Energy, the latter of which he still works part-time as a business development lead. After graduation, he plans to join a startup tackling the challenge of decarbonizing the hard-to-abate sectors, which account for a third of global carbon emissions.
He said he’s enjoyed much of what makes Haas a unique place. “We have a lot of folks coming to Haas who are mission-driven and want to have a positive impact. And you will see a lot of students either starting their own company or going into climate tech, sustainability, and impact investing,” Paquet said.
“It’s an exciting time for Haas. The school is launching a new MBA/MCS (master of climate solutions) degree with the Rausser College of Natural Resources and Haas is hosting ClimateCAP next year. I feel like UC Berkeley really prepared me well for what’s next, and I’m grateful for it.”
The FTMBA program moved up four slots to tie for #7 with the Yale School of Management and NYU’s Stern School of Business. Except for 2021 and 2023, the FTMBA has ranked #7 since 2019.
Meanwhile, the Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA Program ranked #2 this year among part-time MBA programs. The Berkeley Haas MBA for Executives Program placed #7 among EMBA programs and is now the top executive MBA program at a public university in the nation. This ranking is based solely on ratings by business school deans and directors.
The 2024 FTMBA ranking, released today, reflects positive changes that U.S. News made to its rankings methodology, said Haas Dean Ann Harrison.
The ranking reflects all of the work Haas is doing to strengthen its programs and reputation, she said. “There are many different ways of evaluating a school, and rankings go up and down for all of us,” she said. “The change in the U.S. News methodology, with less emphasis on starting salary upon graduation, is a positive step.”
A few details on the rankings methodology used this year:
Employment rates at graduation – 7% weighted (previously 10%)
Employment rates three months after graduation – 13% (previously 20%)
Mean starting salary and bonus – 20%
Ranking salaries by profession – 10%
Peer assessment score – 12.5%
Haas ranked #5 in salaries, which were ranked this year by profession (tied with Chicago Booth). Harrison noted that alumni accept jobs in a variety of industries, which logically means a variety of pay scales.
“This is true for Haas, as well, where graduates prioritize where they can make the biggest impact, whether that is in consulting, product management, fintech, or by founding a new company,” she said. “I applaud U.S. News for taking into account the reality of the wealth of opportunities for a b-school graduate and comparing apples to apples across all the schools it surveys.”
Assessment by the school’s FTMBA peers was strong this year, at #7 (tied with Columbia) and the school ranked #9 for its recruiter assessment. Haas also had the highest GMAT score, tied at #1 with Stanford, Harvard, Wharton, Kellogg, and Columbia.
In specialty rankings, based solely on peer assessments, U.S. News ranked the full-time MBA program:
Berkeley Haas has named alumni leaders in C-suite talent recruiting, investment platform innovation, and novel gene therapy commercialization as the 2024 commencement speakers this spring.
Monica Stevens, MBA 96, an executive search consultant in Spencer Stuart’s San Francisco office, will serve as commencement speaker for the graduating full-time and evening & weekend MBA classes. Jasvinder Khaira, BS 04, a senior managing director at Blackstone, the world’s largest alternative asset manager, will be the undergraduate commencement speaker. Richard Wilson, EMBA 15, senior vice president and primary focus lead of genetic regulation at global pharmaceutical company Astellas, will serve as the commencement speaker for the executive MBA class.
Commencement ceremonies will be held at the Greek Theatre for undergraduates on Wednesday, May 15, at 9 a.m., and the FTMBA and Evening & Weekend MBA combined classes on Friday, May 17, at 2 p.m.. The MBA for Executives Program graduates will celebrate a few weeks later on Saturday, June 1, at 3 p.m. at Hertz Hall.
Monica Stevens
Monica Stevens, MBA 96
As a member of Spencer Stuart’s Financial Services and Boards practices, Stevens focuses on executive search, leadership advisory, and succession planning work for C-suites and boards across corporate and commercial banking, payments, real estate, and risk. A seasoned banker and nonprofit board member with more than 25 years of experience in general management, customer relationship development, talent acquisition, and learning and professional development, Stevens is a champion of diversity and inclusion in business and in her community.
Before joining Spencer Stuart, Stevens spent more than two decades at Wells Fargo, where she held multiple sales, credit, and leadership roles in commercial real estate, capital markets, and global banking. Most recently, she was senior vice president and chief credit and risk officer in the company’s Merchant Services division.
At Wells Fargo, she co-founded the company’s first Black/African American employee resource group, and more recently, she served as co-chair of the Wells Fargo Merchant Services group’s Diversity Council. A champion of talent development, she ran, repositioned, and doubled the size of a program that recruited talent at various levels of the firm.
A veteran, Stevens is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political science. She started her career as an officer in the U.S. Navy, before eventually coming to Haas, where she received an MBA with a concentration in real estate finance.
Stevens is a member of the Haas School Board, and she was awarded the school’s Raymond A. Miles Service Award in 2017 for her contributions in supporting and enhancing diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. She was also previously a trustee for the Redwood Day School in Oakland, where she led the Diversity Committee.
Jasvinder Khaira
Jasvinder Khaira, BS 04
Khaira is a senior managing director and founding partner of the Tactical Opportunities Group, or Tac Opps, at Blackstone. Tac Opps was founded in 2012 to invest across private investment opportunities outside of traditional private equity and private credit. Today, Tac Opps has $34 billion of assets under management.
Khaira was born in Singapore and raised in the Bay Area. He joined Blackstone in 2004 in the Private Equity Group after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from UC Berkeley with degrees in Business Administration and History. In 2007, he joined a small team within Blackstone that eventually led the firm’s initial public offering. Before the IPO, he accompanied the firm’s founders on a roadshow that raised more than $7 billion.
Since helping found Tac Opps, Khaira has led more than 40 transactions for Blackstone totaling over $10 billion of equity invested. He was named the 2023 TMT Investment Leader of the Year and is a founding sponsor of the Berkeley Changemaker program, and a board member of the Berkeley M.E.T Program and the New York Philharmonic. Khaira is married and the father of three boys and lives in New York City.
Richard Wilson
Richard Wilson, EMBA 15
As senior vice president and primary focus lead of genetic regulation at Astellas, Wilson is responsible for a portfolio of novel gene therapies designed to treat life-threatening genetic diseases.
Wilson has more than 30 years of experience in research, development, and commercialization of small molecules, biologics, and gene therapies.
Prior to Astellas, he held leadership positions at a range of organizations, including BioMarin Pharmaceutical, Glaxo Wellcome (now GSK), BioChem Pharma, Theravance, and Innoviva. He has also delivered new medicines to market for diseases such as asthma, COPD, and PKU (a rare disorder that causes an amino acid called phenylalanine to build up in the body), in addition to leading R&D programs in anti-infective, cardiovascular, rheumatology, and urology disease areas.
Wilson has served on a variety of advisory committees and boards, which include Berkeley Executive Education and the Alliance for Regenerative Medicine, and currently teaches at San Francisco State University on lifecycle management in the pharmaceutical industry.
Wilson earned a BSc in chemistry from the University of Manchester before making his way to Haas, where he received his MBA in 2015.
From L-R: Dean Ann Harrison and Executive Director of Sustainability Michele de Nevers.
Berkeley Haas has been chosen to host the prestigious 2025 Global MBA Summit on Climate, Capital and Business, or ClimateCAP, which prepares MBA students and business leaders to understand and respond to the business and investment impacts of climate change.
Haas was named host school during the 2024 ClimateCAP Summit held last month at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. At that event, the largest summit to date, Haas Dean Ann Harrison participated in a virtual Dean’s Roundtable on Climate and Business Education.
