Houston Loves Risk Takers feat. Dean Peter Rodriguez

[00:00]Brian Jackson: Welcome to Owl Have You Know, a podcast from Rice Business. This episode is part of our Up Next series, where faculty, researchers, and alumni weigh in on the trends currently shaping the world of business.

On today’s episode, I talk with Peter Rodriguez, dean of Rice Business and the key architect behind the school’s most transformative decade. Since becoming dean in 2016, Peter has led Rice Business through a period of extraordinary growth, doubling MBA enrollment, launching the Hybrid and Online MBA programs, helping establish the Virani Undergraduate School of Business, and expanding the alumni network to more than 10,000 strong. Along the way, Rice Business has continued to climb the national rankings and built a reputation for excellence in entrepreneurship, finance, and innovation. And in 2025, Peter was named Poets&Quants Dean of the Year.

In this conversation, we talk about the vision that connects those milestones. We also look ahead to the new Rice Business building opening this year, his perspective on AI in business education, and what he hope remains true about Rice Business as it enters its next chapter.

Dean Peter, it is fantastic to have you join me today on Owl Have You Know. Thank you.

[01:19]Dean Peter Rodriguez: It's my pleasure to be here. Of course. Thank you for having me, Brian.

[01:22]Brian Jackson: Well, I figured I would want to start where really, kind of, our relationship even began, which is the online program. Had it not been for you championing the program and making it a reality, I wouldn't be sitting here today with this microphone in front of me. So, first, I owe you a debt of gratitude and a big thanks.

[01:40]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Well, no, I mean, the gratitude is from me to you. That's wonderful. And just hearing you say that is gratifying. I certainly remember the initial thoughts on the program, how we got here, you know, the big role it played in everything we've been trying to build. And that's a good feeling. That's, kind of, why I'm in this business, is to bring people like you in and through an education like this. So, thank you for acknowledging that. That makes me feel good.

[02:05]Brian Jackson: I think of, like, the avalanche of growth at Rice. That was one of the first accumulations of snow. You've doubled the MBA enrollment. You've grown tenure-track faculty by over 40%. You then launched the hybrid MBA. We've talked about the online MBA and now the undergraduate business major. On top of that all, we have over 10,000 alums from Rice Business. So, you know, all of these milestones. What was that guiding vision that connected them?

[02:34]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Well, they're all tied together, so thank you for mentioning that. That's an awful lot of growth. If there was one overarching theme of the last decade, I think growth is it. And the question is always like, ″Well, why growth?" Or ″Growth for what?" And, of course, clearly we want growth for the good outcomes, and that good outcomes all start with pursuing the mission. We have a mission to create and disseminate knowledge at the vanguard of business and the business disciplines.

And so, that's what we really do. And when I was really looking at the job almost exactly 10 years ago and thinking about where Rice was, and where it needed to be, one of the first conclusions that was easy to draw was that it needed to be about twice as big as it was, at least, you know. And it's not that growth is all good, but why would I say that? And the thinking was, you know, in order to advance that mission, we needed more tenure-track faculty.

And they're the foundation on which more or less everything else proceeds. They pursue both parts of the mission aggressively, the research side, the teaching side. They design the courses. Their quality also bestows a lot of your reputation in the market and amongst peer schools and peer faculties. So, the beginning of any virtuous cycle for growth in national prominence really has to lead to more of them. The rub is, it's hard to double. You know, one of the things people worry about is, ″Well, who's that going to be?"

Are you going to lower quality? Are you going to just throw the door open to admissions? Will you have to lower tuition to a point that you can't really deliver, and this is too costly for you to pursue. All these hurdles are in the way. And so, when I was first having those conversations a decade ago, the thinking was, how would we pursue this growth? Good things were here. I've said it many times, Houston has amazing strategic foundations for a business school. We have so many Fortune 100, 500 companies, great entrepreneurship, a bustling, growing state, very pro-business environment.

It's perfect in that way. Also, Rice is, sort of, perfectly suited in that way. Great reputation, serious academics. But growth is not easy. And so, I remember in that first meeting bringing up online as something I thought we needed to do. You know, the technology could deliver well. I knew if we owned the program, we could make it very high quality, do something special in the market, really take advantage of the opening in Texas, a very big state with lots of great students in it, but everywhere else.

And so, it was a linchpin. You know, the online program was discussed day one. And by two years in, we had it launched, but it was an uphill battle all the way through there. And now we're finishing year eight, and gosh, I think currently we have almost 400 students enrolled right now in that program, it's the biggest piece of our growth.

[05:17]Brian Jackson: So, I mean, folks were skeptical of online and, you know, the quality of the program and I guess the other potential risk with it. How did you approach that, and how did you convince other stakeholders that this was the leap and the one worth taking?

