Chuk Orakwue, MBA ’21, is co-founder and managing partner for a brand-new investment & fintech startup, Xantos Labs, that has a mission to offer a low minimum, low fee, and premium investing experience for everyday folks. Prior to seeking his MBA, he worked for about a decade as an engineer and computer architect for top tech firms like Intel, Qualcomm, and Samsung.

Lou Ortiz, MBA ’21, is an economist and Head of Growth at Xantos Labs. Prior to his MBA, he served as a MEDEVAC pilot for the Army, and he is also a Duke University graduate.

As new entrepreneurs, Chuk and Lou hope to not only provide a trustworthy investment experience, but an inspiring practice for other ethnic minorities aiming to help close the financial literacy gap and improve diverse representation in the business world. We spoke with both Chuk and Lou about their unique backgrounds, their inspiration and sustained mission fueling Xantos Labs, and how their MBA experience shifted their perspectives and expanded their knowledge of markets and investment strategies.

 Please give us a brief overview of your background prior to business school, and share what inspired you to start Xantos Labs, and why you chose McCombs for your MBAs?

Chuk Orakwue: I grew up in Nigeria and I came here at a young age for college. My father was in New York, so I joined him and did one year of high school there. Then I studied engineering for four years, graduated, and started a job at Intel. I was an engineer designing semiconductor chips for almost a decade. I also worked for Qualcomm, Huawei, as well as Samsung before applying to McCombs for my MBA. One of the key challenges for me was the financial literacy gap. As someone who grew up poor, and then going to work at some of the top tech firms in the world with a decent amount of pay; I lacked the necessary skills to invest my money. My ambition was to challenge myself to learn how the capital market works and leverage my engineering skillset so I can better navigate it. That’s how we started, meeting on the weekends and working with other partners to solve this challenge. One of my inspirations was actually from a book by Dr. Keith Brown, who is a professor at UT, but funnily enough I hadn’t realized that at the time until I attended his class and was asked to purchase a later edition of the book I already owned. I decided to pursue my MBA to really refine my business world skillset, specifically with investment management. I had already been living in Austin at the time and didn’t want to move my family elsewhere, and McCombs offered a generous full-ride for me to attend, so it was an easy choice.

Lou Ortiz: I did my undergrad at Duke University. I started in Durham in the Fall of 2008 at the beginning of the financial crisis right when things were getting pretty dicey. Initially, I was planning on doing pre-med and had big plans to become a doctor, but with everything going on I developed an interest in finance. I started nurturing my studies in economics while the Army paid for me to go to school. I spent seven years in the service after that. For the majority of that time I was a MEDEVAC pilot flying Blackhawks. Toward the tail end of my time in the service I was a company commander responsible for training combat medics. I was in San Antonio at the time and my wife was completing her medical training there as an ear, nose, and throat surgeon. When I was looking at getting out, I knew that I wanted to go back and get my MBA, but my wife was still going to be in San Antonio. Even though I had applied to other schools, I knew I didn’t want to leave this area and not see my wife for two years, especially since I had already spent quite a bit of time away from her during my time in the Army. UT was already one of my top choices, but with the added convenience of it being right up the road, it just made the most sense. As far as landing at Xantos Labs with Chuk, hearing about his story and his insights, and hearing about what he was already able to accomplish; it blew me away in the end. I offered to help out with whatever they needed, and Chuk found a place for me to be valuable to the company.

Tell us about some of your experiences here at McCombs. What was your student experience like (i.e. favorite classes or teachers, group involvement, etc.)?

