Valerie Garcia Houts, MBA 99 – Charting Paths and Navigating Careers in Finance

On this episode of the OneHaas Alumni Podcast, Sean sits down with Valerie Garcia Houts, recipient of a Haas Evening MBA in ‘99 and a managing director of private equity & venture services at Merrill Lynch.

Raised in Torrance in a blended Mexican-American family, Valerie worked through school, studied economics at UC Irvine, and credits key professors and mentors for opening doors into finance and graduate education. She recounts entering Haas with a small cohort and few women, learning through real-time, workplace-based projects, and taking memorable classes with then-professors Rich Lyons and Jenny Chatman.

Sean Li talks with Valerie about building her team from the dot-com bust era into a 60-person, bi-coastal platform focused on long-term client relationships, and discusses philanthropy centered on homelessness, immigrants, women and girls, and supporting Latinx business pathways through Haas’s THRIVE program. She also shares Hispanic heritage traditions like her family tamale party and encourages diverse students to pursue finance.

*OneHaas Alumni Podcast is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

On Choosing to Go to Business School

“ You have visions of what you might be doing with that MBA degree afterwards. I was told by management that the only path to the next step and the next step within the firm that I was working was to get an MBA. Since I already had my sights on an MBA, I thought, "Well, that's great. That's what I'm doing, so it's all gonna align." But I had a very narrow view of it. You know, my parents didn't... No one in my family had graduate degrees and so there wasn't really anyone to guide me in that front. 

 But I thought, "Okay, this is needed in my field." I just figured I'd be meeting interesting people and pursuing what was needed for the next step in my career.“

The Benefits of the Case Studies in the Haas Evening Classes

“ In the evening program, we were learning with situations real time. The very first group project that I was on, there was four of us, and we used one of the guy's companies. It was a shipping company, the case study and the challenge was: How do they maximize the shipping capacity going in multiple directions? We worked in the guy's office and used their whiteboards and figured it out and came up with this whole analysis and paper that focused on a real-world scenario that that firm was grappling with at that time. And that repeated itself over and over, and I realized Haas brings together amazing individuals, and the evening program brought together those individuals that were working in a variety of industries that were just ripe for learning and practicing those skills. So it was incredible.”

Haas Students Becoming Haas Leaders

“ She was a young and energetic professor that everyone loved. And to see how both she and Rich, two Haas professors that really kind of grew up, for lack of a better phrase, as Professors engage with students and their leadership growing and becoming now Dean of Haas, and Chancellor of Cal has been so cool to see how the Haas and in my own business and with my partners. Just to fast-forward a little bit in our conversation, you know, we started as a very small team, and we're now over sixty individuals, and the vast majority of the people on our team started from the bottom as an entry-level position and now have grown within our business to managing directors.”

On the THRIVE Program

 ”The THRIVE program at Haas has been something that's been so powerful, and we were so excited to support learning that it is about encouraging Latinx students to pursue business degrees. And much of that is through awareness and education and saying, "This is what it can mean. Here's why you would want to do this." you don't, you don't often know the why if you don't have own family experience and/or business mentors that can open up those doors to you and show you. So that's been extremely rewarding, and I, we've loved being involved there, and I'm excited for the opportunities, particularly in this environment where it is tricky to navigate providing opportunities for underrepresented individuals and communities. but I'm so proud of the work that Berkeley writ large has done, as well as Haas, to continue to live up to that mission and fulfill that goal.” 

Show Links:

• LinkedIn Profile
• Private Capital & Venture Solutions Group