Owl Have You Know

By Rice BusinessSociety & Culture Business

Owl Have You Know episodes

April 12, 2023Human Moments Are Not Always Pretty feat. Dan Purvis ‘05
Dan Purvis says his passion for working for himself started in junior high when he began selling pieces of gum to classmates. Six companies later, it is safe to say Dan is a certified serial entrepreneur.

Dan graduated with honors in electrical engineering and an undergraduate fellowship from Texas A&M and was a Jones Scholar at Rice Business, where he earned an EMBA in 2005. His career began at National Instruments in the upper Midwest. After returning to his hometown Houston, he began building a division for his new employer. After his third successful sale, he co-founded Velentium in 2012, which took over as his full-time job.

Velentium is a professional engineering firm specializing in end-to-end support for designing and producing therapeutic and diagnostic active medical devices, intelligent products, and automated test systems for the medical, energy, and manufacturing industries. And in 2020, Velentium faced an unprecedented ask: partner with a small medical device company and a very large vehicle manufacturer to increase emergency ventilator production from hundreds per month to thousands per week—in just 28 days.

Dan shares with host Scott Gale ‘19 the risks he took early in his career to get him to the level of success he is at now, the importance of “work/life fit” and the incredible story of how Velentium became a major player in ventilator production in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Read more about Rice Business’ #1 entrepreneurship ranking four years in a row in Princeton Review and Entrepreneur Magazine.

Episode Quotes:

At the end of the day we are all just humans
30:11 - In competitive environments, somebody wins the bid, and somebody loses the bid. But then, when we get back to our humanity, we are all equal. We share this ball we live on. Right? And so, remembering to be empathetic, remembering to celebrate life events, remembering to look people in the eyes and remember things about them, remembering to be human, and not allowing even the busyness of a pandemic response, the ventilator project, to get in the way of that, I believe is really important.

Getting people involved in volunteering
03:34 - If you're thinking about going to Rice or just on your way towards graduation, you're going to have many moments in your career where you have the opportunity to step in, raise your hand, volunteer, and say, "That's me."

The origin story of Velentium
16:22 - The origin story of Velentium was not about running from something; it was about pursuing something. I had a dream of something greater, just something great. And so the idea that I could be at the helm of a culture-forward, family-first, unbelievably fast, highly technical organization. That was my dream.

On having valuable connections at Rice
09:33 - There's just an esprit de corps. There's a level of excellence. There's a level of connection within this town to the extent that you want to be a Houston business person. If you have a Rice MBA, you are connected to a very elite group of people that you can call colleagues and classmates. Certainly, fellow alum. And so, there's just a camaraderie at Rice that I enjoyed. But, deeper than that, there was a connection with the people of Rice that was really valuable for me.

Show Links:
Transcript
Guest Profile:
28 Days to Save the World: Crafting Your Culture to Be Ready for Anything
Velentium
Dan Purvis on LinkedIn
45 min
March 29, 2023Taking DEI Into the Future feat. Amanda Stewart ‘08
These days, you don't often find someone who's been with their job for maybe 5 or 10 years. Well, Amanda Stewart has been at Constellation for 15 years now and is still committed to helping the company grow.

Amanda earned a BBA from UT Austin in 2002, with a concentration in marketing, and an MBA from Rice Business in 2008. She is the vice president of retail operations for Constellation, the nation’s largest producer of carbon-free energy and a leading competitive retail supplier of power and energy products and services for homes and businesses across the U.S.
She sits down with host Scott Gale ‘19 to chat about the benefits of getting an MBA at a smaller school, what has kept her working with passion at Constellation for 15 years, and how her Japanese-American background and the internment camps of WWII are a central part of her family’s history and her commitment to DEI work.

Episode Quotes:

The value of working together
18:19 - If we understand how to work together better, we will deliver better results for the organization. We can become a high-performing team that delivers for the organization because we've created an environment where everybody's voice matters. You have a totally different experience than mine. If I learn from your experiences and then use that when we sit around a table to solve a problem, we'll come up with a better answer.