[05:32]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Yeah, that's a good question. You know, of course, you begin all conversations with explaining the “why.” I think people listen when they hear the “why.” But everybody who was really critical listened and said, ″Okay, what's the story? How would you do it?” Okay, even if you get comfortable with the broad idea or understanding, yes, that could work here. You know, the devil is, sort of, in the details.

So, “Who delivers it? Who makes the courses? How do we control quality?" Et cetera, et cetera. So, a key was, you know, being really forthright about two things. One of them was who would own the program, and the tenured faculty would own the program. In fact, we had almost all full professors, not quite, but almost all full professors, design and deliver the main courses, design and deliver the entire curriculum, so they could own it.

I knew they were great quality, so they weren't going to mess up on the curriculum or anything like that. And I think if they felt like it's all ours, they could feel comfortable. The second thing was, well, what are we going to do with any resources generated from it? Is it going to reinvest into itself? What do we do? And I said for this and all the growth we have, our primary goal is reinvesting in more tenure-track positions, which we can do.

And, in fact, our partner in delivering the online program, which is 2U, helped us on that end. And so, we got going right away, and people could see the possibilities that, ″Okay, we can make it high quality. We feel comfortable with that." We know that any good that comes of this will come back to the mission. It's not going to be just frivolous things, and we think it's going to be sustainable in that way.

You could continue to invest in the program. You can continue to provide good academic program support, all that. The case was won. And once we had the internal folks convinced, I think the rest of the university came along, too. They were also skeptical, like everybody else, but having the business school say, we are comfortable, we're willing to give it a go, it's all on us, we'll deliver.

You know, the timing was right, and President Leebron, at the time, was a big supporter. I think he wanted to see Rice at least try hard, in online, and we did. And so, we got most of that done in a little over a year. Yeah, we launched July of 2018. It was very exciting.

[07:50]Brian Jackson: And one of the best parts of the online program is that you don't have to have the physical space. You're able to have this virtual campus.

[07:57]Dean Peter Rodriguez: No, you raised a great and an important point, because I think one of the chief concerns was where would we put everyone? What's this going to do to classrooms? Is it going to change the feel of the space? You know, when do we do it? Like, what time of day? All these questions come into the scene. And then you also get questions about capacity. Do we have the capacity to do that? So, the argument was, well, actually, it's even better to do this virtually. We'll have no real threat of the space in that way.

We can provide access, and so people can double up on the weekends, evenings, or daytime if they live locally, which they could. And then when we do our residencies, well, you know, that's, sort of, specialized and we can manage that. We do that anyway. But it also meant that you preserved the feel of the physical campus in a way that gave assurance to everybody who was here. We're not going to flip a switch and change this overnight.

The challenge we have is a lot of people who are interested and qualified and would flourish here at Rice can't match the schedule or don't have the location, and that's just math and logic. Of course, that's true. It's a big state, a big world, and lots of jobs, particularly amongst the most successful people, but just too demanding to let you, one, take off a lot of work, or two, take off significant time in the evening or weekends on a very predictable schedule for two years.

So, yeah, it made good sense. And then my other benefit, which would be we learned a lot about delivering online that we didn't know. People who had maybe done nothing or only dabbled became experts and began to think about it. And I knew that would happen, is that the more they did it, the more they took it seriously, and they learned how to get better, which improved their teaching in every aspect of the school.

[09:41]Brian Jackson: So, then I think about the other growth we had hinted on, which was the undergraduate business major. One of the biggest constraints was the capacity of McNair. Could it really support that type of growth?

[09:52]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Yeah, that's right. Well, when we got to, sort of, the post-COVID environment, I think we'd learned a lot about hybrid delivery. We were hearing, we check our environment every year. More and more people who are professionals wanted access. They wanted something in between online and the programs we have. The hybrid MBA is really a modification of the weekend MBA program that allows you to come once per month, but that was going to add to the weekend, which is starting to get crowded.

Really, McNair Hall was designed for none of that. You know, it was designed for about four sections of a full-time program, maybe, and a couple of sections of EMBA on the weekend. But by the time we get to 2020, you know, when we have the online, and we're starting to think about hybrid, and we have an undergraduate minor, and we're thinking about a major, the building is being used really six nights a week, almost seven days a week, every week of the year.

It's almost completely overloaded, and we know we just can't do it. The math stopped working. So, the prospect of getting an undergraduate major approved, which we did in 2021, meant that we'd have to start thinking about a building. And it was about that time that we started thinking about a building. By the way, all throughout that period, from 2016 to 2021, we renovated parts of the building every year. So, the second floor, which I'm on today, was completely redone. We did the first floor before that. We added a west wing on the first floor.