Asked by Professor Stuart Hart, a visiting lecturer at Michigan Ross, whether sustainability is “here to stay” or “something that you don’t want to bet the company on,” Harrison said:
“Business has to accelerate the transition to net zero. It has to reckon with the impact of climate change and shift away from fossil fuels. That is not a fad, it is not niche, and it is clearly, in my opinion, going to be a part of the business curriculum now and way into the future.”
“Business has to accelerate the transition to net zero. It has to reckon with the impact of climate change and shift away from fossil fuels. That is not a fad, it is not niche, and it is clearly, in my opinion, going to be a part of the business curriculum now and way into the future.” – Dean Ann Harrison
With more than 41 partner schools across the world, ClimateCAP hosts a summit every year at a different partner school. The event will bring up to 500 MBA students and business leaders from across the world to the campus for one weekend.
Haas was named the 2025 ClimateCAP host during the 2024 summit at Michigan Ross.
“We are so pleased that Berkeley Haas has been chosen to host ClimateCAP next spring,” said Michele de Nevers, executive director of the Office of Sustainability and Climate Change at Haas. “The conference will provide a terrific opportunity to bring hundreds of climate leaders to our campus to showcase Haas and California’s leadership on climate change.”
ClimateCAP aims to give students a deeper understanding of markets with the biggest financial and operational risks due to the climate crisis, and introduces them to promising innovation and entrepreneurship opportunities, de Nevers said.
“Classified” is an occasional series spotlighting some of the more powerful lessons being taught in classrooms around Haas.
Marissa Maliwanag, MBA 24, pitching Tables Together during the Online Marketplace and Platform Design course. Photo: Jim Block
It’s a recent Tuesday evening at Berkeley Haas, and Marissa Maliwanag, MBA 24, has just five minutes to pitch her team’s idea for Tables Together. It’s an online marketplace that big corporations like Google could use to donate surplus food from their employee kitchens to organizations that feed people in need.
“There are matches that need to be made and we want to create a marketplace and solve the problem,” Maliwanag said, ticking off the amount of food that goes to waste in the United States each year.
After a few quick questions for the team, the rapid-fire pitch slam—part of the MBA class called Online Marketplace and Platform Design—continues. Students pitch ideas, among them a private plane rental marketplace to a community for matching skiers and snowboarders with coaches to a marketplace for tailors of bespoke clothing for events like weddings.
MBA students have just five minutes to pitch JetJunction, a private plane rental marketplace, during the night’s pitch slam. Photo: Jim Block
All of the pitches serve as practice for the students who are working toward final projects, says Assistant Professor David Holtz, who teaches the class, an elective that enrolls 68 students. The group is a split of mostly full-time and evening & weekend MBA students, on a journey that covers all aspects of online platforms—from A/B testing, network effects, and platform monetization, to reputation systems and discrimination in online marketplaces.
The class aligns with Holtz’s career experience as a former Silicon Valley data scientist. Most recently, Holtz worked for Airbnb, where he first became intrigued by online marketplaces. “I was exposed to a lot of interesting problems including reputation-system design, algorithmic pricing, and experiment design,” Holtz, a member of the Management of Organizations (MORS) and Entrepreneurship & Innovation Group at Haas, says. “To this day, these topics form the backbone of my research, because, in addition to being extremely interesting, they’re also extremely difficult to solve.”
Taking apart the case
During the first half of a recent class session, Holtz asked students to split into groups to discuss one of the week’s assignments: Pick a company on the a16z Marketplace 100 list—Andreessen Horowitz’s ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies—and come up with a new market mechanism that the company might trial using A/B testing.
One MBA student team wrote about the online specialty food marketplace Goldbelly, suggesting that the company might add a feature that prompts site visitors to indicate that they’re trying to buy a gift. Then, Goldbelly could customize searches and provide a more personal message option at checkout.
Students share their ideas for a new market mechanism that a company might trial using A/B testing. Photo: Jim Block
Holtz then runs students through a business case called “Innovation at Uber: The Launch of Express POOL, a case directly related to some of his marketplace research that examines experiment design in two-sided markets. Set in March 2018, the case follows Uber through the launch of a new product called Express POOL, which offers carpooling riders a cheaper ride if they agree to walk a short distance to and from pick-up and drop-off points and wait a few minutes before being matched to a driver.
In this case, Uber had to decide whether to keep rider wait times at two minutes or change the Express POOL wait time to five minutes mid-experiment. The big dilemma? Uber benefited from a cost-per-ride reduction with a five-minute wait time but didn’t want to make a change that could hurt the user experience. “Even if the company did decide that a longer wait time was preferable, what did that mean for the ongoing experiment the company was running?” Holtz says. “Should they change the product mid-experiment or let the experiment continue running as originally intended?”
In this case, Uber had to decide whether to keep rider wait times at two minutes or change the Express POOL wait time to five minutes mid-experiment.
Holtz then shifts to a whiteboard, where he outlines different types of experiments (also called A/B tests) that marketplace companies like Uber use to test new features.
First is the “bread and butter” user-level test, which Uber could have used to compare the behavior of riders with access to Express POOL to the behavior of those who did not have access to Express POOL. The second kind of test, a switchback experiment, would give all riders and drivers in a given market access to Express POOL for randomly selected 160-minute-long chunks. Over two weeks, Uber would switch Express POOL availability back and forth to compare behaviors.
The third type of experiment Holtz describes, which Uber did use with Express POOL, is a synthetic control experiment. It is the most accurate form of testing, Holtz says, but also the most complicated to run and the “noisiest.” Using the synthetic control experiment, Uber identified two sets of markets that, in aggregate, were as similar to each other as possible. The company then launched Express POOL in one set of cities, but not in the other. By comparing behavior in the two sets of cities, Uber could estimate the impact of both.
The class aligns with Holtz’s career experience as a former Silicon Valley data scientist. Most recently, he worked for Airbnb, where he first became intrigued by online marketplaces. Photo: Jim Block
Holtz’s knowledge of how to apply A/B tests comes from deep research. He has conducted multiple large-scale experiments analyzing the effects of marketplace design choices on Airbnb. One studyexamined whether coupons would lead more Airbnb bookers to write more reviews—with the eventual aim of facilitating better matches on the platform and increasing revenue. Comparing behaviors of buyers who received coupons to those who didn’t, he found that the coupons led to additional reviews that were more negative, on average, and that the reviews didn’t affect the number of nights sold on the site or total revenue.
In a separate, widely cited study, he and his co-authors examined the effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers at Microsoft. They scoured anonymized, aggregated data describing emails, calendars, instant messages, video/audio calls, and workweek hours of more than 60,000 U.S.-based Microsoft employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, trying to estimate the causal effects of firm-wide remote work on collaboration and communication. Results showed that under firm-wide remote work, collaboration patterns become more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between disparate parts of an organization.
Impressive guest speakers
For Lena Corredor, MBA 25, knowledge gained in Holtz’s class is providing an opportunity to explore the challenges of building a successful entrepreneurship marketplace, which is her startup idea.
“This class is really eye-opening for me because it’s not as straightforward as it seems,” she says. “When you think about the different sides of a marketplace, one would think if you build it, they will come, but it’s not the case. The design elements he talks about are very important to business success.”
During most classes, Holtz opens with a guest speaker, and his roster includes an impressive industry bench of leaders including Sudeep Das, head of Machine Learning/AI at DoorDash; Martin Manley, co-founder of Alibris and former U.S. assistant secretary of labor; Ania Smith, CEO of Taskrabbit; and Briana Vecchione, a technical researcher at Data & Society’s Algorithmic Impacts Methods Lab (AIMLab); among others.
Roberto Pérez, MBA/MEng 24, said they were drawn to the class in part because of the impressive guest speaker roster. Photo: Jim Block
Roberto Pérez, MBA/MEng 24, an entrepreneur in Mexico before coming to Haas, said they were drawn to the class for two reasons. “First, I knew that the professor had a great background and first-hand experience on this topic,” they say. “Second, I knew that the class would have a lot of guest speakers and that was interesting to me as this level of exposure is very valuable.”