How her grandparents played an essential role in her passion for DEI
16:16 - The real story behind my passion for DEI comes right back to my grandparents. They had very high and very hopeful expectations. They believe that freedom, basic human rights, happiness, and a little success for our families was not only possible but probable for generations to come. And so, really, when I think about my DEI work and the work we still have left to do, I'm really motivated to do right by them and everything that they did for us.

What does inclusion look like
23:46 - That's what inclusion looks like. We hear different perspectives, and we understand them. We might not agree with them, but we embrace them, and we listen.

Leading an organization by embracing DEI
13:41 - As a leader in a huge organization, I feel a strong sense of accountability for creating a culture that embraces diversity, equity, and inclusion.

It’s impossible to not fall in love with the Rice community
03:12 - It's impossible not to fall in love with the Rice campus, the Rice community, and the business school. And that was probably one of the best decisions I've ever made in my career: to come back to Houston to do the full-time program at Rice. It was exactly what I needed at that point in my career. Where I wasn't really very specific about what I needed. I just knew it was something different, something original and unique, and I needed a little refresh at that point.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:
Amanda Stewart on LinkedIn
36 min
March 22, 2023 Encore Episode of The Index - Unmarketing: A Guide To Not Buying Anything
Every March, South By Southwest brings together innovators, changemakers, and leaders from all over the world to Texas.

To celebrate, this month we are revisiting episodes from The Index, a podcast collaboration between Texas Monthly and Rice Business at the 2019 South by Southwest festival, where the two entities co-hosted a pop-up experience in an Austin storefront.

We sat down with Professor Utpal Dholakia in episode 5 of our series. He is a marketing expert who encourages people to buy and consume prudently to maximize pleasure.

You can find more episodes of The Index coming up in this feed opposite weeks of our regular episodes of Owl Have You Know, or find them on our website.

29 min
March 15, 2023The Value of a Kind and Collaborative Community feat. Joanna Nathan ‘19
Joanna Nathan has been pretty busy since earning her MBA 2019. A biomedical engineer by trade, visionary, and serial entrepreneur, Joanna most recently became the CEO of Prana Thoracic, a Houston-based medical device startup dedicated to developing solutions for the detection and intervention of early-stage lung cancer.

She was formerly the manager of new ventures at the Johnson & Johnson Center for Device Innovation at Texas Medical Center (CDI @ TMC). And before joining J&J, Joanna was a venture fellow at Mercury Fund, a $300M venture capital fund focused on early-stage enterprise software.

Joanna joins with host Maya Pomroy '22 to share her career journey, passion for healthcare, deep connection to Rice, and how the heartbreaking loss of her young son serves as inspiration to continue her work in finding groundbreaking medical technologies to help others.

Episode Quotes:

Building the right skill set through Rice
07:25 - Innovation is very complex because the body is extremely complex. And biology is extremely complex. And taking the scientists and engineers and working with them on their incredible innovation, and then translating that into the business world, both in terms of telling the story of those technologies but also building the strategy around actually getting those technologies to the market and the patient. So that's why I wanted to find that skill set, and I thought Rice would be a great place to do that, particularly because of its entrepreneurial focus. And I came back specifically to build out all of those pieces. So storytelling, strategy, learning the investor mindset because I'd mostly been on the entrepreneur side of the table at that time.

On her transition from biomedical engineering to entrepreneurship
08:08 - I realized that I had an interest in developing this very particular skill set, which is building and telling the stories of technologies that could save lives.

On finding friends & community at Rice
08:08 - When I started at Rice Business, I'd already been in Houston for about a decade and I thought all of my friend slots were full, and I didn't need any new friends or community. But I ended up finding this incredible community of leaders that really served as a sounding board, and continue to serve as a sounding board for me, both for work and work issues and life.

Advice to new entrepreneurs:
15:04 - Of course there's a balance there, but you don't have to have everything neatly tied up in a little bow at every board meeting.

On preserving her son’s memory through her work:
22:17 - I think that whole experience, it's pushed me. Losing Lionel has pushed me to love harder, to lean into joy, to experience life to its fullest just like my kid, and to be a little wild like my kid as well.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:
Joanna Nathan on LinkedIn
34 min
March 10, 2023 Encore Episode of The Index - The Strangely Immovable Economics Of Live Performance
Every March, South By Southwest brings together innovators, changemakers, and leaders from all over the world to Texas.

