OneHaas

Episode #33: Host Sean Li talks to MBA student Steffi Decker (‘20). They discuss her background in digital marketing for political campaigns, how she ended up at Haas, and how to reflect, identify your goals, and adjust how you spend your time accordingly.

Episode Highlights:

• Steffi built and ran a digital marketing agency in DC focused on policy and advocacy back in the late 2000s when nobody but the young upstarts knew anything about digital.
• During the 2010 campaign, a big local company saw their digital political ads and it landed them their first corporate client.
• Steffi and her partners grew the firm to 25-30 people and then worked with her colleagues over 2 years on a transition plan for her to leave the company.
• Between leaving the company and starting at Haas, she traveled alone for months, biking up the coast of Thailand, and exploring Laos and other countries.
• Steffi learned to be self-directed and determine what would make her happy and fulfilled.
• You don’t have to travel to Thailand alone for three months to figure it out; each week, reflect on which experiences you had that you found meaning and value in, and adjust accordingly.
• She knew very little about business school and didn’t know anyone who had gone to business school because she worked in politics, but she doesn’t recommend going into it that uninformed.
• Steffi identified what tangible things she wanted to get out of her time at Haas and deliberately oriented her time around those things; if she’s asked to do something and she can’t see how it moves her towards one of those goals, she doesn’t do it.
• Haas could do better at prioritizing diversity and representation in the student body, in faculty, in the curriculum, and everywhere.
• Steffi interned at New Media Ventures, a partisan non-profit investor that invests in progressive civic tech and political organizing tools.
• She’s driven to help people at the biggest scale possible.

3 Key Points:

1. Business school is more demanding than Steffi anticipated; it is not a decision to take lightly.
2. Reflecting on your experiences is an important way of learning what’s important to you and how to align your life more in that direction.
3. Identifying your goals is the first step towards knowing how to spend your time.

Tweetable Quotes

• “Having all that space and time helped me learn to be really self-directed and have to look deeply inside of myself and think about what would give me meaning and joy and purpose every day.” –Steffi Decker
• “I reflected, what do I want to walk away from this institution with? And I identified those and wrote those down. And that enabled me to start organizing my time towards those.” –Steffi Decker

Episode #32: Host Sean Li talks to David Corfield FTMBA'19. They discuss his company LifeWork, how he became an entrepreneur and ended up at Haas, how business skills are transferable across industries, and more.

Episode Highlights:

• David grew up in Essex, about an hour outside of London, and began his entrepreneurial experience with a company called Folder Monkey that created custom folder systems for students, but it quickly got shut down.
• In his first year at McKinsey, he was thrown feet first into the fray, but it was also his only exposure to the business world prior to pursuing his MBA.
• David pursued his MBA in California because of its proximity to the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial ecosystem.
• David wants to be able to see the tangible impact of his work.
• The biggest pain point for freelancers that David talked to is income insecurity.
• LifeWork aims to ease payment issues that freelancers encounter and wants to provide, essentially, an HR department or back-office support for freelancers.
• LifeWork differs from other platforms like Upwork or Fiverr because it is client-focused instead of being marketplace driven.
• One of LifeWork’s core values is transparency.
• You shouldn’t be afraid to share your ideas; if someone else takes it and executes it, it just proves that you have good ideas.

3 Key Points:

1. As a freelancer in any industry, you need to have some business skills.
2. People now value autonomy and purpose in their work more than they value stability.
3. Don’t hoard your ideas, but share them for the sake of solving problems.

Tweetable Quotes

• “The entrepreneurial spark that I knew I had was starting to be squashed by these big, slow-moving companies and our role to advise them and never actually see that impact.” –David Corfield
• “There is no solution right now that enables flexibility, which is obviously why people become freelancers in the first place, and also provide security.” –David Corfield
• “I think I’d say to any student anywhere that is in close proximity to a business school, it is the perfect time to start something.” –David Corfield

Resources Mentioned: 

• Email Sean: [email protected] 
• https://www.lifeworkonline.com/
• David Corfield
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidjcorfield
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidcorfield
• Medium: https://medium.com/@david_corfield

Episode #31: Jason Syu, EWMBA ’19, was born in the US and due to family reasons grew up in Taiwan for the majority of his formative years. He moved back to the US in high school and received his degree in Electrical Engineering at Ohio State University. After college, Jason went on to work for Texas Instruments starting in manufacturing and acquisitions, and later in automotive semiconductors, specifically in Advanced Driver Assist Systems (ADAS). He then transitioned into his current role as a Hard Test Engineer at Lyft in the Autonomous Vehicle Division. Jason shares with us how he decided to pursue an MBA to network with like-minded individuals interested in building businesses. We hear a little about his start-up experiences during his time at Haas, including launching a caffeinated chewing gum. 

Episode #30: Samantha Tannor (FTMBA ’20) joins us today to talk about her career in food, the FTMBA experience, and Tannor’s Tea, her own plant-based superfood concentrate company. Sam graduated from college at USC and went into the grocery industry as a District Manager at ALDI, a low-cost grocery chain. She talks about how that experience helped prepare her for life as an entrepreneur, how Haas has helped, and her love for matcha. We get to hear some fascinating details on Tannor’s Tea around product development, including how she found a food scientist to help refine the product taste. Furthermore, Sam is one of the co-presidents for Food@Haas and speaks about incorporating Food Summit into Career Week, and how Food@Haas is a blend of both a career-focused and social club here at Haas.