We were doing everything we could to add more spaces. Renovated 116, which is kind of a special, nice, big flat room. All of these things, but there are just so many tricks you can pull, and then you're just out of building. And so, we started a big push then and finally got that approved. And I don't know if you can hear it now, but there's some drills and mechanized equipment and cranes outside my window today, as there have been for about two years, finishing up a brand new big, great expansion.

[11:48]Brian Jackson: You went, you know, to seek approval for a new building, coming from a place of showing that growth was possible, and actually, it fit for the current market and what folks were looking for.

[11:59]Dean Peter Rodriguez: No, I think that's right. An expansion to McNair had been considered before, I think in 2014. There was a thinking that they might get there, and the board of trustees reached a conclusion, which I would agree with. I believe if I'd seen the data, what I've seen said that, no, they didn't really have capacity constraints at the time that warranted growth. Probably through some rescheduling and other activities, you could manage that. But we demonstrated it in a big way.

You know, by the time we got to 2020 and 2021, even with a large proportion of our students being online, we just couldn't do it anymore. We had the busiest working building on the campus. In fact, if you look from 2016 to today, I'm pretty sure about 60% of the rough growth in all student populations at Rice University has been in the business school. So, that's a great deal of growth. And the university has grown too at the undergraduate space, but we definitely needed the space.

So, the seven new classrooms, the 30-ish to 40-ish new offices, and many other spaces are going to be badly needed. But we demonstrated that, and that made it easier to go to donors, other philanthropists around town, and say we could use your support to do something really good and valuable for Houston, the region, and certainly for the university.

[13:15]Brian Jackson: And so, I mean, having been in McNair, grown all these programs, seen everything. When you thought of the new building, was there a certain part of the design that was a non-negotiable, that you felt was just absolutely needed?

[13:28]Dean Peter Rodriguez: You know, that was an interesting part. Our architects are great. They know how to think through these problems and to ask a lot of questions. And so, I can remember in the interview phase and the proposal phase talking to all these firms. And the question they ask you, which always puts you on the spot a little bit, is like, ″Well, what's your vision?" Et cetera, and, ″How do you think about… What are your values?" You know, ″What is the feel?"

You know, it almost sounds like an emotional design, but it's really trying to evoke, “What are you trying to accomplish? How does this space matter? What messages do you need to deliver? You know, what does it say about the school, about your values, and the like?” And that's a great exercise. I don't think we do it enough, and it certainly wasn't something I did on my own. But the more we did that, we talked about a few things that were important. One was we wanted the building to be a place where people were very happy to come and convene.

Certainly, students, you know, people involved in business at the corporate level, at startups, all the way around. I wanted them to feel like they belonged here, that they could come to Rice. They wanted to be there. This was where the action was. There was energy, innovativeness, excitement, you know, and academic perspective on what growth in business and changes in the business environment meant for the world.

So, all that was boiled down by, you know, better people than me into, you know, a view of a much more open, lit, artistic, modern addition. So, you know, the design of McNair Hall, which is exquisite, it's a Robert A.M. Stern building. It, sort of, has this Spanish design. It's reminiscent of what you see at Baker and other places, needed to be complemented by something that wasn't quite that. You know, it might harken back to a few of those design points, but it'd be bringing much more light. It'd make a lot of space available to people that was unbooked. So, just a lot of places to sit, be quiet, be in a small group, be alone.

No need for special access. We needed food, which is key. I heard that a lot. Food all throughout the day, different types, and great coffee. And, of course, we need the standard things, classrooms, Ph.D. space. So, you know, we threw all that together. And we needed it to fit in this geography we have here, where it didn't invade the Turrell. It fit beneath the viewshed of the building. And, you know, the design reflects that.

And I can't wait for everybody to see it. It's something to see in a two-dimensional image or rendering. I think being in the space is going to make people feel very different, and I think it's going to accomplish those goals.

[16:06]Brian Jackson: So, I mean, we hinted on it, the establishment of Virani Undergraduate School of Business. I mean, that was a huge step. So, what was really your underlying vision for Rice Business at the time when you brought that into the fold?

[16:22]Dean Peter Rodriguez: The Virani School is going to have huge impact. I think the upside for it is limitless. It's going to be fantastic. Thinking about, you know, if you go all the way back where we began our conversation, I was definitely thinking about online, adding more students to the full-time and the other programs. I don't know that I had hybrid on my mind yet, but in general, that growth. You know, we've added graduate certificates in healthcare this year.