Chuk: As members of The Consortium, I first met Lou at orientation prior to meeting the rest of the 2021 class. Once on campus, Lou and I had similar interests in finance, so we both had applied to work with the MBA Investment fund. This is a program that allows 16 MBA students out of a class of 270+, that are selected to manage multimillion-dollar equity portfolios as part of the endowment fund for the institution. That was something that uniquely helped us refine our investment management skill set, because this was all happening in the beginning stages of the pandemic, and with a very volatile year in the stock market. Beyond that, there were a few classes that were really insightful. The basic ‘finance 101’ course that every MBA has to take had a great professor named Clemens Sialm, and he was also the CEO of the MBA Investment Fund that we were working on. I really enjoyed his class, and I was glad to work closely with him as part of managing the school’s portfolio. Another class I liked was an Investment Theory & Practice course that we took as part of Keith Brown’s book as I mentioned earlier, and this class was very eye-opening. I also took a lot of entrepreneurship classes with John Doggett, a senior lecturer at McCombs. He played and still plays a key role in our ventures and in our lives. The last class I want to mention is also very elite, called Titans of Investing. This class is taught by Britt Harris, the former CEO of Bridgewater who runs the $60 billion+ UTIMCO [University of Texas/Texas A&M University Investment Management Company] Endowment Fund. Being a part of this class is a very exclusive opportunity, so for both Lou and I to be a part of the same cohort at the same time was very lucky. His class was very eye-opening for us in terms of our professional and personal development. He brought in a lot of high-caliber speakers to this class. I’m talking, the 2nd in command at Bridgewater Associates, The President of the Dallas Fed, and even Vista Equity’s Robert Smith and Michael Dell came in to speak to us. They each shared their entrepreneurship journeys and how they defined success in their lives. That class stood out because so much of finance is just thinking about numbers and probabilities, but there’s more to life than numbers. This class helped me reframe my mindset in that way.

Lou: Well Chuk covered a lot of the experiences that we got to share together, so I’ll just touch briefly on some of the professors. Chuk is absolutely right about Britt. You know, after seeing the school rankings that just came out recently, where you usually see Harvard, Stanford, or Wharton at the top of the list; you notice that their big draw is that they get to bring in these very impressive speakers because they are alums of those schools. Britt Harris brings a special element to McCombs that elevates the institution as a whole and offers a unique opportunity that rivals those other schools. His course was exceptionally valuable, and I agree Britt has been really great as a mentor as well. He helped Chuk and I understand how to think about approaching investors, and about our value proposition and what we’re uniquely offering to folks. I’ll also echo that Clemens is just, the best, and as a special mention, Xavier Sztejnberg teaching valuation. I appreciated him because he brings a lot of great stories from the industry on the banking side, and on the private equity side. He’s also not afraid to talk a little trash along the way which makes things fun [laughs].

Tell us about Xantos Labs, where your inspiration came from, how McCombs helped your process along the way, and what sets you apart from others in the industry.

Chuk: In terms of the processes that we use, it is recognizing that for me as an immigrant and starting at rock bottom, it is as if you’re starting a race and you’re running it with one hand tied behind your back. In that regard, you’re pretty much losing already, you must aim to be much better than average in the race. The thing about investing is also to recognize that you can do well year upon year, but if you have one bad bet, it could wipe out all those years of nice gains. We wanted this to be an opportunity for people with similar backgrounds to build wealth and do it systematically. So, when we started this idea, the inspiration came from primarily being risk averse in terms of growth and without losing the very little that we have. We designed it to focus on what is called managing downside risk, which is essentially the probability that your $100K would likely become $50K. And we leveraged the founding team’s strong engineering background to build a quantitative approach to achieve this. Think about it in this example from my previous career. I used to be a chip architect, and in chip design we simulate everything we do. That means that when you press a button on your phone, there’s an internal set of instructions; and in my job, I could actually tell you why the phone might take 10 milliseconds to respond instead of 5 milliseconds. I can tell you down to the instruction levels and we simulated all of this to improve and predict functioning. Carrying that engineering expertise, we built something called a back-testing environment that allows us to simulate and actually rank our strategies in terms of how our ideas might do in the stock market. We tested and explored so many strategies on that platform – it took us about a year to design. Then we took another year to develop strategies that we tested on that platform. For two years it was just pure research and development across different scenarios, across historically good markets and down markets. We put all our best ideas to the races and then picked the best one out of them. Then a friend challenged us to use our real money on the markets to test what we developed, and we learned even more about what kind of orders we want to use, and what kind of trading controls we have to put in play so that the orders execute when we want them to execute. One of the key challenges when we started this was that while everything I described helps you understand how and when to deploy money, it only works if you know what to invest in. That was one of the key things that we gained from the MBA program at McCombs and through the MBA investment function; understanding how to actually do fundamental analysis in order to pick what to invest in.