To celebrate, this month we are revisiting episodes from The Index, a podcast collaboration between Texas Monthly and Rice Business at the 2019 South by Southwest festival, where the two entities co-hosted a pop-up experience in an Austin storefront.

In the first episode of this series, we’ll hear a conversation with Dean Peter Rodriguez on his research into what live performance reveals about our economic future.

You can find more episodes of The Index coming up in this feed opposite weeks of our regular episodes of Owl Have You Know, or find them on our website.

25 min
March 01, 2023Your Biggest Competitive Advantage Is Your Authentic Self feat. Takeya Green ‘22
From the moment Takeya Green stepped off the plane to visit Rice, she knew Houston was the city for her. The Chicago native earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. After getting her undergraduate degree in 2014, she joined Dow, in Freeport, TX, as a lead production engineer. She then joined Olin as a site logistics engineer in 2017, where she led an operations team of 40+ people.

After graduating in 2022, Takeya joined Citi as an investment banking associate in Houston, Texas. She works for the oil and gas and clean energy sectors.

With our host Scott Gale ‘19, Takeya shares her incredible journey from the chemical engineering lecture halls of a top-ranked program to the control rooms of world-scale chemical manufacturing facilities and from NRG Stadium cheering for the Houston Texans to now an investment banking career focused on clean energy.

She also reflects on being a Black woman in the STEM fields and overcoming the challenges placed in front of her, to being honored this year by the Texas Business Hall of Fame as a local leader.

The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice University Jones Graduate School of Business and is produced by University FM.

Episode Quotes:

On being your authentic self
23:55 - I really firmly believe your biggest competitive advantage is your authentic self because people are not okay with being themselves...it's such a freeing experience, and not everyone gets to experience it because people are really scared to be themselves. They are afraid of whatever consequences they've built up in their head. And so that is my motto, like, just be yourself. You're enough.

Your authentic self is your superpower
21:45 - Your biggest competitive advantage is your authentic self. Nobody can be you. That is your superpower.

On winning an award from the Texas Business Hall of Fame
37:34 - Going there to be around a caliber of people that I never thought I would ever, I wouldn't say I never thought I'd be around, but to actually be 31 years of age and have that much access to millionaires and billionaires of Texas? And be able to have that opportunity is phenomenal. This is why I say I, I feel like I was supposed to be living here in Houston.

On living in Houston
03:47 - I ended up doing Dow because I wanted to live in Houston. Houston has always been a city that, out of all the cities I ever went to, I just felt like I was supposed to be here.

Show Links:

Guest Profile:
Takeya Green on LinkedIn
40 min
February 15, 2023A Scholar of Scandal feat. Professor Anastasiya Zavyalova
They say all you have in business is your reputation. But in today's rapidly evolving world with social media lending everyone a microphone, who truly controls it?

On Monday, October 24th, 2022, we hosted our first live podcast taping at Rice Business with host Maya Pomroy ‘22, and Rice Business Associate Professor of Strategic Management, Anastasiya Zavyalova.

Anastasiya is an associate professor of strategic management at Rice Business and an International Research Fellow at the Oxford University Center for Corporate Reputation. Anastasiya’s research focuses on socially responsible and irresponsible organizational actions that build, damage, and restore social approval assets, like reputation and celebrity.

During this conversation, we dive into Anastasiya’s research on reputation management, how social media changed the landscape of the field, how that relates to the Russia-Ukraine war, as well as her hopes for the future.

Episode Quotes:

How long is a person's social memory in a crisis?
24:00: With social media, there are two dynamics going in different directions. So, on one hand, our attention span becomes shorter. Like, what happened yesterday? We forget because there's so many more shiny and bright things happening right now. Like you want to be constantly on point, you have to do so much more just to catch up. So that's one thing: attention span may be shorter, but on the other hand, with social media, everything you've posted stays with you forever on the web.