We're growing further. But undergrad was always a key piece, and there are just a few reasons for it that really matter. One, it's a very high-demand field for young students and their parents. You know, they're very interested in undergraduate business. We had a minor at Rice, but undergraduate business isn't available everywhere. I would say if you went through your, sort of, U.S. News lists and the top 100 schools, I'd say, you know, 90 to 100 almost all have it, but one to 10, it's maybe three. You know, so there is this scattering of the big Northeast Ivy schools where it just isn't present. Everywhere else it is.

And Rice was, sort of, built in the mold of some of those, plus some liberal arts colleges with which everyone would be familiar. And so, it had this idea of a presence of business, maybe, but not a major. So, my view was, let's make a case for the academic value of a major within this great university, where the major takes up about a third of your credit hours, but two-thirds you spend in the other schools, in engineering, humanities, social sciences, you know, architecture, music, whichever one you want. You could spend your time there.

And the upward value of that, having very well-rounded students who could have explored lots of interest in these younger years, but then get real depth in business and be ready to get that first job, start the career at a place that could be rewarding. And we'd have, one, terrific Rice undergraduates, they’re incredibly bright. Rice has the history and the privilege of being highly selective on who we bring in, really being, you know, choosy on the quality of folks.

And you see it when you meet our undergraduates. And then I thought they would really be able to elevate the university, too, because now you would be able to compete with, and you just tick off the list, well, the University of Pennsylvania, the Wharton School, of course, has a great undergraduate program. Schools like Cornell have a great undergraduate program. 

If you went to UT McCombs, or Texas A&M Mays, or SMU Cox in the state, even those schools are overwhelmed with demand from great students, especially in and around Texas. And that's what they're looking for. Some of them we'd be more than happy to have, but I think they looked the other way because I think their concern was maybe we can't get to the same places in terms of career. But we've addressed that, and it's going fantastic.

And I think an interesting anecdote to that is I think the Virani family got interested because we announced that degree program around the time their son, Faraz, was graduating. And I think he really would've preferred to be a major. But I also believe being a Rice undergraduate, he knew firsthand, and maybe better than anyone, that it would really succeed. It was really a good, smart idea, and that, you know, good things would come from it. So, we had a terrific entry point into a conversation with a really philanthropic family who got behind us in a big way at the right time.

[19:45]Brian Jackson: The one thing I think about, and I'm, kind of, like, back to my undergrad [experience]… The big difference now is having AI and having the capability at your fingertips. You know, how are you thinking about that? And, you know, as we send undergrads and then MBAs out into the world, into this new AI-driven world?

[20:04]Dean Peter Rodriguez: It's a topic we think about every day. I don't think I've stopped thinking about it deeply and actively for two years now. You know, I think there's always the feeling that I believe everybody has, which is, gosh, this is hard to keep up with. I can't see around this corner. There are a lot of possibilities everyone's happy to sketch out. It's hard to know what probabilities to put on any of the paths. There's kind of a joke that, you know what? One path is nirvana, and the other path is like the Terminator.

You know, you, sort of, are between these heavenly outcomes where productivity is massive, and wellbeing is great, and the other ones where we're just completely subordinated to this power we've created. I'm less worried than I was a year ago. I see firms adapting in ways that still leverage a lot of human capability, that still value and leverage a lot of human judgment. And, you know, I try not to be unduly optimistic, but I think that's still the path forward.

So, we've got to do a couple of things that are pretty basic. On the basic part of our mission, which is delivering an education, we have to do two things. We have to prepare people to think really critically and to be able to assess them as individuals without this incredible, unprecedented tool. That is to say, ″What can Peter do of his own accord? What does he know?" And then I have to train him very aggressively to make sure that with the tool, he's also highly capable, far more capable to do some things, and as capable as anybody in any university in the country is using the tool.

So, there's, sort of, an almost martial arts mastery. You know, you have to, sort of, like, you know, wax on, wax off. You know, learn these sort of things that are apart from the tool, and then you're, sort of, empowered. That's where we are, is trying to do that. I think going too all in for us risks… And by that I mean training students with AI aggressively at the beginning risks maybe losing some of that. An example might be I'd like you to go through your core finance course, and still have to do, kind of, the hard work.

Not that I'm going to make you do heavy calculations or anything, but I don't want you to ask ChatGPT or pick your GenAI to give you an answer, or to produce the scenarios, or even maybe to make your discounted cash flow files. I might want you to do a little bit of that first, but then I need you to learn you don't have to do almost any of that. You can empower something else, but I need you to be the chef behind the cuisine.

[22:33]Brian Jackson: You want them to be skeptical, and you want to develop their ability to judge the information.

