Martin de la Herran Oyarzun

MIT, Sloan School of Management

“Positive, friendly, entrepreneur with a creative mind.”

Hometown: Madrid, Spain

Fun Fact About Yourself: Created an energy cocoa drink for people who don’t like coffee. Just like Nesquik, with a kick!

Undergraduate School and Major: Pontifical University of Comillas (Madrid), Industrial Engineering

Most Recent Employer and Job Title: Telefónica, Corporate Strategy Analyst

Describe your biggest accomplishment in your career so far: I am proud of several successes during my years in Telefónica, especially while working in the corporate strategy team on projects that have not only generated significant profits for the company but also improved telecommunications for millions of people in Europe and Latin America. However, I am more proud of a bold initiative that five Telefónica colleagues and I developed and implemented. We decided to create a Millennial Network within the company. Our idea quickly gained support from very relevant sponsors in the company, including the company’s president. Less than a week after we launched our Millennial Network, we had more than 2000 members across 19 countries. Years later Telefónica Millennials are still connected through our network.

What quality best describes the MBA classmates you’ve met so far and why? Humble. All of the MBA students I have met have excelled professionally and personally; however I have rarely heard any of them speak about their success.

Aside from your classmates, what was the key factor that led you to choose this program for your full-time MBA and why was it so important to you? Entrepreneurship. I have always been a risk-taker, and I knew that it was time to do so in my professional career. I was looking for a school that had a focus on entrepreneurship. MIT has some of the best entrepreneurship professors in the world but also an entire structure of resources to help their students build companies. MIT alumni have founded more than 30k currently active companies whose annual revenue is the equivalent to the 10th largest GDP in the world.

What club or activity are you looking most forward to in business school? delta v – MIT’s summer start-up accelerator.

What led you to pursue an MBA at this point in your career? As an engineer with a passion for building a significant business, an MBA with a focus in entrepreneurship was the perfect step. I also thought that after five years of experience, this was a good point in my career to do it.

How did you decide if an MBA was worth the investment? I spoke to many of the people I knew who had done MBAs and asked them what they thought about the investment and the experience. I asked people from different industries and different types of positions. Not only did every one of them agree that it’s worth the investment, but many also agreed that it was the experience of their lives. It was a no-brainer after hearing them speak.

What other MBA programs did you apply to? I applied to MIT and Columbia.

How did you determine your fit at various schools? When I was looking for a school where I would be a good fit, I looked at two things: my professional background and my personality. On the professional side, I am an engineer with a few years of experience in technology and entrepreneurship. Therefore, I believed I would be a better fit in a school where engineering, technology, and entrepreneurship were relevant to the community. On the personal side, people who know me would say that I am a humble and collaborative person; thus I was looking for a school where students had these personality traits.

To do my research I first talked to all the MBA alumni and current MBA students that I knew, and friends of friends. Second, I attended on-campus events. For the universities that I couldn’t visit, I attended their events in Madrid. Lastly, I researched all the data that interested me from each university website and other sources, such as Poets & Quants.

I had done all the research, but I only had time to apply to one school in Round 1, plus Columbia because its application deadline for the Early Decision round was a few weeks after all the other schools’ Round 1’s had passed. I saw a very clear professional and personal fit in MIT, so it’s the one I chose to apply to in Round 1. Although I didn’t see a precise fit in Columbia, I applied because I had time and wanted to reduce the risk of only applying to one school.

What was your defining moment and how did it shape who you are? I was reading through a brochure about Dr. Santiago Ramón y Cajal, 1906 Nobel Prize for Medicine for his discoveries on the human brain. While reading through, I started to think about what people like Doctor Ramón y Cajal had done differently to make an impact of this size. I knew that they were innovative, passionate and dedicated, but I had seen many other people who were creative, passionate, and dedicated and yet were not able to do such great things. There had to be another ingredient. I kept reading more closely about Dr. Ramón y Cajal and how he had done hundreds of incredibly detailed drawings of what he believed that the nervous system looked like, at a time when nobody knew much about the brain. Years later, it was confirmed that the brain did indeed work as Dr. Ramón y Cajal had described in his drawings. People like Dr. Ramón y Cajal were not only passionate and hard-working innovators, they also seemed to know that they would succeed. I started to think of all the people who had moved humanity forward, from Nikola Tesla to Nelson Mandela, to Steve Jobs, to Mother Teresa – they were all convinced that they would succeed, no matter the obstacles.

That is when I realized that if I wanted to bring something new and relevant to the world, I had to build a mindset that was strong enough to get me through the challenges of creating a new venture. I thought that the best way to do that was to surround myself with people who already had this mindset. After a pre-MBA summer internship at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, I can confirm that I found the perfect place to define my entrepreneurial future.

What do you plan to do after you graduate? Work on my own venture.

Where do you see yourself in five years? My startup will be thriving and I will be making a positive impact in the world.