The difference between identity and reputation
39:38: Identity is what internal stakeholders think about who we are as an organization. Reputation is what external stakeholders think about the company. And if there is a mismatch, that's a good recipe for disaster.

On cultural level approach
06:17: So the US seems a much more positive country and culture. So when I teach certain concepts in my class, I come from a positive angle, like look at the success stories. This is what you should do, how they tackled it, and how they came out of a crisis. I think if I were, for instance, teaching this in Russia or another less positive culture, so to speak, things would be like, "Well, what did they do wrong?" Tell me what I should not do. And part of it is that there are certain cultural differences.

Show Links:
Episode Transcript
Guest Profile:
Professional Profile at Rice University
Anastasiya Zavyalova on LinkedIn
46 min
February 01, 2023Banking in the Bay Area feat. Danielle Conkling ‘09
While most high school graduates spend the summer hanging out with friends or working at local amusement parks, Danielle Conkling was interning in downtown San Francisco with the PR and events team at Robertson Stephens. And she’s been working in the banking industry ever since.

Danielle is the director of corporate social responsibility and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and serves as the ESG program lead for Silicon Valley Bank (SVB). Her unique role at SVB combines her passion for giving back to the community with her extensive experience in advising entrepreneurs and leaders in the innovation economy. Based in Menlo Park, California, her leadership of ESG efforts advances the sustainability and ethical impact of the company’s investments and operations.

Giving back both on and off the job, Danielle is a regional board advisory member of BUILD, which provides entrepreneurial experience to young people in under-resourced communities, and of Girls Leadership, a nonprofit organization whose workshops and training programs equip young girls to develop the power of their voices.

She chats with host Scott Gale ‘19 discuss her start in the world of finance and banking, getting acclimated to Houston and its weather as an out-of-towner, the future of ESG, and her travels with her family.

Read more about how Rice Business ranks #6 for best MBA for finance (Princeton Review).

Episode Quotes:

Reducing costs and creating efficiencies through ESG investments
31:21 - The investments in ESG actually allow companies to also reduce costs and create efficiencies over time. But again, that takes time. And a lot of it's new. So, there's that time that you need to kind of build it and then roll out and implement a lot of this work. And then, to realize the benefits also takes time. You know, I think most companies are just beginning that work right now.

On what she really learned at Rice
15:37 - I learned a lot about how to think and how to develop leadership skills and strategies in business beyond the more tactical work that you do. I realized that so much of the MBA program for me was really learning from my friends and my professors.

Maintaining friendships with cohort for years after leaving
14:56 - When we graduated, having those relationships where we all went off and reconnecting, how many years later and still having that commonality and that relationship to one another, and really those memories is, I think it's really special. For me, that's really what I got out of it.

On being pregnant in the final months of her program
18:58 - I was able to graduate. And my son, who's now 13 and a half, was able to be there for my Rice graduation. I don't know if that makes him like an honorary owl or something, but he was in my belly and my classmates and my professors were so amazing about the whole thing.

Show Links:
Transcript
Guest Profile:
Danielle Conkling on LinkedIn
44 min
January 18, 2023Taking Classes in 12 Different Cities feat. Mike Narvaez ‘20
Mike Narvaez describes himself as a “husband, father, manager, student and volunteer trying to make more right decisions than wrong.”

Right out of undergrad, Mike was a system safety engineer at the GHG Corporation, identifying hazards affecting the International Space Station (ISS) and astronauts by providing real-time support at Mission Control. He spent time as a manager of safety and risk at Sysco in 1999 after that, and eventually joined BP where he is currently a workplace services manager for the U.S. and Canada, driving the implementation, execution and monitoring of bp workplace operations.

This Houston native sits down with host Maya Pomroy ’22 to talk about how his son pushed him to get his MBA, maintaining connections with his cohort even though he did the online MBA program, and being a lifelong learner.

Episode Quotes:

What Mike wanted from an MBA program
22:21 - I really wanted to learn from the other people in the program. And so the more diverse that is, whether that's something as simple as geography, it certainly makes the program more enriching for me because I learned just as much from my fellow students, as I did from my professors.