[22:40]Dean Peter Rodriguez: I think that's right. And I think at the end of the day, we do think about the ethics in a very important way, too. Where's the boundary? No matter what is possible. And with agentic AI, I think almost more than you can imagine, it's imaginable. What's the boundary a good leader or manager might want where, you know, someone with a heartbeat is making a decision, or casting a final judgment, or intervening? And I think that's our caution right now for the world, which is, what do we want out of this?

Clearly, we can have a lot of outcomes, and we should probably shape, actively, the ones we'd really prefer. You know, another piece of our thought is we're doing what scientists and academics do, which is to think about the future and imagining and asking, what could AI do? What's it going to do to the shapes of certain industries and the jobs that are produced? What's going to be left, or what will we be moving into?

We've seen thematically at least this type of thing before. Technological change has been disruptive in job markets. This appears to be of an extraordinary scale. It may be an unprecedented scale. Certainly, that feels like it to me. But, you know, we need to think about that and imagine what that means going forward, and be prepared. Because obviously, if you work backwards, we're a professional school. We need to be able to ready people for professions. If some of them are changing, we need to get ready for that.

If some of them are evolving, we have to be ready for that. And if some of them are really going away, we should be ready for that, too. So, that's the other side. But we're at the early stage. I think two years ago, when this was just emerging, everybody, sort of, raced ahead to try to do something or at least say they're doing something.

Now you can see we're all slowing down a little bit, trying to be more thoughtful and cautious. So, I think about it all the time. It's changing, and we have to change with it. We know it's not optional, so we're trying to just stay ahead and do our jobs well.

[24:41]Brian Jackson: I had a discussion with Professor Capuano. And we were talking about, kind of, AI in her class, and she has her students use it. They use it together, but then she'll often find the pitfalls of reading an AI-generated response and not knowing that it was inaccurate or not exactly the truth. And I think she was saying those lessons, you can, kind of, see it calculate, and all of a sudden it's like, ″Okay, you need to go back. You need to know what you're talking about."

[25:08]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Yeah, I think that's right. Well, you can tell that when you're reading exams and things, and it's like any of us who have our own professions, our own expertise. Because you know it, you know when the AI gives you good output. But if you didn't know it, you wouldn't know. And you think that looks highly plausible, or that seems exactly right. And so, there is that issue where the expertise is still needed, and it's not that easy to develop. You know, if you rely, over-rely, on that crutch. So, there's that spacing and that pace. We're trying to deal with that.

You know, I think the other part, frankly, we've talked about, “How do we make sure that exams are taken honestly.” I think most of that is to assure students that their peers are operating on a level playing field. I think that can often be one of the big challenges that unwinds confidence in a program, is when you look and you think, you know, “I want to do this the right way and understand this deeply, but if everybody else in the class is using AI and getting A's, yeah, I have to think about whether or not I can go without it or not.”

So, we need to make sure that everyone feels like it's a level playing field. When we ask you to not use the AI, no one is going to use it. And when we ask you to use it, of course, you use it. And for that, we probably need to think about our processes. Five years ago, we didn't have that kind of a problem. Today, we do. We need to think about it.

[26:29]Brian Jackson: Who knew that being a dean could have so many headwinds and changes come your way?

[26:34]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Not me. I think that it's always interesting and it's always new. There are lots of different challenges. It's still fun. But, yeah, it's the wild west sometimes.

[26:46]Brian Jackson: So, in terms of rankings, Rice Business really performs well nationally, especially in the areas of entrepreneurship and finance. You know, why do you think that is?

[26:55]Dean Peter Rodriguez: You know, it's interesting. Rankings are always, I think, every dean, every academic leader thinks, I don't know where they get some of these, right? It can be, kind of, tough, and there's a great rankings business. A few things tend to shine through, though. I'd say that overall, if you average all rankings together, you start to get more signal than noise. Looking at any one individually, you tend to get more noise than signal. When you look at all of ours together, you know, I think one of the highlights you always see for the business school is entrepreneurship.

And I think there are really two big things I can think of that I'm confident about. One is we had an early start. I think we took entrepreneurship more seriously earlier than most schools, and it's largely because we had some professors here who took it upon themselves. So, Ed Williams and Al Napier maybe did the most in that regard. Certainly, they did more than anybody else, I know of in that regard. But, you know, I don't want to leave anybody out. People like Dennis Murphree and others did a lot, too, to, kind of, get that started and talk about it in an active way, treat it more seriously, give it more attention.

And, you know, they built momentum. So, that's 25-plus years ago. Not that other business schools weren't doing it, but we did it well and have kept up. So, I'll say that, we’ve kept up and done it in smart ways. And people like Brad Burke and Yael Hochberg, who do that today here, have added immeasurably to our success. But the other thing is really Houston. I think being a business school in a major urban area with high growth and high appetite for business means you just are in the environment in a way that is hard to replicate anywhere else.