Looking toward the future of online marketplaces, Holtz said he’s excited to see where entrepreneurs will take new technologies, such as generative AI, AR/VR, and blockchain-based tech. To that end, he said he expects the students will hear more from a group of investors and VCs who are guest judges at the last class—Raphael Lee, Vickie Peng, and Lindsay Pettingill.
“They weigh business pitches all the time and will have a better sense than anyone of where we are headed,” he said.
TOMS company founder Blake Mycoskie speaking at DSS.
When TOMS Shoes first hit the market in 2006, company founder Blake Mycoskie’s plan forever changed how people think about the for-profit business landscape. TOMS’ One for One business model was simple: Every time you sell an item to a customer, you give one away to someone in need.
Mycoskie said his idea came to him during a trip to Argentina.
Taking note of both the country’s popular alpargata shoes and, more importantly, the youth who could not afford to buy a pair, he was inspired to create a business that could help solve the problem.
“The idea was really simple,” Mycoskie shared at the Feb. 7 Dean’s Speaker Series, co-sponsored by the Center for Social Sector Leadership. “It was just: ‘What if I took these shoes that I see all these people wearing that I’ve never seen before, and sell them back in Venice, California, where I live, and every time I sell a pair, we give a pair to these kids that desperately need them for their school uniforms. The idea is, that if you buy a pair today, we give a pair tomorrow.”
That’s when “Tomorrow’s Shoes” became TOMS. As the brand grew in popularity, the company did not invest much money in traditional marketing strategies. (Watch the video below)
While a lack of marketing may seem antithetical to a for-profit business, it was exactly this alignment between values and practice that brought the company’s early success. “It’s this idea that our giving and our commitment to our impact had a greater influence on the customer than any type of marketing we could ever do,” Mycoskie said. “We were not necessarily going to be focused on the things that a traditional business was, but we really focused on giving and telling our story, and that’s why our model worked so well.”
From shoes, the company expanded its One for One model to include eyewear and safe drinking water. Mycoskie would donate a book for every purchase of his 2011 autobiography, “Start Something that Matters.”
Though he is no longer an owner of TOMS, Mycoskie’s leadership efforts have not stopped. He is currently a co-founder of the wellness program Madefor and is also investing in research into the use of psychedelics for therapeutic purposes.
“I really have this belief that, to found a successful company, it has to come from a passion, from a need, from something that you’ve seen in the world that you’re frustrated with or you don’t agree with or there’s a product you wish you had but you can’t buy,” Mycoskie said. “I believe that that’s where the great businesses come from.”
Read the transcript below:
– [Ann] OK, why don’t you all take your seats. Come and take your seats. Good afternoon, everybody. My name’s Ann Harrison. I’m the dean of the Haas School of Business. Welcome to today’s Dean’s Speaker Series. It is co-sponsored with the Center for Social Sector Leadership, otherwise known as CSSL. Nora here who runs it is sitting right here. I am absolutely thrilled to introduce our guest today, Blake Mycoskie. Blake’s story is a really powerful one.
He was on a trip in Argentina in 2006, and while he was there, he saw many children who had no shoes, and he was deeply affected by how difficult their lives were. And so, he decided to create TOMS Shoes. And in doing so, he created the One for One business model. And that’s a model where a customer, by buying a product, helps someone else in need every time they buy. And that was a complete revolution in the way to do for-profit business. Amazingly, over its lifetime, TOMS has provided over 96 million pairs of shoes for children around the world. Since then, TOMS expanded into other areas of vital needs, for example, eyewear and safe water.
Now, Blake didn’t stop there. He published a book, “Start Something That Matters.” And every time that book sells one copy, he donates a child’s book to a child. So that’s really amazing. His current ventures include co-founding a wellness program Madefor, and his philanthropic endeavors include working in the area of legalizing psychedelics—hopefully we’ll hear a little bit about that today, too. We’re incredibly fortunate today to have such a trailblazer here working in the area of socially responsible business, an area that Haas excels in and that we’re passionate about.
Blake, our students have so much to learn from you, I just want to thank you once again for coming to speak today to give your insights to our community. So just some quick housekeeping. When you sat down, you might have noticed a note card on your seat. If a question occurs to you, write down the question while you’re listening to the Q&A, and then you can hand it to our assistants here, my colleagues, they’ll be collecting them, and then there’ll be time starting about 1:10 for some Q&A. So now, I’m going to turn over the session today to two students who will be doing the Q&A, Eli Bresler and Yvonne Mondragón, and they will moderate today’s discussion. Take it away!
– [Yvonne] Thank you, hello, can you hear me? So Blake, thank you for being here. As we’ve mentioned before here at Haas, we care a lot about social impact and entrepreneurship, so everybody here is very excited to hear from you. To start us off, why don’t you tell us a little bit about your journey starting TOMS, kind of from your perspective, what influenced the One for One model and how that helped drive the success of TOMS?
– [Blake] OK, great, well TOMS started in Argentina, and there’s kind of a funny backstory of how I got there. How many people have seen the reality TV show, “The Amazing Race?” Oh, a lot of people. OK, did anyone see it 20 years ago when I was on it? Two people, yes! So my sister and I were on this TV show, “The Amazing Race,” and for those who haven’t seen it, you’re racing around the world for 30 days, and there’s a $1 million prize at the end. And interestingly enough, the last leg of the race was here in San Francisco. And unfortunately, at a very critical moment, my sister said, “We’re almost there to win the $1 million. Let’s stop and ask for directions to make sure we know where we’re going.” And as it’s such a cliche, as a man, I said, “No, I know exactly where I’m going. We don’t need to stop and ask.” And next thing I know, we were lost, and we lost the $1 million by four minutes. And after we lost $1 million by four minutes, about a month later, I got a text message from my sister, and it was this random string of numbers. And I thought, “That’s weird.” And I thought, “Well, maybe she kind of butt-dialed me or something, and that’s what came through on the text.” So I didn’t respond or anything. And then the next month, I got another text message, and it’s a different random string of numbers. And so I called her, and I said, “Paige, what’s with these text messages?” And she goes, “That’s the interest you owe me on my half million dollars.” And so, that was a great experience, but what, “The Amazing Race,” did was, it really took me to all these countries I had never been to. And Argentina was one of them. And so, I decided I wanted to go back to a lot of the countries. And so, in January of 2006, I took a trip to Argentina. I was there for about a month, and I experienced a bunch of different things. And one of the things that I experienced was, and it was the first time that I’d really seen this, was just really intense poverty. Just outside of Bueno Aires, I saw many kids in the street, and not wearing shoes and sniffing glue and just some really horrible things with these children. And at the same time, I noticed that a lot of the young people were wearing these slip-on shoes called alpargatas. And I grew up wearing Converse and Vans and kind of these thick, bulkier, slip-ons, but these were really different. And so, I asked my friend at the time about the shoes, and he said, “Yeah, the farmers wear them, the polo players wear them.” And I thought they were really interesting. In a very serendipitous way, I met a woman that was running a nonprofit, and they were specifically helping kids get shoes for school. The shoes was part of the uniform, and so many of these kids that I saw in the streets, the reason they were in the streets and not in school was ’cause their families couldn’t afford the uniform, which included a pair of shoes. And so, I had this kind of morning ritual where I drink my coffee and write in my journal about the day and have some of the things I’m thinking about and goals for the day. And when I was sitting on this farm that I was staying at in Argentina, I was writing in my journal, and this idea came to me and the idea was really simple. It was just: “What if I took these shoes that I see all these people wearing that I’ve never seen before and sell them back in Venice, California, where I live? And every time I sell a pair, we give a pair to these kids that desperately need them for their school uniform, and we’ll call it ‘Shoes for Tomorrow.’ The idea is, that if you buy a pair today, we give a pair tomorrow.” And most people think my name is Tom—it’s not. But that’s where the name TOMS came from, was “Tomorrow’s Shoes.” And we wanted to put the whole word, “Tomorrow’s,” on the tag, but it wouldn’t fit, so we shortened it to TOMS, and that’s how we got the name, yeah.
