A Q&A with Amarsh Anand, MTM Alumnus

Our department had the pleasure of sitting down and chatting over video with Amarsh Anand, a recent graduate from one of our programs. Read the full interview to learn more about his experience at UCSB and in our department, his passionate advice for current and incoming students, and more! This interview was conducted for the Winter/Spring Quarterly Newsletter 2024. 

Find Amarsh at his LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amarshanand/ 

Tell me a little bit about yourself. 

Q: What was your major while you were here and when did you graduate? 

A: My major was Technology Management—Master’s in Technology Management—and I graduated in June of last year (2023). 

Q: What departmental activities/programs were you involved in during your time here? 

A: I did a little of the New Venture Competition (NVC). I was actually a part of it for about half of the program, but then the team that I was working with ended up disintegrating. I also did Grad Slam. Outside of Technology Management and my research studies, I was part of the School of Music, learning and playing the drums, and ended up forming a little band in the San Clemente Villages. Our band members still keep in touch! I’ve even composed a music piece that was all about my time at UCSB. 

Link to Amarsh’s music: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7127015912234250241-x_Fx and https://www.linkedin.com/posts/activity-7077353636137218048-iHzW 

Q: What company do you work for currently and where are you based? 

A: I work for Coupa Software and I’m based out of San Mateo, California. 

Q: What is your job title and what does that job entail? 

A: My job title is lead software engineer. What it entails is a complicated question. Or really, the question isn’t complicated, but the answer is. Although I’m a software engineer, I was recruited mostly because they needed someone with managerial skills. That’s where my degree in Technology Management comes into use. So, while my title is software engineer, my work is all of management, really. 

Q: What is exciting about your line of work, and since your area of expertise is so broad, what part of your job is your favorite? 

A: Both parts of this question really point to the same answer: How do you relate the theory you’ve learned and the practical practices that you have seen in the classroom with the real-life world? I enjoy connecting those situations that I find myself in, especially not knowing what will happen—like the meeting I was just in, which was supposed to be an engineering meeting that would take barely 30 minutes. It ended up being an engineering management meeting, in which someone senior said, “But I was expecting a manager to be here.” And I was able to respond, “I have enough managerial experience to answer your questions.” The thing that I enjoy the most about my job is seeing a situation in front of me, and saying, “Hey, this is no big deal! Professors like Dr. Renee Rottner have talked about this; I remember that! I know how to handle these guys.” As long as you know that you’ve got the right tools and you’ve discussed them with your peers and professors, you’re ready. 

Tell me about Technology Management has affected your life.

Q: How did the courses you took in the department, as well as the guest lectures, activities, etc. contribute to your personal growth?

A: Every single lecture—every single subject—actually helped me become a better manager and person. I used to even take photos while I was sitting in lecture and post them to say that these were life lessons that we were learning in these classes. 

Q. What is the thing that your certificate/degree best prepared you for?

A: The kind of arguments that I just had, really. This is not a skill-based degree. In fact, the only skill that was skill-based was accounting. Everything else was not a skill; it was training! Mental training. And that’s what the degree did for me. Now, when I walk into a room full of managers, I can map them all out in my head. And, of course I learned about this in the department—social mapping, from Dr. Paul Leonardi’s class—but at the time I only enjoyed it. I couldn’t relate to it. But here, now that I’m in the situation, I can. 

Another example that comes to mind: Clayton’s Innovation Curve. The theory says that there’s a certain pattern around companies. A huge company focuses on doing something, and then a tinier company emerges on the side that does something similar but on a much smaller scale. In the beginning, the bigger company doesn’t care about the smaller company because it’s a tiny market segment. But over time, the small company grows, until the incumbent company gets threatened by it. Then it gets shaken. And I can tell you right now, I've been in a situation like this before, and the moment that it was explained to me, I saw in my head the graph that Dr. Nelson Phillips had shown us on the board. 

This is the power of listening and participating in the classroom. This just looked like theory back then; nobody knew how we were going to use it. But now that I’ve landed this job in Silicon Valley, I can see it happening. 

Q: What would you say was your most impactful/interesting/memorable experience during your time with the department?