If you went to Silicon Valley, they would say something similar. People have said that a long time about Stanford. They say, like, you know, ″They're really good at what they do, but so much is the environment itself. How could you not succeed?" That is really important there, and it's super important here. The other thing I always tell people is that Houston loves risk takers. It's part of the environment. It's part of a Texas thing, too. But, you know, it's going to space, drilling out in the Permian Basin or deep in the ocean, you know, putting in an artificial heart, whatever it is.

I think there's a real admiration for trying hard things and picking yourself up if you fail, and not being discouraged because things didn't go right the first time. I think there's a sense of, you know, kind of chest out. We do big hard things here, and we're proud of it. And it doesn't work every time, but we keep going. And so, when people want to engage with Rice in the business school, oftentimes the thing that they want to be most involved with is, ″How can I help somebody start and try something hard and walk them through a difficult process?"

So, it's a great business city, just a super great entrepreneurship city. The last thing I'd say about that is that's also true about the many immigrant populations that are here. I always tell people we know this. Houston's one of the most diverse cities in the country. It's a city of great diversity because it's a city of great opportunity. People can come here. There's no zoning. You can get something cheap, get started. You know, there are downsides to that. But the upside is you get a shot. You know, you get a ticket, and you can get on the ride and see if you can make it work.

And for many people, that chance is all they need. And we see that over and over with entrepreneurs who have come here, you know, who are born here and are drawn here to succeed. So, that environmental feature and a good start with pioneers has made the difference. And that's something we can't lose, really, you know, unless we're really silly and make bad choices, which we're not going to do. But we're fortunate, and that's where that comes from, and that's why it's so strong. I think it's even stronger than recognized sometimes, but that's why we're so good.

[30:42]Brian Jackson: And I think you've nailed it. This environment of Houston itself, that ecosystem, brings out so much opportunity. I think the other thing that Rice Business has tied into it, you know, this integration with LILIE and Rice Alliance to The Ion. So, what made that kind of coordination and growth possible through those?

[31:03]Dean Peter Rodriguez: You know, those are the key elements of our entrepreneurship delivery system, and it's growing still and doing well. On the internal side, you know, I go back. Yael Hochberg comes to us. Great background. She's been everywhere important, you know, Stanford and Northwestern and other places, leading an entrepreneurship program. She was brought in to be the head of the entrepreneurship initiative at Rice University by David Leebron, joined in 2015.

A little bit later, we get LILIE, which is essentially the heart of entrepreneurship education at the university. It delivers all of our credit-bearing courses to the students here, I think, save one or two, and it does just an amazing job. So, it's meant to be exactly what you need, a place that's not just a classroom, but kind of a living community for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, particularly our students who are graduates and undergraduates, and they do a famously good job of that.

Before Lilie, we had the Rice Alliance for Technology and Entrepreneurship, which performed a lot of those duties and now more focuses as, I think, kind of a platform for the launching and the commercialization of ideas from outside of Rice that connect into Rice or from the laboratories. In some ways, we all play a role in that, and they do. And nowadays, and I think Brad Burke has done a great job there, particularly with the Rice Business Plan Competition. There are many things I could point out.

But if I were to call it one, it'll be the world's largest and richest business plan competition, which is, you know, it's the March Madness of entrepreneurship at colleges and universities. We always get Stanford, Berkeley, MIT, Harvard, teams from the best universities, and all universities come to compete. It's fantastic. It's unprecedented and great, and that's made a big difference. That team is now running the programming at The Ion, which is a Rice-sponsored space designed to scale that presence into the city and beyond. And that continues to grow.

Even today, you know, we recently added startup garages, if you will, at The Ion through what we call the Nexus. And there are going to be more wet labs and dry labs put out adjacent to The Ion and graduate housing. So, this investment around this entrepreneurship ecosystem is designed to grow Rice and commercialize Rice ideas and IP and original research, and to expand the opportunities of our students. So, you know, we're upping the ante on anybody who wants to try to compete with us for that, and I think that's been terrific for us.

But we work together on all of that. I think this entrepreneurship ecosystem is essentially unmatched. I think it's superb, and we're continuing to do good work and collect good people to do it.

[33:46]Brian Jackson: So, I'm sure when you were interviewing to become the dean of Rice Business, you were in front of a committee sharing your vision, talking about your experience. You know, from sitting there and what you thought the job was going to be to today, 10 years later, tell me what you couldn't have understood before really stepping into this role.