– [Eli] That’s really incredible, and as someone with two sisters in the crowd right now, I can only imagine that costing us all $1 million for four minutes, you’re probably catching grief about that today, so I empathize with that. We are on an MBA campus, and so, I think one of the things that we’re really curious about is the business of TOMS, and the One for One model signals a lot how you can have a profitable, successful enterprise and also have it do good, do well for the world. So I think one of the things we’re curious about is how you layer in social responsibility and what complexity that adds. What challenges have you faced in maintaining TOMS’ commitment to social impact while ensuring the company’s financial responsibility? What sacrifices do you have to make on both sides of that coin to make sure that both can succeed, financially and your social goals?
– [Blake] OK, well, I think maybe start in answering the question, just thinking about the financial aspects of the TOMS business model, there’s really kind of a magic formula that TOMS kind of created and that other businesses have followed. And it’s not necessarily just the One for One model. It’s this idea that our giving and our commitment to our impact had a greater influence on the customer than any type of marketing we could ever do. And so, while many companies might spend 10%, 15%, 20% of their margin on marketing, we spent basically zero. And instead, we took that money and we used it to pay for another pair of shoes, which was oftentimes less expensive than the marketing. And so, that’s why when we became extremely profitable, which was a kind of a surprise to me because when I started the, we didn’t even call it a business, we called it a project, we started the TOMS project, we priced the shoes based on how much it cost for us to make them in a guy’s garage in Argentina. So you can imagine when the business took off and all of a sudden we were working at big factories, the cost went down so much that our profit went up a lot. And so, we really had to focus on, to be successful as a business, we actually need to focus on our giving as much as anything else and telling that story of the giving. And I really learned that lesson in a really kind of funny way. I was in the JFK airport, we had just started TOMS and I was probably two, three months in and the only people we really sold TOMS to was my parents, their friends, my neighbors and I was living in Venice, California. And so, I was in New York trying to get new stores and I decided to go for a run right before I had to get to my flight and so I went to the JFK Airport not wearing TOMS, which was unique for me—at that point, I always wore TOMS. And so, I had my running shoes on, and I go to the American Airlines check-in counter, I’ll never forget this, it was kind of one of the most meaningful things the early days of TOMS for me, and I went to do the electronic check-in. And next to me, there was this woman wearing a red pair of TOMS, and I had never seen a stranger wearing our shoes. I mean, it was so cool! It was such a cool moment, and so, I’m kind of looking at her and I’m thinking, “Gosh, should I say something?” And so, I decide to say, “Hey, I really love these shoes you’re wearing, what are they?” And she says, “TOMS, TOMS Shoes.” And so, I’m doing the check-in. I’m like, “Oh, that’s cool.” And she literally physically put her hand on me and said, “No, you don’t understand! This is the most amazing company in the world!” She goes, “When I bought this pair of shoes, they gave a pair to a child in Argentina and there’s this guy who started, I heard he lives on a boat…” And she just went on and on. So I was feeling bad, and so I was like, I had to stop her. And I’m like, “Excuse me, actually, I’m that guy. I am Blake, I live on a boat, and I started TOMS.” And she goes to me, she looks at me like deer in headlights, she’s so, like, “What?” And she goes, “Why’d you cut your hair?” And I was like, “How did she know I cut my hair?” And I realized that she wasn’t just a customer, she was just totally invested in this, and she’d watched all these videos on YouTube of us giving the shoes away. And so, that’s how she knew I had cut my hair. But then, as I said thanks to her and went to my flight and started thinking about that conversation, I realized that this woman took the time out of her day at an airport to tell a stranger about TOMS. So how many people has she already told about TOMS? I mean, definitely all her friends and family and people on FaceBook, and so, I realized that the effect of just one customer connecting to our giving was going to have such a magnitude effect on how many shoes we would sell and ultimately give away. And so, that’s when we really decided that, as a business model, we were not necessarily going to be focused on the things that a traditional business was, but really focused on giving and telling our story, and that’s why our model works so well.
– [Yvonne] Yeah, that’s awesome to hear, to see that something you believe in, others also believe in, and it grew into what TOMS is today. Going off of that, large-scale innovation is something that is very hard to do. There are some products out there that we see that we think this large scale is inevitable. What are some of the challenges that you experienced with scaling up TOMS, and how did you face those challenges?
– [Blake] Well, the biggest challenge was making the dang shoes. I mean, I had never made shoes before. My Argentine polo playing partner, Alejo, had never made shoes before, and we met this guy who said he could make them in his garage, which he could do somewhat sufficiently. So really scaling the production once the business took off was really, really hard. What I found was, the key to that was finding people who did know how to make shoes and had done it for companies that really scaled. And so, we very early on were able to attract a really senior executive from one of the big shoe companies to come and start working in my apartment with us. I think he was employee number two or three, and the first two were interns off Craigslist. But Sean came to us, and I remember it was really cool. I went on a factory tour with him in Asia, and we were drinking beers one night, and I said to him, I said, “Sean, why did you come to TOMS?” Because, I mean, we’re paying you probably half as much as you as you made at this, I think it was Nike or Converse, I forget where he was at before, and he’s very senior in his role, he’d worked in the industry for I think 30 years. And I said, “‘Cause we’re paying you probably half or two-thirds what you’re paying, and you’re having to do the job of basically five people.” And it was so cool, he’s told me, he said, and this goes back to the giving being our key differentiator is, he said, “Because now my kids think I’m so cool, and my daughter thinks it’s so amazing that I’m helping kids get shoes. And so, that’s a big part of why I’m here.” And that’s also, I realized, just focusing on our giving and staying authentic to that was so important, because without Sean, we never would’ve been able to scale the business.
– [Eli] That’s really interesting. It feels like people are attracted to it because it’s solving two problems. It’s putting stylish shoes on people’s feet—that’s actually a fun problem to solve—it’s also putting shoes on the feet of people in need, and that’s an even more fun problem to solve. I think when we think about the most successful businesses, the most successful products, that’s what they fundamentally do. They solve problems that people can’t solve themselves. Velcro allows me to fasten my shoes, Advil allows me to reduce pain, inflammation, all that kind of stuff. How do you go about figuring out what problems people need to solve and how you can solve that problem? And even one step further, if you know how to solve the problem, how do you turn that into a business that can solve it for a lot of people? What does problem-solving and filling need look like for you?
