David James Pinto

University of South Florida, Muma College of Business

“Founder-turned-operator. Teacher at heart. Data convert. Helping to make the world safe for education.”

Age: 59

Hometown: St. Petersburg, Florida

Undergraduate School and Degree: University of Pennsylvania — BA in Political Science; University of California, Los Angeles — MA in Applied Linguistics

Where are you currently working? Health Connected, East Palo Alto, California

Number of Hours Per Week Spent on an Online MBA: 15–20

Fun Fact About Yourself: My company’s black-and-white graphic art for babies ended up in the hands of over a million families worldwide. Working with my wife to make it happen was an experience that I’ll always cherish.

What achievement are you most proud of in your professional career? It was co-founding Wee Gallery with my wife, Surya, and building it into a globally distributed consumer brand over 22 years. Not because of the exit, but because of what the company actually did: it put well-designed, developmentally meaningful products into the hands of families across dozens of countries, through licensing partners, major retailers, and independent boutiques. We bootstrapped it, navigated every supply chain and retail shift of the 2000s and 2010s, and built something genuinely lasting. Walking away from it — intentionally, on our own terms — required as much courage as building it did.

Why did you choose this school’s online MBA program? I had started the MBA in person at USF some years earlier to help me drive growth in my company.  When things took off, I put the degree on the back burner. About the same time we sold the company, I had a terrible motorcycle accident in which I lost my left leg from the knee down. I wanted to finish the degree. Considering I was working through a difficult recovery, the online program was perfect for me. The Muma program let me pursue a focus on strategy and analytics that matched exactly where I was trying to go — not back into entrepreneurship, but into senior operational roles where data fluency and strategic thinking matter. It was a deliberate residential investment that has worked for me.

What was your favorite part of being in an online MBA program? The cohort diversity. I was in classes with active-duty military officers, healthcare administrators, recent undergrads, and mid-career professionals from completely different industries. In a residential program, you often self-sort by age or background. Online, I had access to everyone’s ideas and could get many more perspectives than I ever expected.

How did your online MBA experience compare with your in-the-classroom experience as an undergraduate student? Almost incomparable, in the best way. As an undergrad at Penn, I was absorbing frameworks without context. Twenty-plus years of running a company gave me the lived experience to actually argue with the frameworks, to know when Porter’s Five Forces maps cleanly onto a situation and when it is the wrong lens entirely. The MBA was less about learning and more about organizing what I already knew, stress-testing it, and finding the gaps.

What is your best piece of advice to an applicant for thriving in an online MBA program? Treat it like a job, not a class. The flexibility of an online program is real, but it’s also a trap.  The absence of a fixed schedule means your MBA will always lose to whatever is urgent that week unless you protect time for it. Block the hours. Treat deadlines like client deliverables. And do not lurk in discussion boards: that’s where the actual learning happens.

How has your online MBA education helped you in your current job? At Health Connected, I’m working at the intersection of nonprofit operations, school-district partnerships, and program accountability – exactly the kind of environment where strategic analysis, stakeholder communication, and data-backed decision-making converge. The MBA gave me a shared vocabulary with funders and board members, and the analytics coursework gave me the confidence to build evidence frameworks rather than just cite someone else’s. And the job is remote, so all the skills and tools that I learned to use in the online program have been essential to helping me to hit the ground running.

Did you earn a promotion while in the program or immediately after graduation? I transitioned from founder-operator (exiting Wee Gallery in January 2025) to a Director of Operations role in the nonprofit sector, a deliberate pivot, not a promotion in the traditional sense. The MBA was a core part of making that transition credible to organizations that might otherwise have wondered what a 20-year consumer products CEO was doing applying for their ops role.

Why did you pursue an online MBA instead of a full-time residential or executive MBA program? I was 59 when I started back in the online program and in the middle of a company exit. A full-time residential program would have required stepping away from work and life at exactly the wrong moment. An executive MBA made more sense on paper, but the USF online program offered the same rigorous curriculum at a fraction of the cost. For someone who already had two decades of operational experience, I needed depth in specific areas, not a full reset.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? Several courses incorporated AI tools for competitive analysis, financial modeling, and scenario planning. My capstone focused directly on AI implementation in community hospitals; it built a multi-lens, risk-tiered framework for evaluating readiness and adoption pathways. That project forced me to move from being a curious AI user to someone who thinks critically about deployment, liability, and organizational change management around AI.

What insights did you gain from using AI? AI is most dangerous when it sounds most confident. I learned to treat AI output the way I treat a first draft from a smart but overconfident analyst: useful as a starting point, but unreliable as a final answer and always in need of a human with domain knowledge asking the hard questions. The insight is not that AI is powerful; it is that the human judgment layer is more important, not less, when AI is in the loop.

What is your ultimate long-term professional goal? I want to lead operations for a mission-driven organization doing genuinely important work. More than that, I want to do it with the same rigor I brought to running a company, just pointed at problems that matter more than market share. Health Connected is a meaningful step in that direction. Beyond that, I’d like to teach at the graduate level, sit on a nonprofit board or two, and eventually write something worth reading about what it actually takes to build organizations that last.

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