[34:04]Dean Peter Rodriguez: So, I had run programs at a school for about five years, and before that, I had been heavily involved in some other dean work at a dean level. And I could imagine what it meant to design and deliver MBA programs, what it meant to think about business programs in general, and to do most of the inside work. I could do all the inside work. I'd say I knew what it was like to, sort of, run the organization and the key leaders, like the head of the career center, the head of admissions, the head of Exec Ed, the folks who do student programs, tech, all of that.

That's different when you're really in charge, you know, when you're the final say on a lot of that. I think it's the outside work I couldn't quite imagine as much, and I think it was harder to, sort of, see year-by-year challenges. Like, how do you keep momentum? How do you stay ahead? How do you deal with headwinds? And a lot of that's the outside work, too. By the outside, I mean working across the university with other deans and the leadership, namely the provost and the president, and then working in the broader community to raise money for the school.

You know, a big part of the job is philanthropy, but also to be the ambassador of the university and its business school into the corporate environment, into the business environment. That, I think, was a little bit new and different to me, and I've loved it. You know, it's really interesting. But I remember thinking, “What should I do here? What's the call?” But, you know, some of those are, for example, universities school by school tend to be very different. We share a lot in common with peers, but I'm not much like the music school.

And I'm not much like the School of Natural Sciences with labs and heavy reliance on grants and a very different profile and a very different, you know, set of professionals. In some ways, equally interested in academia, highly trained, of course, but different. And so, coming up with and talking about policies, for all of this, matters. And then, of course, there are some trade-offs. If you think about an undergraduate program, that's not a win for everybody in the university, or isn't seen as one.

I think that's a hard thing to think about, you know, when you're just in one school, like mine, or just in somebody else's. We, of course, had different, you know, tough issues, like Hurricane Harvey, and we had the freeze in '21, and we had COVID, which, of course, nobody was thinking about that. And I think that's the part where you get the exigent sort of leader questions, and you're like, ″Okay, what do we do here?" You have a role to play, and you have to do it. The other piece on the outside, on the philanthropic side, I've really enjoyed. It's really the public relations side, maybe put differently.

I love talking about the school. I like being involved in different civic organizations and getting to know people. I think getting to know people and getting to know how they thought about the school from the outside was a great benefit. But I hadn't done enough of that before I got here, so that felt a little bit different for sure. Then there's just the usual stuff. You know, there's people in organizations. Those are always challenging.

So, you learn more about yourself, and you learn how to live your values a little bit better and what you care about. But it's been a lot of fun. I mean, I've learned a lot from it. It's been terrific.

[37:24]Brian Jackson: So, Dean Peter, one of the things that recently I was fortunate enough to do was volunteer and speak to recently admitted students to the Full-Time program. One of those students was, kind of, on the edge in considering an Ivy League East Coast school or Rice Business. His thoughts and concerns were around, kind of, the energy world and looking at a career pivot into commodities. Could you, kind of, speak about Rice's vision in connection to energy, and, you know, are we hedging purely to renewables? Are we split between that and conventional?

[37:58]Dean Peter Rodriguez: That's a good question. I think the presence of energy in the minds of everyone in the world are much larger than they have been only a few years ago. And there's two reasons for that. I think the first reason is one that's been around for a while, would be concern about climate change, a concern about, you know, a transition into renewable sources. How fast should that take place? How do we do it? We've talked about that a lot, and we've committed a lot of resources to understanding that.

But the second, and the one that is, I think, dominating currently, is the massive energy requirements of the data revolution in AI. I think any forward projection for the energy demands of the future has to be all of the above. It isn't because people and governments may not have a preference, but because meeting those demands will require different types of energy sources, because they're not completely substitutable for each other.

And being the energy capital of the world, Houston thinks about all of those. We, of course, have a very longstanding, deep, deeper than anyone else's, you know, as a business school, fossil fuel understanding through companies like Chevron and Exxon are great examples. But also, deep connections to all of the resources dedicated in companies like those and many others in renewable spaces for wind, solar, geothermal, of course, natural gas, and all those other types.

If anyone had an interest in energy, there's no question, you know, this is a slam dunk. You should be at Rice, because we think about it that way. It's not that from the ivory tower, whatever, we're thinking the world should become this. We, one, you know, take the environment as it is and talk about, well, what's the phenomena taking place, and how is it being shaped?

And, of course, we always talk about the pros and cons of each pathway forward. And I was just having a conversation with one of our professors today on this very topic. Rice needs to prepare leaders to be ready for all of those paths forward. And I would bet today that we're going to need a very broad set of energy sources for the future, including, you know, more renewables, more fossil fuels, and everything we haven't yet discovered or produced in sufficient quantity.