– [Blake] OK, so I’m going to tell a story from a different company. So I’ve started, I think five or six companies, and most of them were before TOMS, and one of them was an online driver’s education company. Now, how I got into that business is really by listening to someone’s problem. I was at a barbecue for a television network that I’d also helped start, and my head of programming’s son was there, and he was 15 years old. And I asked him, “What are you doing this summer?” And he kind of said, “Uh, I’m learning to drive.” And I was like, huh, I mean, I would think that if you’re learning to drive, that’d be exciting for a 15-year-old. And I said, “Well, why is learning to drive not that exciting?” And he said, “Oh, I’m in this classroom, and it’s stinky, and it’s dark, and it’s in this mall, and I got this old lady teacher, and I can barely understand what she’s saying, and the cars are just crap.” And I mean, he was just super negative. And I was thinking, “Well, this is not good for our safety on our California highways. If this is how engaged or disengaged this kid is, like, we are in a lot of trouble.” And so, I went home that night, and this is right when MySpace was out and there was no Facebook yet, and some of you probably don’t even know what MySpace is, I’m realizing, and it was also when they were just starting to do things online that traditionally had been done in brick and mortar. And so, I thought, “Well, one way to solve this problem of these classrooms that are really not that inspiring, they’re usually in Sears malls or something, is to see if we could take this class online. And so, that could be more engaging, more entertaining, they could do it at their own pace.” And so, that was one idea. And I worked really hard with some legislature to get that changed in California so that we could do that. And so, that was Step One. And Step Two was, we got to get better cars, these cars have got to be more interesting. Now, this was right when Toyota came out with a Prius, and so, they had this huge desire to get people to know what an electric car even was. And starting with young people who might be more environmentally inclined was a big part of their thing. And so, I cold-called Toyota down in Torrance and got a meeting, and they decided to give us four cars at basically, at the cost. But the third thing was the teacher, and that was something that was going to be a little bit harder to do, because people who were kind of driver’s ed teachers were pretty—a very specific type. They’re usually retired, they were usually … I mean, I think everyone can remember the driver’s ed teacher. Unless you went to our school, ’cause I’ll tell you why ours was special, and you’d really remember because what we decided was these teenagers were not paying attention to their teachers at all. And so, we thought about, OK, how can we get them to pay attention? Now, we were lucky, ’cause we lived in Los Angeles, so we had a lot of actors and models. And so, we went and basically and hired a bunch of Abercrombie & Fitch models and actors that had all this free time, and we knew that teenagers pay attention to them. And it worked. And so, we had them as our driver teachers, and they would post pictures on MySpace of them and their teacher. And, so we solved all three problems at once!
– [Eli] That’s beautiful. I distinctly remember my driver’s ed teacher self-branded himself as Tupac Dave, and he was far too old to be trying to educate 15-year-olds about Tupac and not teaching them about driving. So I understand not learning anything and also trying to make sure kids actually learn how to drive so it’s safe. Pivoting a little bit, you’re mentioning a lot of partnerships, you’re talking about Toyota, you’re talking about these Abercrombie & Fitch models, you’ve been talking about this person that you met who was working at Nike came to work for you, and I think partnerships are key, and I know you often talk about collaboration as being key to success. I’m curious, what are the green flags that you look for in individuals, entities, partners of what you think would make them a trustworthy partner, a good faith partner, someone who you want to do business with, whether it’s an individual or an entity, kind of what’s your criteria? What are the green flags?
– [Blake] I mean, I think the most important thing in a partnership is: Is the partnership going to be seen as something that’s authentic, that makes sense? The best partnership we ever had was with AT&T. It was truly one of the biggest turning points in our business, and I would even say in my life. Because what happened was, I was on CNN doing an interview, and I did an interview, and they were asking about how many people worked at our company at this point, there were like 40 of us, and we were selling all over the world. And they were like, “How in the world do you run your business, when you’re in places like Ethiopia giving shoes or Cambodia or Guatemala and there’s only 40 of you and you’re competing against these big shoe companies?” And I pulled out my, it was funny, I had a BlackBerry back then. Do you guys remember BlackBerry? OK, good! I’m not as old as I think! And so I pulled out my BlackBerry on the CNN interview and I said, “This is how I do it.” And basically, I can run the business and do everything from my phone while I’m in Ethiopia. And so, this ad exec was in the back of a taxi in New York, and they saw this interview on CNN, and they thought, “Oh my gosh, if he uses AT&T, this is perfect.” And so, they called me, and luckily they asked me if I used AT&T, and I said, “Yes.” And that was one of the great, lucky moments of my life because they said, “We want to do a commercial about you and TOMS and your story, and we don’t want to create something slick, and we want to actually go with you on a giving trip to Argentina and just film you and then make a commercial.” And so, they made this commercial, and it was like lightning in a bottle. They loved it, they tested it, it tested well, they premiered it on the Masters Golf Tournament, which if you know that tournament, they only allow three different commercials for the entire term. And then they played it at the NBA Final Playoff games, everything. They ended up spending $30 million on a commercial to basically tell the TOMS story. But it was completely authentic because I use AT&T. And so, it worked really well for them. Our business grew 500% that year because of that commercial. And so, literally, I mean it was crazy how much it grew. And that was really the beginning of our mass growth. But that partnership was so important, and the reason it worked, to your question, is because it was completely authentic.
– [Eli] Thank you.
– [Yvonne] Yeah, that’s a great partnership story. Moving a little bit away from the business side and transitioning into leadership, I strongly believe every great venture has a strong leader behind it. You often talk about being a servant leader, one that aims to serve others. You talk openly about your failures and vulnerabilities. How do you think sharing some of those experiences have shaped you into the leader you are today?
– [Blake] Hmm, thank you. Well, I think when you hear the term, “servant leader,” I think it’s a really important term. And it goes back to the fact of, in most businesses, your employees that are on the front line are serving customers, you hear that phrase. And in order for them to really serve your customers, they need to be served from their managers, and I think that’s really the job of a manager or an executive, is not just to lead the vision of the business, but to really serve those that are working for them so that they feel empowered to really serve the customer. I think, also, leaders really set the culture, and I think talking about failures and vulnerabilities, you really, I believe, need to set a culture where it’s OK to fail. I always say “If I’m going to fail, I want to fail fast.” So I don’t waste a lot of time and money failing, but I learn from it, and I move on. And so, I think it’s really important that as a leader, that you show that failures are not going to be reprimanded. If anything, they’re going to be celebrated because what did we learn from that failure? And I think that’s a really important part of leadership.
– [Eli] I love hearing that. And I think one other thing we hear a lot of successful entrepreneurs talk about is luck. So learn quick from your failures, but also, you have to have some luck sometimes. Some say they create their own luck and that they earned it and they built that luck, and if they didn’t work as hard and put themselves in those situations, that luck wouldn’t have happened. Others say, “A beautiful opportunity fell in my lap and I got lucky that my idea worked.” So I’m curious what you think about luck and how much luck has played into your success.
– [Blake] I mean I’m a lucky guy for sure. So I think there is some truth to this idea that the harder you work, the luckier you get. But I also think that, sometimes just an idea, I mean, how do we have an idea? Start there: I’m sitting on a farm in Argentina, and this idea is somewhat downloaded or transmitted to my brain that then goes to my journal that then goes to starting a business that then goes to kind of changing the face of business across the world—I can’t take responsibility for that. I mean, from a spiritual perspective, I don’t really understand how that came about, but I feel really lucky that I was the one that got to do it. And so, I do think that you can make your own luck, and you have to work hard, but I also think that in certain businesses or certain ideas that come and really have a huge effect on culture, that idea was just, its time was to come. And the person that got to bring it to the world is pretty lucky, so I feel lucky.
– [Yvonne] Yeah, that’s great. I think we’re all hoping for some, a little bit of luck, out here to go on to our next endeavor. So your ventures have given us shoes, provided safe drinking water, and restored vision of countless individuals at a global scale. Going forward, where do you think the greatest need will be and what new business models outside of the One for One model have you been excited about or you’ve seen actually work?
– [Blake] Well, I think if I was an entrepreneur starting out today, I would be spending a lot of time looking at green energy. I think that one of the biggest problems facing our species right now is the climate. And I think there’s going to be so many opportunities—there already have been so many opportunities, so many fortunes built—focusing on how we can live in a more sustainable way. But it’s something that I don’t have a lot of experience or expertise in. But I think that’s where I would really be focused ’cause I think that there’s just going to be, I mean, technology and innovation is our only way out. And so, when there’s a necessity, there’s usually great opportunities for entrepreneurship.
– [Eli] I think half of my classmates here who are going into green energy and climate tech just got really excited, so thank you for that. The future is bright, my friends. I do also want to ask about another interest that you have in something that you’ve pledged time and resources towards, which is the legalization of psychedelics. And I just want to know, what inspired you to get involved with that and where do you think the opportunity is for that to succeed? Or just any general thoughts about that space, which is kind of new and upcoming?