A: It was in Dr. Kyle Lewis’s class. She gave out an assignment about a company called CloudPhysician. I was doing the midterm exam and suddenly, I thought I would take a look into this company. It turned out, CloudPhysician is a company running out of India, so I thought “Alright, let me go and find these people.” So I did a LinkedIn search, and I contacted the founder of CloudPhysician on LinkedIn, but he didn’t respond, probably because he didn’t know me and I looked like nobody. After that, I decided that my goal would be to make this one person pay attention to my messages. It wasn’t really the assignment itself, or the midterm, or the submission itself that was impactful; it was the question of, “What do you do with this problem?” I made a point of it: instead of guessing what the company did, I wanted to hear it from the founder himself. I actually learned this pattern from Dr. Leonardi’s class—because Dr. Leonardi would present a case, and at the end of that case, he would say, “Now, what would you do in this situation?” And then we would go and do our preparations. The next morning, in lecture, he would bring the actual person into the classroom, and have them explain what had been done in that real-life scenario. This is a unique way of presenting content! 

So I copied this pattern. It took a lot of effort. I started contacting other people in CloudPhysician, and when they saw UCSB—a good name, and an American school!—they accepted my invite. Then, when I contacted the higher level people in the company, they saw that I was linked to all these other people, and so they thought I must be important. Because LinkedIn shows you! And so they thought I must know CloudPhysician very well. 

Through this strategy, I was finally able to contact the founder. And when I reached the founder, I shared my assignment with him—my submission. I explained that this was what our question was, and these were my solutions and improvements. I said, “I’d want to know from you; did I understand it correctly?” And then I asked him if he could appear in our lecture. And he did appear! And the great thing about Dr. Lewis is that even in the very last lecture, she found half an hour to have him appear in our lecture and talk to our students. And now, me and him are kind of friends, and we still talk on and off!

Q: If you could give any advice to students interested in applying for our department, what would you say?

A: I’ll tell you the biggest reason that I wanted to be interviewed. I want to remind students that a Master’s in Technology Management is not a skill-development program. These are trained people that have a skill set other people don’t have. Management programs are pretty generic in nature, but here…where you really stand to gain a lot is when you focus on your classes and participate as if this is the workplace. If you think about this as a college education, you will not make the best use of it. Because then you’ll simply think about these topics as—well, what’s the big deal? But the question is not that. These are real-life situations that you might encounter after you get your degree. And if you can’t train yourself to handle them once you graduate, then you end up back where you started. If you were to write one thing to sum this up, it would be this: stay active in the classroom. These are 16 work hours you have, not 16 college hours.

If you can underline something else in bold for the students: do LinkedIn posts about these courses and the good things you’ve learned. This does two things. First of all, they tell their prospective employers and people around the world that they are learning something. Otherwise, what’s the proof that you’re learning and reflecting? The second thing it does is that it evangelizes the school itself. People say that UCSB is not as big a name as Stanford, but you are responsible for half of it. Because people at Stanford go out and tell people how great it is. And so that was what I did—and I got a lot of likes from people I knew back in Australia, where I’m from, as well as from prospective employers. People look at these posts. The staff being active on social media is only half of it—really, probably only 10% of it. Students talking about the good things they’ve learned is the greatest acknowledgement of what the program is trying to achieve. 

Q: What do you wish everyone knew about our department?

A: MTM simulates work situations. Every professor in the department is extremely skilled and reputable. People don’t know how hard that is to find! These people are so experienced, and you won’t get the chance to listen to them outside of the classroom. The simulations that they put in front of you in the classroom by giving you case studies—these are not just stories. They are training. You are not on a college assignment; you are working. 

Tell me about your personal goals. 

Q: Where do you see yourself or would you like to see yourself in the future?

A: I want to start a company. I’ve tried to start two companies in the past; they worked, but not really to the point where I would call myself an entrepreneur. That’s the objective with which I came to MTM, and that I came to America. That would be where I would like to see myself. Where I see myself right now is making slow advances toward that goal. 

Q: Are you associated with any academic or on-campus organizations that you would like to highlight?

A: There’s one particular sector that I’m deeply committed to, and that would be the disability sector, focusing on autism spectrum disorder. Here at my company, I’m part of an ERG group that talks about disability inclusion. There’s also an accelerator program that runs out of San Francisco called Multiple Hub and they fund companies that are doing something in the field of autism spectrum. So through that, I’ve reached out to a bunch of people, and I’ve mentored a couple companies that are doing something in that regard. That is my primary focus outside of work. 

Q: Do you have any recent publications, events, or anything else that you’d like to promote to our readership?

A: I believe that with ChatGPT, anyone with a logical mind can code. I am a frontend (React) and backend (Node and Python) programmer. I am inviting people who have ideas for a WebApp, and will teach them just enough so that, using ChatGPT, they can code on their own. I am looking at seven sessions of Zoom based teaching for $700. If I can get 10 paid customers, I may have a business :) 

Please get in touch with me if you are interested here.