To summarize, all of this is based around the idea of protecting the little guy. With our strategies, we aim to minimize the probability of large drawdowns while simultaneously delivering consistent above-average returns. We do that by finding a sector we want to go for based on the big macro trend behind it. One example would be climate change. While some people are still denying it, we see some effects of it today in terms of forest fires, hurricanes, flooding etc. And we see it worsening year after year. As fiduciaries to our clients, we accept this reality and work to turn that into actionable investment advice. We ask, what companies in that space can we invest in that will help? We then put together a concentrated list of stocks with very high conviction, rather than investing in everything else that is out there in the world. Then we optimize it using our quantitative approach that also manages the downside risk. In terms of being risk averse, we also built a way to systematically try to predict where we are in the market cycle. If a recession is coming, then we adjust the portfolios for it and shift our allocations. Some companies will do well in the recession, others won’t, but the risk aversion allows room for growth or sustainability rather than losing it all on a few bad bets. Ultimately, many of these ideas were an elemental understanding built across years of R&D, but what we learned at McCombs and through the MBA Investment Fund really complimented all our skills and allowed us to put these ideas into action for our clients.

Lou: Good synopsis, Chuk. I think he nailed just about everything that I was going to follow up with. I’ll just add the importance of the element of trust. Obviously, you want to avoid losing money for your clients, but I think we go even further than that. It’s about the trust that you built up with them. We recognize that when people struggle to build whatever little wealth they can, you don’t want to jeopardize their efforts or cause unnecessary losses. So, we take that responsibility very seriously and whenever there’s a disagreement about the correct way to proceed with anything, we go 10 rounds over and it’s a lot of intellectual rigor around assessing where we’re at and what we hope to achieve based on what is right for our clients ahead of anything else.

Looking at your career as a whole even before getting your recent MBA, has your career played out in the ways that you expected? What sort of things would you say you’re most proud of in your career so far?

Lou: For me, being in the Army prior to McCombs, almost everything was just planned out for me. I knew exactly what was going to happen from the jump just because the timelines are so long and planned out for each officer. There’s literally a manual that you can go and look at that will tell you something like, this is the next job that you should have, and this is what you’re going to be doing there, and these are the kinds of things that you’re to learn while you’re there. During that time, it was just very much like “Oh okay, I guess that’s what I’ll be doing three to five years from now.” Coming to school was definitely an opportunity to expand the way that I was thinking, because coming from that environment, it is hard to overestimate just how different things are out in the “real world” outside of the Army and how different it can be for service members to enter the business world. With that, I knew I wanted to take a chance and do something different than in the Army when everything is laid out ahead of time. That’s pretty much exactly what I’m doing now! I would say though, I have a little bit different conception of what success in my career has been. Really it’s been about being able to work hard doing things I’m interested in while supporting my wife. She is a doctor, as I mentioned before, and she is a great one. That’s been something that I’ve really prioritized overall – making sure that she has what she needs to be successful. I would say that being there for her is what I’m most proud of.