– [Blake] Sure, I mean, I’m really excited about this. I feel like this is really at the beginning of a new frontier in how we help address so many mental health challenges. I’ve struggled myself with depression, I know many people that have, and I know many people that have taken the traditional route of pharmaceuticals and talk therapy and have not had success. I had the opportunity, gosh, it was six, seven years ago, a friend of mine, famous podcaster, Tim Ferriss, many of you probably know, called me and had known that I had worked with psychedelics myself and had found them very beneficial, and we had shared that with each other and in private, and he said the John Hopkins is thinking about creating the first-ever center for psychedelic research in the country, and they’re looking for a few philanthropists to kind of step up and help in Dallas. And at that point, most of my giving had been through TOMS, and then also a supporter of some of these nonprofits like Charity: water that I’m a big fan of, and so this was, kind of, giving to a university and helping endow a department for psychedelic research, this was really kind of outside of my scope, but I realized, and Tim really helped me understand and see that there was going to be very few opportunities as a philanthropist to have their dollars be so leveraged because if this worked and John Hopkins could show the effects of psilocybin or MDMA or LSD on different mental health challenges, that this could be the beginning of legalization and really our society accepting that these are not necessarily drugs, but they’re actually medicines. And so, I made that donation, and it was the largest donation that I had made, to date at that time, and then about two years later, there’s an organization called MAPS that’s been working really hard to put MDMA through the FDA, mainly for helping with PTSD. And they were at a critical place in their FDA, kind of path, and they needed to raise, I think, $10 million. And so, interestingly enough, Tim Ferriss called me again. And Tim and a guy named Joe Green were putting together this round and trying to raise this for the nonprofit, and they explained the benefit, especially to many of our veterans. The statistic that haunts me every day when we think about our veteran community is that 17 veterans a day commit suicide. I mean, that’s more people are dying of suicide than dying combat now, and that to me is just inexcusable. And so, seeing how MDMA can have an effect on that, in helping with the PTSD and depression that many of them experience was really an amazing opportunity for me. And so, I made that investment, and then I just kind of sat back and watched these two for about four or five years. And then, a couple years ago, I decided to get more engaged and more involved. I made an investment here in the Berkeley Center for Psychedelic Science. I continued to help John’s Hopkins. I’ve worked with the VA now on some projects there. And what I’m finding is, I like things to happen fast. I think as an entrepreneur, that’s kind of one of our characteristics. This is going to be a long process. I mean, this is something that I probably commit the rest of my life to because that’s how long it’s going to take for things to really become legal, to have regulated access. We’re working on a bill through the legislature in California right now to create regulated access for PTSD, for MDMA and psilocybin, that’ll go to the governor’s desk next year around September. So there’s a chance that it gets passed, which will then really change the landscape across the country. But this, to me, is the most exciting kind of science advancement that we could have that could have the biggest impact on what really is a health epidemic in our country with mental health issues. So I feel really, really lucky. It’s kind of like when TOMS idea came to me and I got to be part of a change in the way that business is done, I feel really lucky that now I get to be a part of a way that hopefully we help millions if not billions of people around the world with mental health issues.
– [Eli] Thank you so much. I do want to thank you for all that. I’m very passionate about this space personally. Do I wish I had my own Tim Ferriss? Absolutely. But otherwise just interfacing with those.
– [Blake] Oh, be careful. Tim Ferriss has been very expensive for me.
– [Eli] OK! That’s true, that’s true, that’s true. But no, it’s a huge need. And I think I could ask about 200 follow-up questions about that, but I want to be conscious of time. We have a lot of questions here from the audience. So the last question we want to ask you is, you’re sitting in front of a room of aspiring leaders, entrepreneurs, people who are going through their MBA or teaching at this program so that they can make a real difference. And so, just for the aspiring leaders in the room, whatever capacity that is, do you have any last words of advice, parting pieces of wisdom just for us aspiring leaders?
– [Blake] Oh man, that’s always the hardest question because, do I really sit here and give you advice? I mean, I’m not that much older than most of you guys in the room. I mean, I think, we were talking about this back there, and so I would say, if you have entrepreneurial desires, then this is advice that I think is particularly for you. And that is, that I really had this belief that, to found a successful company, it really has to come from a passion, from a need, from something that you’ve seen in the world that you’re frustrated with or you don’t agree with or there’s a product you wish you had but you can’t buy. I really believe that that’s where the great businesses come from. I think it’s very dangerous to come get your MBA, learn about entrepreneurship and be like, OK, I want to be an entrepreneur, I’m just going to go start a business, without the passion behind it, just ’cause you think you’re going to make money. I’ve seen most of those businesses fail, to be honest. And so, if you make making money the reason you’re getting into entrepreneurship, I think it’s dangerous. I think if you make the change you want to make or the product you want to create or the service you want to provide because you deeply care about it, the reason you’re becoming entrepreneurship, then the money will follow. And so, that is what I would say is kind of one of the main pieces of advice I have for entrepreneurs. The second piece of advice, I’m going to give two now, I just realized there’s another one, and this is going to be super contrarian to this group, I can tell already. ‘Cause you’re spending so much money to get your MBA here. And so, as soon as you graduate, you’re going to have a ton of pressure, yourself, your student loans, your parents perhaps, to go out and get a job that will pay the most amount of money for a job that you can get. And that makes sense, initially, but the truth is, no matter how much money you make working at a bank or a consulting firm or whatever, it’s not going to actually have that big of impact on how much money you make in your life. And I’m not saying making money is the only reason that we work, but it is one of the reasons. And so, what I tell people is, “Instead of going out and just chasing the biggest paycheck right away, think about what you’re most passionate about and invest your time, at least for a few years, in that without the pressure to pay those loans back right away or to make as much money as possible.” Because what usually happens is, if you follow your passion and you do something that you’re really deeply interested in versus just trying to make money, you become really good at it. And when you become really good at anything, usually you make money at it. And so, that I know is probably falling on some deaf ears, but that’s fine. And you think I’m naive and idealistic, and it’s easy for me to say ‘cause I’ve already made money, but I really have seen, I’ve given that advice to undergrads and MBAs over, probably, 15 years of speaking now, and I’ve had people come up to me or write me emails or letters years later and say, “That really made an impact,” because they ended up getting into something that they deeply cared about, and they got really great at it. And then they made the money, so there you go.
– [Eli] That’s brilliant, thank you so much Blake. Turn it over to Nora!
– [Nora] So first, I want to thank Blake for starting off with a loss, we don’t do that very much in business school, and I want to really acknowledge Eli and Yvonne who came up with the questions and posed them so well, don’t you think?
– [Blake] Yes, absolutely.