Episode #29: Double Bear Dana Zhang, EWMBA ’21, shares with us her upbringing from China to LA. She then went on to study economics for her undergraduate degree at Berkeley and joined Wells Fargo early in her career as a relationship manager for international banking partnerships. Dana then continued on to Lending Club in a similar capacity helping Lending Club pivot from a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) lending service to connecting with banking institutions to offer more lending services for clients. We delve into why Dana decided to come back to Berkeley for her MBA when many of us thought we were done with school after our Bachelor degree. Dana shares with us one of her most memorable and influential classes, Distinguished Teaching Fellow Peter Goodson’s Turnarounds class, and how that influenced her career trajectory into investment banking. We continue on to chat about how unique and supportive the Berkeley Haas Career Management Group is in being inclusive with Evening and Weekend students for on-campus recruiting. We finish on her tips for prospective students after spending 3 semester at Haas.

Episode #28: Having been passed the torch from his predecessors to make Haas more Diverse, Equitable, and Inclusive, Evan Wright FTMBA ’20, shares with us the importance of these initiatives at Haas and beyond. Evan starts his humble roots, born and raised, in Southeast Washington D.C. He was educated in the DC public school system until 9th grade when he received a full scholarship to attend the well-known Sidwell Friends School, a school attended by the likes of children of the President of the United States (Obama, Clinton, Roosevelt). He shares with us what it was like to go from a public school with predominantly underrepresented minorities (URM) to one of the most prestigious schools in the nation but predominantly white, and the shocks he experienced those formative years of his life. After high school, he went on to study Biomedical Engineering at Brown University. After Brown, we hear about his experiences from Asia to DC to Chicago to Japan and more. Evan then joins us at Haas and serves as the VP of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) on behalf of which he gave a presentation, at the dinner where we met, on Allyship and what it means to be an Ally. Check out the example we mentioned on the show of Allyship in action at the Sacramento City Council Meeting here.

Episode #27: Harry Goldberg, MBA/MPH ’20, hails from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He studied biology at Emory University and joined Deloitte as a strategy consultant in healthcare after graduating. Healthcare has been a big part of his life, leading him to internships in HealthTech VC and Verily - an Alphabet subsidiary. His interests also pushed him towards pursuing the intensive dual degree Masters in Business Administration and Masters in Public Health program. Harry shares with us what the dual degree program is like and the wealth of opportunities he’s been able to tap into at Berkeley Haas. We dive into topics such as healthcare AI to get a glimpse of how artificial intelligence and machine learning may shape our future. He further shares his experiences as Co-President of Haas Venture Fellows, VP of Haas InSite Venture Fellows, VP of Haas Healthcare Association, and more.

Episode #26: Austin Yoder, EWMBA '21, was born in New York but grew up in Hong Kong and Jakarta. He studied Chinese at Georgetown University and proceeded to move to Taiwan shortly after graduating to start a tea company amongst other entrepreneurial endeavors. Austin currently works at the Stanford Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (CES) where his team puts out research reports on Search Funds. Check it out here! Austin continues to pursue his passion for entrepreneurship and came to Berkeley Haas to learn how to be a better business operator. He shares with us the benefits of the MBA education and how it can complement the Search Fund model for budding first-time entrepreneurs.

Episode #25: Konrad Kennedy (FTMBA '20) is visiting Haas for the semester on an exchange from the ESADE MBA program in Barcelona where he is the president of the Entrepreneurship Club. Konrad graduated from Warwick University in the UK and subsequently started his career in FinTech in London. After the first startup he joined was acquired by Apple he joined Barclays' leadership rotational program where he focused on product management and helped launch the world's biggest bank-run FinTech community. In the podcast, we discuss how Konrad has built an international career for himself, his interest in social entrepreneurship, what made him choose Haas for his exchange program and the differences between European and American MBA programs. 

Episode #24: Bree Jenkins, industrial engineer extraordinaire, of the FTMBA ’19 class starts from humble roots in the Midwest. She later moved to Georgia with her family to attend high school and college at Georgia Tech. She pursued her passion for math and science which lead her to a career in industrial engineering. Bree fires up while talking about her work at Disney World and for the Disney Cruise Lines in Florida, where she helped manage everything from the logistics of thousands of costumes to the planning of cruise ship renovations. We then talk about the 900-lb gorilla in the room, how despite diversity efforts at Haas and through programs such as the Consortium, there is still a severe underrepresentation of Black, Hispanic, and Native American students in MBA programs. Bree speaks candidly about the courage required to join a program where you are severely underrepresented and is unreflective of the general population. I ask her on advice for underrepresented students who may be sitting on the fence, students who may have been accepted to Haas but may choose another school where they feel better represented. We hear how Bree has been involved at Haas serving as the leadership of multiple clubs and serving on the student board for the Center of Equity, Gender, and Leadership. We top off with Bree sharing with us her exciting path ahead, post-graduation, as the Head of Operations at Hayward Collegiate, a community-backed K-6 charter school opening at the end of Summer. She is already helping brainstorm and plan how to make the learning environment more fun for both the kids and the teachers.