Chuk: When I started engineering at Intel I was promoted early, and climbed the corporate ladder pretty quickly. The rank I had before I joined the MBA program, as well as my annual income and things like that were already pretty good. To be honest, the MBA didn’t add any more additional value to me in that regard, and in terms of the career options that were presented. The big break for me actually came from being able to dislodge my career satisfaction from annual income or my net worth. To me, it was really the fulfillment and the joy that came from being in service to others. That’s part of the driving factors why Xantos Labs is where it is today. Entrepreneurship is difficult, and the chances of success are pretty slim, but being able to see the joys in our clients’ lives and see the impact that we make is incomparable. The second aspect is as Lou said, is the trust we build with our clients. The trust that people embody and give to us, we cannot break that. That’s why if for instance, I pitch something and Lou doesn’t like it, he would tell me and it’s not a problem. We leave our egos at the door because that’s the way we see it, for one, as minorities. There are very few of us in the field. We are doing this for ourselves, and for others like us. For someone out there who is going to look at this and say, “Wow if this person is able to do it, I can actually also do this, and do it on my own, and do it well”. I think that message is really much more important than any corporate career offering can really get. It’s also just such a big part of our lives. We have a lot of our closest friends and family members now as part of clients on Xantos Labs, so it circulates all around us, and it’s really important that we get it right and not make any secondary excuses. With money, the pay should not be a reason why we let down our clients. It’s not about greed. So, that to me is career success in the definition.

Looking towards the future, what are some of your goals, personally or professionally?

Lou: We have very ambitious goals as far as Xantos Labs is concerned, and we’ve been working diligently. Our next step is that we’re releasing an international product, and so then we’ll be able to provide this level of investment expertise to pretty much anyone around the world. I think that’s pretty exciting. I think in my life in smaller chunks, I don’t like to think too far into the future because it just gets kind of fuzzy once you look too far out. That is the main priority right now, is to grow Xantos Labs into a global brand.

What are your roles at Xantos Labs?

Chuk: Titles are subject to change, as they generally do when you start your own firm. I’m a co-founder and managing partner of the firm. It is a leadership role, but we run a flat hierarchy here. Lou is the Head of Growth, so he’s responsible for figuring out how to position us from client engagement and client relations. He’s also part of the investment committee, and manages any public-facing issues, with press releases and such. We have a four-person team.

Lou: We wear a lot of hats.

I know you’re still just recent graduates, but are you still involved or connected with any other fellow alumni, either from your cohort or from the network as a whole?

Lou: I know I’ve spent a lot of time speaking with not only folks in the class behind us, but then also potential students. I’m also a part of a half dozen group chats that are still going on, talking football and all that jazz.

Chuk: Yeah, I’m still engaged with a lot of organizations at McCombs, and with a lot of other alumni. In fact, I had dinner with one of our classmates, part of our MBA class friends recently. I’m also a part of the funding team for a nonprofit called MBA Africa Connect (MAC) that helps take MBAs that have an interest in working in Africa or visiting Africa to go back there. John Doggett was a faculty advisor for us when that started when we were in school. It was actually started by 4 MBA students at McCombs, so I’m still engaged in that with placement for independent study for some MBAs that have interest in doing that. I’m also engaged with the Black Graduate Business Association at McCombs. I talk with them about the MBA Africa Connect program, or I go in to speak with them about Xantos Labs and things like that. Then, the Titans of Investing class is really more like a career or a club, and we still meet up every year.

Lou: Yeah, it’s more of a lifetime commitment.

Chuk: Yeah, it’s a lifetime commitment. So, Titans are everywhere, with over 600 exchange hosts now. We have an annual dinner, and still have a strong level of engagement there. The couple of shout outs I’d really like to give are to the individuals we’ve met and associations we’ve been able to leverage from within the alumni network.  One of them is Brian Bares of Bares Capital Management. We had reached out to him and he made time for us. We went into his office and he gave us invaluable career advice, Longhorn to Longhorn. I’m really grateful for him doing that and there’s so many more like him. Josh Galatzan of Meridian Wealth Advisors, was also a mentor and advisor. Travis Cocke, also a Titan, helped us. So, I think the alumni network and being engaged is something we can’t fight at this point. People are going to reach out to us and we’re going to stay engaged.