[40:08]Brian Jackson: And I think the way your view of the conversation… That's why when you walk the halls of McNair now, you see a mix of companies representing that.

[40:17]Dean Peter Rodriguez: We do. And we have companies that are deep into the renewable space and companies that are hedging, and we have, of course, traditional fossil fuel-based companies.

[40:26]Brian Jackson: So, recently, we celebrated 50 years of Rice Business, and now we have the new building on the horizon. What's next in this chapter for Rice Business?

[40:37]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Well, I don't know where to put us along our overall timeframe, but you could certainly look at the first 50 years as sort of birth through adolescence. I'd say in that 50 years, we didn't quite reach 10,000 alumni, but the statistic I like to give people is in the first 20 or so years, we had fewer than 1,000. So, the easy math is we averaged less than 50 students a year for the first 20 years. We have a relatively small alumni base at our origin and a much larger one today.

So, I think we've really come into our fullness, and I think we're really much more of a national competitor, and we've put into the workforce lots of great leaders. The next 10 and 20 years are going to see us have an unprecedented and high number of leaders of top firms and organizations in traditional firms, you know, corporate America, in startups, in firms that have yet to be created. So, that's incredibly exciting for us and for what our future holds.

I think we're going to see that maturity and that, sort of, full benefit come back to our professional programs at the graduate level in ways that we haven't yet enjoyed. And so, for those schools, you know, traditional East Coast schools that have had alumni bases that are large for 50 years, we'll finally be toe to toe. And I really look forward to that sort of flowering and emergence on the graduate side.

You know, in addition to all the curricular enhancements we'll undertake for those programs, we'll have that, and we'll start to see the undergraduate program really come into national prominence in a way it hasn't yet. You know, when we started, you had to overcome the basics, which is getting students in high school to think, well, I am interested in, say, a finance degree or a marketing degree, but I know Rice doesn't do that, to now think I should consider them alongside everywhere else.

And so, we'll see the Virani School elevate relatively quickly, and we'll see how we fuse these cultures together and bring in even better faculty and more great students. So, the next 10 to 20 years are going to see that. And then I'd make one more prediction, which I think will be true at many places, is I believe, strongly, that we will integrate more deeply with the rest of the university and a lot of our programs..

That you'll see combinations with social sciences, humanities, in the STEM fields, maybe even other universities. I think that's the work ahead for universities, is how we take the best of and give students even more choice and options. So, I think that's really coming soon, and I think we're going to add strength to the university and vice versa.

[43:15]Brian Jackson: It's all so exciting. In anticipation of us talking today, I asked the Alumni Association board if they had any questions they'd want to ask you. And one of our volunteers, Kim Denney, proposed asking, ″As alums, what would you like to see us do to help the school?"

[43:31]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Oh, that's a great question. So, thanks to Kim, and thanks to you for asking Kim's question. The number one thing I always want is for people to stand up and speak up for Rice wherever they are, in the firm you're in, in the community you're in. Make sure people know you're from Rice. Get the swag, wear the swag, put the stickers on, whatever it is, and mention us when the time comes to look for talent or to look for opportunity. We haven't had enough of that.

The other one is: Get involved. I think so many students, there are missing cohorts, missing classmates, where they get involved with each other, maybe or not at all. But we need them more involved in the Alumni Association than they are. We will be a lot stronger when we do that. So, if you haven't, make it a point. Do something. It could be small. Come to a reception, come to a reunion, get back in touch with someone, but be more involved, because that presence builds and it amplifies.

And without it, it doesn't really matter as much, the rest. So, once you get involved, you'll see great opportunities to help our current students, to help yourselves, and to help others by connecting and building this much stronger network. That's such a key factor for business schools and slow scale, low diffusion, low participation, those are the death knells of a great network. We want higher scale, higher participation, high engagement.

And so, all that means is, you know, get involved. You're going to like these people. You liked them before. You'll enjoy it. You'll have a space to come in that you'll like. But, yeah, get more involved and speak up for Rice. Those are my big, big requests.

[45:07]Brian Jackson: Thank you very much, Dean Peter. I really appreciate you joining me today and for the conversation. I'm very much looking forward to seeing the new building and seeing what's ahead.

[45:17]Dean Peter Rodriguez: Thank you, Brian. Thanks to all the alumni. This has been great. I look forward to it, and I can't wait to welcome you to the new space. You'll like it.

[45:26]Brian Jackson: Thanks for listening. This has been Owl Have You Know, a production of Rice Business. You can find more information about our guests, hosts, and announcements on our website, business.rice.edu. Please subscribe and leave a rating wherever you find your favorite podcast. We'd love to hear what you think. The hosts of Owl Have You Know are myself, Brian Jackson, and Maya Pomroy.