BIO

I was born and raised in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia as the third child of two Colombian immigrants who moved to the USA in pursuit of the American Dream. Overcoming the irresistible lure of video games and Legos, I became obsessed with soccer at a very young age and enjoyed spending weekend mornings with my dad watching English and Spanish soccer on TV. I was fortunate to be good enough to captain my high school's varsity team and play club ball at a highly competitive level on a team that taught me the importance of hard work, perseverance, and camaraderie. Highlights with my club team include going undefeated to secure a regional title, becoming nationally ranked, and competing for a national championship title on my birthday that we unfortunately lost (but hey, at least I scored!).

Fast-forwarding to the fall of 2010, I flew across the country to attend college at Stanford University. Interests in astronomy and space travel prompted me to declare an aero/astro major during my freshman year with the aspiration of someday becoming the first human on Mars. However, after discovering my desire to design and create, I decided to switch majors to mechanical engineering and subsequently enjoyed spending countless hours at the Stanford Product Realization Lab improving my design process and slowly starting to uncover my creative side. I still never considered myself artistic, and I was more preoccupied with the technological rigor of my engineering coursework. However, I eventually enrolled in a silversmithing class to determine if I had any hidden artistic ability, and I subsequently uncovered my hobby of watchmaking after silver casting a watch housing. I was ecstatic about fashioning something personal and unique, and my curiosity grew into a desire to further create, leading me to switch my graduate focus from mechatronics to product realization. Since then, I’ve continued to experiment with watch designs, having learned metal 3D-printing to create custom watches as gifts to friends. I ultimately earned both my bachelor’s and master’s in mechanical engineering in 2016, and my induction into the Tau Beta Pi California Gamma chapter capped an incredible 6-year journey and affirmed my ability to learn fast and learn well.

After graduating, I thrived at fast-paced, high-stakes startups. At drive.ai, I collaborated across teams to navigate a resource-strapped environment and race to deliver the first publicly deployed, revenue-generating self-driving vehicle. Our team’s small but well-executed endeavor caught Apple’s attention and resulted in the eventual acquisition of our assets. I subsequently turned down an offer to join Apple to move with my girlfriend to NYC while she attended NYU Stern. Upon moving to NYC, I joined an indoor vertical farming startup called Bowery Farming, and at Bowery, I continuously juggled executives’ competing priorities while rooting my solutions in our farmers’ daily needs. My efforts in expanding our production capacity and facilitating the launch of new products have subsequently helped Bowery to become the leading indoor, vertical farming company in the country. However, I felt the drive to effect change at increasingly higher levels of game-changing technology organizations, and as a result, I decided to enroll at the Kellogg School of Management as part of the 2023 MMM cohort.

As a long-time soccer player and recent marathon finisher, I am an athlete with an insatiable thirst for pushing boundaries. While I’ve focused my professional career on innovation that expands human limits, I aspire to shift my professional focus to include sport and fitness more directly, most recently interning as a digital product manager on Nike’s Advertising Technology team. I am fascinated by the science and spirit behind human performance and am motivated to join a sporting company full-time that will help me learn how to best leverage my engineering experiences to empower athletes via a more strategic role. In the meantime, I plan to use Kellogg as an opportunity to further expand my horizons and branch out into different areas of interest. My hope is that my curiosity will make me into a more open-minded and creative designer, leading me to uncover ways to better understand consumer needs and ultimately design compelling products and services that make them feel deeply understood. While Kellogg will transform me into a businessman, MMM will push me to be a better designer. Together, this unique combination of business acumen and creative, human-centered design thinking will give me the tools to achieve my dream of enabling others to leave their mark on the world. 

-Daniel Espinel, 2023