Is there anything else you’d like to add? Any other hobbies or tidbits you want to share?

Lou: My hobbies are spending time with my son and my wife. She’s currently doing a fellowship here at Vanderbilt, and we’re in Nashville, and so not a lot of free time. Whatever time that we do have we like to spend it together with our son. He just turned one a couple weeks ago.

Chuk: For me in terms of hobbies, I’ll echo the same sentiment with Lou. When you run a startup, your free hours revolve all around ensuring you can make time for family. Everything else gets sunk into the startup, really. I now have a nine-month old daughter, so I try to spend time with her as often as my wife and I can. I go out and meet friends.

Solu Nwanze, MBA ’12, is a certified executive coach with her own practice, Expanded Impact, and is an organizational effectiveness executive in Tech/SaaS. In both capacities, she works with executives and their teams to create and implement strategies that expand leadership capabilities, promote team engagement, and drive organizational effectiveness. In addition, she recently served on the Board of Directors for HERA, a legal services non-profit in California, and has architected award-winning leadership development programs for women and people of color at work.

At McCombs, she served as co-chair of the MBA admission committee during her MBA studies, president of the Graduate Business Technology Group, and helped form Sigma Fellows, now known as Operations Fellows. She continues to serve the alumni network in multiple capacities, most recently with her summer series webinar, “Promote a Learning and Growth Culture in This Brave New Hybrid World.” We spoke with Solu about her experiences in the business realm of technology, about her time at McCombs, and about her continued aspirations to serve the McCombs community. 

Please talk about your experience as a student here at McCombs. 

During my search for the right graduate school, I wanted a top business school surrounded by a strong technology school. I was in Tech prior to business school and planned to return to the Tech industry after business school. What truly solidified McCombs as a top choice for me was my experience during Explore McCombs, a weekend program for prospective students to interact with current students, professors, and staff. During that weekend, I felt the McCombs culture come alive – deep collaboration, academic excellence, and community impact. The icing on the cake was seeing Tina Mabley, a McCombs alumna and then Director of Admissions, come to the weekend event with her two-week old baby (who is probably over 10 years old now) simply to help make an impact in our life decisions.

At McCombs I was involved in several professional development activities. I was the co-chair of the McCombs admission committee, and helped in bringing in two sets of MBA students along-side 80+ classmates on the Committee and the McCombs Admissions staff. I was also the president of the Graduate Business Technology Group (GBTG), leading a couple technology symposiums for our classmates with the IROM department and corporate sponsors. Through GBTG, I worked with the leaders of the Graduate Operations Group and we formed Sigma Fellows, now known as Operations Fellows, a selective program for students to deepen their experience and skills in Operations and Technology.

My favorite moment was at graduation, where Fernando Gonzalez, our classmate known for documenting many of our experiences through pictures, captured a shot of the entire class as he walked the graduation stage. It was truly amazing, and was another showcase of the McCombs culture.

I had many memorable professors whose lessons I still carry with me several years later. One lecture that stood out was the last class of our high-tech marketing course. In that class, Kevin Williams gave us a life lesson that has stayed with me. The gist of it was to focus on building enough savings first, so that you are always in control of your decisions and can live in alignment with your personal values. Integrity is a core value of mine, and this lesson resonates strongly, even to this day.

How did your educational experience change you?

My educational experience gave me a more rounded view of business and people. Prior to business school I was a software engineer building multimedia communication platforms. I chose to go to business school, instead of continuing in engineering, because I wanted to understand the interconnection among various systems across business functions. I have always been a systems thinker, and my engineering background certainly fed that systems thinking mindset. McCombs gave me rich knowledge of even more systems, and that has helped me succeed in highly cross-functional roles where I thrive at the center of various functions and contexts.

