Differential equations was my “aha moment.” It was hard, but I totally loved it and I ended up, when I majored at Berkeley, ended up majoring in digital signal processing and that was all basically applied math and I totally loved it. Peter Zaballos: Well, that's one of the classic differential equations problems that you tackle, because it’s all about the flow of something through something and measuring that on an incremental basis. I really liked sort of the conceptual challenge of math and that led me to Berkeley and engineering, computer science.Ĭhristopher Reichert: I read a light went off in your head when you were trying to figure out how the temperature of a bar of metal changes as it heats up? I think that was where I discovered I really liked math. And I took the subway, you know the mass transit to get there. And then I had a job bagging grocery at the Safeway, didn't have a car, and enrolled at Diablo Valley College mostly out of default. I left high school knowing I liked some subjects. I heard a great interview with Michael Lewis, the author of Moneyball, and he went to Princeton, and they asked him, “would you go to Princeton today?” And he said, “There's no way I could go to Princeton today, I literally applied over the weekend, no plan and I got in.” You know to do that today, it's a career. We joked at my high school that I think I got the lowest grade in math that they’d ever given.īack then, just going to college was just not the way it is today. So from the moment I was getting grades, they were not good ones, which was a struggle because I think my teacher saw potential in me-some of them did-and I felt like I had it, but middle school, high school, my grades were horrible. And it was only through the experience we had with one of our children who had some learning disabilities that I realized I probably had some combination of learning disabilities. Peter Zaballos: Well, I was privileged in that my parents put a lot of value on education and they put us in private schools but you know back then, I just don't think learning disabilities were a thing. You said you had poor grades and test scores in high school and college and what changed for you? So, I want to be sure to cover some of your ethos of giving back that I read about in your bio and things we discussed but before we get to your career tell us more about your upbringing. He spent his subsequent career in high-growth technology startups as a senior marketing executive and venture capitalist, spanning Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, and the Midwest. He earned his MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management in 1990. He first attended Diablo Valley College and then transferred to Cal Berkeley, where he earned a BS in electrical engineering and computer science. My mother came over, left Spain in 1929, in the Spanish Civil War. Peter Zaballos: I took Spanish at the local community college last fall and I'm slowly trying to acquire it but I speak French.Ĭhristopher Reichert: Muy bien. And actually, just to be clear, it's my grandparents that emigrated from Spain. His parents emigrated from Macotera in Spain, near Salamanca, Ávila, and one of my favorite places, Segovia. ![]() Peter is a second generation American like me, also from Spain. My guest today is Peters Zaballos, a 1990 graduate of Sloan's MBA program. Hi, I'm your host, Christopher Reichert, and welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies. So, what does it mean to be a Sloanie? Over the course of this podcast, you'll hear from guests who are making a difference in their community, including our own very important one here at MIT Sloan. Christopher Reichert: Welcome to Sloanies Talking with Sloanies, a candid conversation with alumni and faculty about the MIT Sloan experience and how it influences what they're doing today.
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