Meet Dan Hedden, MTM Class of 2021

Dan Hedden received his B.S. in Environmental Science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and completed the MTM program in 2021. He is currently a Partner at Santa Barbara Venture Partners.

The following are excerpts from an interview conducted in Fall 2023.

Q: How did you find the UCSB MTM Program?

A: Coming out of Cal Poly back in 2017, a lot of my friends were jumping into opportunities in tech, and I got excited about it. Many of those friends went to UCSB and went through the undergraduate Technology Management Certificate program. I kept hearing about their experiences with all that the program certificate offered and they spoke very highly of the department. As I was working in tech at a couple of different software companies here in Santa Barbara, I was thinking about my next move in growing as an individual in business. I was kind of hitting a ceiling. I was an individual contributor in sales and I was thinking through different ways I could add value to companies, whether at a later-stage startup company, or a publicly traded company. MTM spoke to me because of the professors, the curriculum, and the field project. 

Q: What were some of the highlights of your time in the MTM Program?

A: The field project was really neat. I'd say the latter two thirds of the program was spent applying fall quarter’s curriculum—everything from business strategy to finance. My team worked with Apeel Sciences. We worked face-to-face with the executive team, the founders, the folks that were making the decisions. We were identifying real-life problems, we had a seat in the room, we were pitching to the decision-makers and interviewing outside parties. It was a very tangible, real-life experience tied to what we were learning in class, too. It was a nice blend of very comprehensive learning. 

Another program highlight is the faculty and the staff. The staff's great. They do their utmost to align everything to real world learnings. And the faculty, most of them come from years of being operators in the field. You really can't get that much combination of academic knowledge and real-world experience anywhere else. When I think of the UC system, it leans toward a theory and research orientation, whereas this MTM program brings a really nice practical element to higher education. Kudos to the faculty! It's really neat to have people like that to interact with and to mentor you throughout your journey at MTM. 

At the end of the day, the MTM program is awesome. The curriculum and what's been built there is awesome as well. I also really used my time in the program as best as I could to speak to as many people as possible. That was based on the framework around “Designing Your Life” that is provided by MTM Career Services, where you reach out and speak to people who are seasoned business folks in various roles to discover what their day-to-day looks like, if it speaks to you, and what it might look like to be in marketing, sales, product engineering, etc. at various companies. And I also leaned into the alumni network for this. The layer of alumni that’s available to us as students—that's probably my number one highlight.

Q: What did you learn in your field project that has taught you valuable lessons for your current job?

A: First and foremost with the field project, I think there's key learnings around how to interact as a third party. Of course, we were students, but in a professional setting as a third party working with a company that was in hyperscale mode. We weren’t investors coming in, we were consultants trying to identify problems and help them mitigate them and find solutions. That interaction teaches you how to talk to founders, how you build trust, all the soft skills. That was really key in what I'm doing today at Santa Barbara Venture Partners. Another thing is vetting the viability of a business as you gather information. Another important topic was understanding the health score—is this business doing well? What are the immediate priorities? How can we see its success? I think that's what we do day-to-day here at Santa Barbara Venture Partners. As we're talking to founders, there’s KPIs, key metrics that we look for in a business to understand if it’s something that is of interest aligned to our own investment thesis, and that also was a part of our field project. The project was fun for me as I have my own interest in investing, especially in the public equity market and talking to a venture-backed company, understanding how the VCs, the investors interact with the company and how that ties into their overall goals when it comes to board meetings and to executing on a plan. I dug into that more on my own outside of the project, but the field project allowed me to see some of the inner workings of that relationship between the VCs and portfolio company.

Connect with Dan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danielhedden/

Learn more about MTM: tmp.ucsb.edu/mtm