The soft side of time management
31:25 - Understanding who you are, your values, and what you prioritize. That's the soft side of time management that most people don't think about, but it plays a huge part.

With online MBA, cohort was all over the world
21:40 - We had a Naval officer that was stationed in San Diego at the time that was on my cohort. We had people that were on the East Coast, the West Coast, people like me that went to Texas A and M that were in a whole other state. And so it was fun to have that connection of somebody that went to school, but was often another part of the world or another part of the industry.

33:23 - I wouldn't say there's a job in particular that I'm really after, I'm just kind of after the challenge.

Show Links:
Transcript
Guest Profile:
Mike Narvaez on LinkedIn
36 min
January 04, 2023Generations of Rice Grads feat. Chuck Yates ‘94
From grandparents to parents, brothers and uncles, it seems like almost everyone in the Yates family has attended Rice, some even multiple times! That includes our guest today Chuck Yates, who earned a B.A. in political science from Rice in 1991, graduating magna cum laude, and later returned to earn his MBA from Rice in 1994.

Chuck Yates is an investor and former managing partner at Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors, as well as the host of the Chuck Yates Needs a Job podcast.

He is a self-proclaimed “dysfunctional life coach who’s had enough therapy to quote Brene Brown chapter and verse,” pivoting to creating and hosting a podcast after being publicly fired from Kayne Anderson, when the firm consolidated its energy teams.

Chuck sits down with host Scott Gale at the Digital Wildcatters Podcasting Studio right here in Houston to talk about his long-standing ties to Rice, pursuing a career in investment banking, his connections to Nashville and the music industry, and his hopes for rebranding the energy industry.

Read more about how Rice Business ranks #6 for best MBA for finance (Princeton Review).

Episode Quotes:

Advice from Dr. Zeff in Accounting at Rice
33:11 - Zeff would do this thing where you'd sit and talk and it would be, “What do you want to do in your career?” Oh, I want to be an investment banker, management consultant, whatever. And Zeff would go, “Oh, that's great.” And kind of bait you into some conversation.
Then Zeff would go, “Hey, If you won the lottery tomorrow and you had $200 million, what would you go do then?” And just kind of bait you along on your story. And inevitably your story was not, I want to be a banker, you know, or I want to be a management consultant. It was, I'd go join the Peace Corps, I'd do all that, and Zeff would get you all you jazzed up about whatever you're saying when you have all the money in the world and then Zeff would go, “Why do you need money to do that? I've never seen you that excited in your life.”

The Rice student body
04:30 - The collection of intelligence that I was surrounded with at Rice, far and away, the greatest amount of intelligence I've ever been surrounded by.

Changing the narratives about the energy industry
39:23 - 75% of that in terms of just getting the narrative back is convincing people we're human, so don't print up the “Freeze a Yankee” bumper sticker when they have high energy prices. And it's okay to have an Instagram page where you go out to the oil field and just say, man, here's a drill bed, and isint it kind of cool? It's amazing how close we actually are to being able to change the narrative.

Life after getting fired
31:28 - I've read all of Brene Brown's stuff, but I think the key thing she finds in her research is, do we feel worthy? And when we don't feel worthy, that's ultimately our bad behavior. We drink too much, we do this, we do that. We yell, scream, all that good stuff. And so, figuring out why you should feel worthy is something I think individuals just have to do. Mine kind of came with a reconnection back with God.

Breaking into investment banking:
23:26 - So convince 'em that you're ready to work. Convince 'em that it's okay that half your work gets thrown in the garbage can. Just the nature of the beast. And third, go find yourself an advocate who can really pound the table for you in there.

Show Links:
Transcript
Guest Profile:
Chuck Yates on LinkedIn
Chuck Yates Needs A Job Podcast
43 min

About Owl Have You Know

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Owl Have You Know is Rice Business’ podcast created to share the experiences of alumni, faculty, students and other members of our business community – real stories of belonging, failing, rebounding and, ultimately, succeeding. During meaningful conversations, we dive deep into how each guest has built success through troubles and triumphs before, during and after they set foot in McNair Hall.

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