The study group teams we are placed in at McCombs, coupled with the leadership skills I gained through various professional development activities, gave me a deeper understanding of people’s motivations, which helped me hone my ability to lead through influence. I have continued on with my passion in developing myself and others since McCombs, so much so that my career is focused on Organizational effectiveness and Operational excellence.

Please provide a brief summary of your career path since graduating.

After business school, I led information management strategy at Adobe during the business model shift from perpetual to subscriptions. I was lucky to have been at the center of figuring out how to capture and report the right KPIs needed to run this new business model. I got to lead several SCRUM teams creating business analytics and intelligence solutions for various leaders in Product, Sales, and Services.

Next, I shifted to designing business processes and programs, and took a role in Business Operations for Creative Cloud. I designed Product and Marketing processes that allowed us to prioritize what was most important for the then $5B business, release products with the right customer experience and marketing support, and implement pricing strategies across various product offerings. I worked with several senior leaders as a chief of staff, and observed their leadership in action. This experience accelerated my learning of business and leadership.

The third shift I made was to Zendesk to build the Business Operations function, initially in Marketing, and then globally for the company, to help accelerate growth at a pivotal part of our journey from $500M to $1B. I am now in my third role at Zendesk, leading the Office of the President function, and helping us scale our Go-To-Market strategy and operations as we head towards $3B. My time at Zendesk has definitely scaled and optimized my approach to leading global teams and dynamic business functions.

Along the way, I continued my involvement in professional development activities, including co-leading the Adobe Women’s Executive Shadow Program, founding the Adobe Speed Coaching Program, and founding the Zendesk ERG Professional Development Program. Through these activities, I attended a conference where I experienced executive coaching; and I decided to train and become certified as an Executive Coach. Finding coaching helped me unleash the current phase of my career journey.

A few years ago, I launched Expanded Impact, an integrated organizational effectiveness solution provider for organizations and teams. Today, I operate at the intersection of strategy, people, and process; designing leadership experiences and implementing effective strategies that help executives and their teams thrive through change and complexity while accelerating better business outcomes.

What are you most proud of in your career so far?

What I am most proud of is that I am following the spark that makes me truly come alive! I get to work with C-Suite executives and teams across various industries as an executive coach. I learn from my coachees just as much as they learn from me. In addition, my coaching informs my leadership and my leadership informs my coaching. I am truly blessed.

I am proud of the difficult moments in my career when I chose Integrity, and followed that wise teaching from Kevin Williams. I am proud of the moments where I showed up to make an impact for others, like Tina Mabley. When I left the shores of home in Nigeria, two decades ago, I did not dream of all that I have now accomplished. I am immensely grateful to the Grace I have experienced, my family’s unflinching support, and the people along my journey that have lit the path for me, and I am honored to hold the torch out for others around me.

At every step of my journey, the seemingly insurmountable mountains that were before me turned to beautiful landscapes behind me reminding me that my capacity is bigger than I can imagine.

How have you stayed involved with the school as an alumnus?

I have been an alumni interviewer for prospective students interested in McCombs since graduation. I have worked with various MBA staff to help host Tech Trip visits to the San Francisco bay area. Those Jan Tech trips were the highlights of my year as I got to interact with current students and catch up with McCombs staff. I participate in our alumni career series, and recently hosted a webinar titled, “Promote a Learning and Growth Culture in This Brave New Hybrid World” (view the recording here).

I am excited to be back in Texas and closer to McCombs. I visited campus over the Labor Day weekend with a few friends from my class year, and it was a fun, nostalgic and refreshing trip.

What are your goals for the future, career wise, and in relation to McCombs?

My future has Organizational Effectiveness continuing to take the center stage in my career. I see myself leading global org effectiveness at scale – impacting leaders, teams, organizations, and systems.

I also hope to be engaged in faculty opportunities at McCombs, teaching executive development and organizational leadership classes, and I will continue to be engaged in leadership development conversations within the McCombs community.