– [Nora] So my name’s Nora Silver, I’m a faculty director for the Center for Social Sector Leadership, we call CSSL. And I’m an adjunct professor here, and Ann was kind enough to share this Dean’s Speaker Series with us. Before we open it up for your questions, which I do have here, thank you very much. I have a few for you. How many of you are Berkeley or Haas students? OK, how many of you came here in order to make a difference or create social impact at Berkeley or Haas? How many came here for that? OK, about half. Do we have any alumni here? Welcome back. Do we have any friends and family of Blake or of CSSL? Yay, Ella! OK, so I want to take a minute with the students in particular, whatever you came here for. If you are curious about the kind of innovation that Blake made or the kind of career path that he took, I want you to know, do you know that you can explore it through CSSL? And I want to point out a couple things. Gloria, would you stand up? Gloria is right now teaching a course called Reinventing Capitalism for a Sustainable, Humane and Equitable World. It’s offered this spring, it will be offered next spring as well, stay there. In the fall, Gloria taught and will teach again Business Models for Social Impact. She teaches that with Kristin Groos Richmond. Both of them are serial social entrepreneurs who can introduce you to different models, such as that Blake described and describes in his book. Thank you, Gloria. For those of you who want to found something with social impact, we do have an impact startup disco. It’s an intensive weeklong with Jorge Calderon that will walk you through those initial kind of scary steps. And lastly, I’m going to be teaching in the fall a course on social movements. I’m exploring teaching that if that’s what you’re interested in. We have a lot of experiential programs, and one I want to point out to you, ’cause it’s coming up. If any of you are interested in trying exploring a Social Impact Summer Internship, we have a program that will supplement your salaries if that’s what you’re worried about. So look for the HIIA with net impact, and we’ll let you know about that. And we have career advising, so I and CSSL’s executive director are serial social entrepreneurs. We have faculty—20 plus, would you raise your hands here? I see you, come on!—that teach on things and know about things in the world because they’re professional faculty, so they’re out there working on these issues at the same time that they’re teaching you, things like climate tech and global health and food and education and economic development. So whatever is stirred up in you from hearing about Blake doesn’t need to stop here. There are many more resources at Berkeley and at Haas available to you, depending on your interests, and I just want to make sure you know where you can come to start the journey. So there are people here to help you with your curiosity, with your thinking, with your next adventure, no matter what that will be. But now, we still have some more questions for Blake. So Blake, back to you, ready?
– [Blake] Sure.
– [Nora] Alright, you may not be ready for this one, but we’ll try.
– [Blake] Oh no.
– [Nora] “Have you paid your sister 500,000-plus interest?”
– [Blake] So how many people know this clothing brand called Aviator Nation? Raise your hand. Enough, OK, so my sister started this company, and I think Forbes last said that she’s a billionaire now, so I think she’s doing fine.
– [Nora] Maybe she should pay you back? No, I’m kidding. Alright, alright, so here’s the next question: “TOMS was a pioneering business model, and I think received disproportionate scrutiny and criticism. How did you navigate it, and what would you have done differently in hindsight?”
– [Blake] Hmm, yeah, I mean that was a really hard thing for me because, hey, you hear this adage that the media loves to build you up so then they can kind of tear you down. And we got a lot of flak for what impact were we having on communities by just going out and offering a handout? And that was really hard, because all we were trying to do is do good. I mean, I was in Argentina, saw kids that didn’t have shoes, wanted to give them shoes. I didn’t come with a public health background, and so, we really at first were angry and frustrated and scared by this, and then we decided we had to lean into it. And so, ultimately what we did was, we hired some people who did have that background, who really understood the impact of giving free goods in these communities, how it impacted the local community, and that really led us to doing some local manufacturing. So we did a manufacturing plant in Haiti after the earthquake, which was really successful. We moved manufacturing also to Ethiopia, which created a lot of jobs in Ethiopia. And then the other thing we did is we realized that just giving shoes was not enough, that we had to be part of health programs as well. And so ,there’s a lot of health programs for worms that kids get in Central and South America, and so they want them to come in and take the medicine that would keep them from getting worms. But the incentive, a lot of kids wouldn’t come do it, they started saying, “If you come, you get a free pair of shoes.” And so, that was a big incentive, we worked with the Gates Foundation on that. And so, yeah, so we just had to get smarter and better and more sophisticated in how we did our giving.
– [Nora] Great, thanks. So, “How have your previous ventures, you mentioned four or five before TOMS, allowed you to be successful as an entrepreneur? What did you bring forward from those?”
– I mean, just lots of learning. A couple of them were moderately successful, and a couple of them were huge disasters. One disaster was after what I was on, it was not a disaster, but it was a failed business I guess, is after I was on “The Amazing Race,” I recognized that there was this tremendous amount of interest in reality stars and their 15 minutes of fame, but there wasn’t really a market for really kind of capitalizing on that. And so, I decided to start at, I think at the age of 25, I was very naive, I decided to start a television network, and it was an all-reality cable channel, in which I went around and bought the rerun rights of reality shows because once you kind of knew who won, they really had no interest at the networks. But what I realized is, people cared so much about the reality stars that you could pair the stars with the shows, and they could kind of almost do these shows where they gave commentary about what they were thinking when they did that move on, “Survivor,” or how they got that person outed on, “Big Brother,” or something like that. And so we were able to get the content for basically next to nothing, but we knew that advertisers really wanted to reach this audience, it was mainly an 18-to-34 audience, which was the key audience that advertisers wanted to reach. All these components showed that we were going to have incredible success in this business. The one thing we did not think about, which was the most important and the reason it failed, was there were only about 10 cable operators in our country at that time, and including DirecTV, satellite provider. And so, the cable operators, and then DirecTV, basically had a monopoly as to what content we see. It’s not like today where you can see it on Hulu or you can see it on a number of different streaming networks, obviously YouTube being one of the dominant players. So we basically had an amazing product, people wanted it, and we had advertisers willing to pay for it, but our only way we were going to get anyone to ever see it was through these cable operators. And they had no need for another network. I mean, they had 400 channels already. Getting one more was not going to have anyone all of a sudden decide to pay for cable television. They were paying for cable television for many other reasons already. And so, they basically said, “No, we’re not interested.” And so, we ended up going out of business. It was incredibly painful, I had to lay off like 40 people, it was a really challenging, challenging situation. And what I learned from that was, I never wanted to be in a business again where so few people had the power to make it work or not work. And so when I started TOMS, the great thing was, there’s thousands of stores in America that sell shoes, and so, I didn’t have to go out and get this one big fish customer, I could go and focus on one after another, after another, after another. And so, that was one of the real lessons that I learned from an earlier business that failed, that really helped me as I thought about TOMS.
– [Nora] Great, thank you. So, “The buy-one-give-one model used by TOMS has long-standing been a point of celebration, however, there have been shortcomings and challenges and all of that. Here’s the big question, Is it truly possible to be a business for good? And how should incoming business leaders incorporate,” I’ll read it as it says, “Corporate philanthropy into their company brands?”
– Absolutely, my mic, hello? I can just talk loud, too.
– [Nora] We’re trying to broadcast, though, hold on.
– [Blake] I could juggle.
– Hello, great, I don’t know how to juggle. I would love to learn though. So yeah, I mean I think that there’s a lot of examples of businesses for good out there now, TOMS being one of them. I think the key is to really focus on kind of three things, and you hear this a lot of time in conscious capitalism, the three Ps: people, planet, and the profit. By doing that, you can really build a business where all those stakeholders are equally benefiting. I think, I will say the bad news in all this is, is that, and because of the success of TOMS and other companies like TOMS, it’s not as novel to be a business for good as it was when we started. When we started, there was nothing like this. I mean, there was Ben and Jerry’s that had been giving, there was the Body Shop that had been giving, Anita Roddick, but neither of them built their whole business on it like we did with TOMS. And so, we really kind of pioneered this and several other businesses as well. But now, today, if you were starting a business, I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day and they were saying, “OK, well we’re going to incorporate this giving model, helping people get clean water, et cetera.” And they’re going to invest a lot of money in that. And I said to them, and they thought it was weird coming from me, I said, “I don’t think you should do that.” I was like, “I don’t think there’s going to be enough return on your social investment to make it work,” I talked about from a marketing perspective, “because so many other companies are already doing it.” So I think now what I would say for entrepreneurs that really want to do good in business is: “It’s really important to incorporate it into the business model itself.” So to do it as an add-on, or if you do this, we give this, I think can be more difficult, but if the actual business itself, and that’s why I use the example of green energy, if the business itself is making the planet a more sustainable place, then it is a business that’s doing good. But it’s also not necessarily having to carve out a percentage of its margin to do so.
– [Nora] OK, and the final question from the group is, “You talk a lot about conscious capitalism and for-profit business; and in your book, you also herald or celebrate nonprofits and philanthropists, and many people draw divisions between those, but you don’t. Can you talk a little bit about why you don’t or how you see that?”
– [Blake] Well, what I tried to do when I wrote this book, which is a long time ago now, as I’m thinking about it, and I’m trying to remember some of the things that I said, but I tried to really highlight two different organizations, businesses that were innovative and they’re giving and doing good like TOMS, but then also some of these new nonprofits that were being created that were operating more like businesses. And so, I’ll use Charity: water as a great example. How many people know Charity: water? Raise your hand. Oh wow, OK, you should definitely check out Charity: water. Not a lot of people here know, but they’ve been incredibly innovative. My friend Scott Harrison started it the same year I started TOMS, and his idea was to bring water to as many people in the world that need it as possible. And if you look at the marketing of Charity: water, it’s as innovative and as slick as any new Silicon Valley-backed tech startup. I mean, the branding is unbelievable. The storytelling is unbelievable. It competes with any business in terms of marketing, but it’s a nonprofit. They also do really, really innovative marketing campaigns asking people, especially young people, people who are 15, 16, 17 years old to give up their birthday in order to raise money for wells. And they found this to be incredibly successful, especially with social media, ’cause they can message out to all their friends, “This year instead of having a party or bringing a present, I’m asking you to donate $10 for every year I’ve been born or whatever.” And they’ve raised, I mean literally they’ve raised I think $300 million in the last couple years through these campaigns. So I also try to talk about something like that in the book as well ‘cause I think, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of big problems in the world that we want to solve, and sometimes the right vehicle is a nonprofit, like in the psychedelic space, for instance, and then sometimes it is a for-profit like TOMS. And so, I don’t really see a distinction between either, as long as the organization is being used to address a major problem in the world.
– [Nora] Great, thank you, Blake. We’re hitting our time, and I’m going to take a little editorial freedom and go off script here. Alan Ross, would you come up here? Alan does not know I was calling him up here, so bear with us. Alan is doing something I think is very innovative as a philanthropist, and he sent out an email just yesterday asking us to vote. So Alan, I want to relinquish the final two minutes to you to make a pitch to the group.
– [Allan] Well, thank you so much, that’s very sweet. It’s very surprising. I started something a couple years ago called the Chris Kindness Award, and everyone calls me Chris. I’m Alan. I named it after my kids’ preschool teacher who died, just the sweetest guy I ever met, and I give $1,000 every month to someone in Berkeley who does a kind act, random acts of kindness. We’ve had a gas station attendant, someone who volunteers, Children’s Hospital, a teacher, this month was a 16-year-old at Berkeley High who’s from Afghanistan, just arrived in America a year ago, who helps newcoming kids from all over the world acclimate to Berkeley High, sweet, sweet stories, and we just announced our three finalists for this month on Monday, one of whom is a Haas person, former student of mine of 20 years ago, Olive Davis. Anyone know Olive? Wonderful woman who was with YA for a while, Young Entrepreneurs at Haas, and now she started BBAY [Berkeley Business Academy for Youth] several years ago, giving back to the community, bringing in youngsters from middle school to Haas to educate them about business, to get them interested, so they’ll go on to college and all. Wonderful person, anyone can vote. ChrisKindnessAward.org, voting goes through Friday. If you want to vote for Olive, that would be wonderful. And we need nominations—we’re seeking nominations all the time. Go on our website, nominate anyone who lives, works, or goes to school in Berkeley, and we’re raising money now. We now give second- and third-prize cash prizes, also, and we’re trying to grow throughout the community, and beyond Berkeley as well. So ChrisKindnessAward.org, thank you so much, Nora. Thank you, dean, appreciate it, thank you.
– [Nora] So we know that many of you are doing meaningful and interesting things for your local communities, for your friends, for your family. We want to thank you for all of that, for Blake, Yvonne, Eli, Ann, thank you for coming, thank you for listening. We hope you are inspired to go out and try something really meaningful to you that you’re passionate about in the world, and Haas is here to help you, thank you very much.
Lizzie Hoerauf, MBA 24, is part of the inaugural Impact CFO cohort.
When Lizzie Hoerauf, MBA 24, joined Berkeley Haas, she had a vision of what she wanted to do post-graduation.
“My goal was to bring the finance and operations business acumen I gained from an MBA program back to organizations with missions I care deeply about,” said Hoerauf, who has a background in nonprofit management, including working for Yosemite National Park.
At Haas, Hoerauf found her calling in the Impact CFO program, an innovative initiative designed to create a new generation of CFOs equipped to lead foundations, nonprofits, and other social enterprises.
She’s not alone in this journey; Hoerauf is part of the inaugural cohort of 14 MBA students united by a goal to develop strong finance and analytical skills while having an impact on society.
(Hear about Impact CFO from a few students in video below.)
Workshops, speaker series, and networking events complement hands-on projects and industry mentorship, ensuring a comprehensive learning experience. Another key program feature is an internship that bridges impact and finance, helping students gain insights into the evolving role of a CFO in the social sector.
Raising the financial leadership bar
Silver emphasized the program’s unique approach: “Today’s social sector organizations need more than just accountants who can close the books; they need strategic thinkers with an MBA-level understanding.” This sentiment echoes throughout the program, raising the bar for financial leadership in the social impact realm, she said.
“Today’s social sector organizations need more than just accountants who can close the books; they need strategic thinkers with an MBA-level understanding.” — Nora Silver.
Even-Tov highlighted the diverse backgrounds of the program’s candidates: from seasoned finance professionals seeking meaningful impact to experienced nonprofit professionals aiming to amplify their fiscal expertise. “The program challenges its participants to balance the mission of the organization with financial stability,” he said. “Without wise business decisions, these organizations will not be able to achieve their social missions.”
CFOs in demand
Demand for such specialized financial talent is high, especially in California, a hub for the social impact sector, Silver said. “Of the 86,203 U.S.-based foundations, 22,347, or 26%, are located in California and hold assets of more than $722 billion,” she said. The base salary range for a senior finance manager or director in the sector is $120,000-$140,000.
Victor Ringeard, MBA 24, plans to intern at LifeLong Medical Care.
Mentorship is a cornerstone of the Impact CFO program—and mentors in the Impact CFO program hail from industries including education, health care, impact investing, government, humanitarian aid, housing, art & culture, and philanthropy.
Hoerauf’s mentor, David Samuels, MBA 86 and CFO of REDF, exemplifies this. Interning at REDF, Hoerauf uses her MBA skills in a real-world setting, applying her learnings from courses like Strategic Management of Nonprofit Organizations and Social Sector Solutions.
Victor Ringeard, MBA 24, who is transitioning from a healthcare consulting background, anticipates a transformative experience at LifeLong Medical Care under CFO Brent Copen. Ringeard aims to grasp the nuances of nonprofit finance in healthcare and learn how to influence stakeholders who may not have a financial background, all the while making healthcare more accessible in the Bay Area.
A deeper understanding of the role
Yvonne Mondragón, BS 16, MBA 25, is blending her investment banking career with her nonprofit commitments. “Understanding the CFO role deeper will enrich my contributions to both sectors,” Mondragón, who serves on the board of the East LA Community Corporation, said.
Delphine Sherman, CFO of BRIDGE Housing, is mentoring Alex Weinberg MBA 24, who is interested in low-income housing, a field where BRIDGE Housing is a major player.
Sherman, the former CFO of Haas, said she believes that the Impact CFO program is not only shaping future leaders, but “molding a new financial paradigm in the social sector.”
“Impact CFO will fill a huge need for strategic, forward thinking, systematic, efficiency-driven, change agent CFOs in the social sector,” she said.
Looking ahead, Even-Tov and Silver envision building one of the largest networks of finance professionals in the social sector within a decade.
“We want the Impact CFO program to stand as a beacon, illuminating the path for future CFOs committed to making a difference,” Even-Tov said..
