Alumni Spotlight: MPAc Grad Larry Yee Jumps from PwC to VC firm

(Editor's note: We recently had the opportunity to catch up with alumnus Larry Yee MPAc 13, one of the members of the inaugural class of the Master of Professional Accountancy program. In this video, he shares his experience as a student, then working his way up to senior manager at a Big Four accounting firm, and now as director of finance at the Mayfield Fund, a global venture capital firm. Below is a transcript of our interview.)

"This program has kind of driven where my career has ended up.

Without it, I wouldn't have grown my network and the connections in the industry that I work in today without ... having started here at the MPAc.

A lot of what I do today was grounded in the things I learned, and all of it started here.

From the MPAc you're going to get two different things, you're going to get the core base technical skills.

And then there's the other kind of category of soft skills. And those have probably been the most important takeaways from my time at the MPAc program.

Collaboration

One of the things that I think the MPAc taught me that was super important was how to work in teams. That's kind of a microcosm of what public accounting is. You have teams that you rely on, then you have teams that rely on you.

One of the things that I really appreciated about the faculty and the staff here were that they had a lot of relevant career experience in either audit or tax. Will is still the executive director of the program.

Every single year I've come back, you know, just to catch up with him and tell him where I am in my career and he's always offered new advice. And that's meant a lot to me.

Career Progression

And I wound up with one of the Big 4 firms. The one I chose was PwC. And there's kind of a natural progression at PwC because you kind of work your way up from associate to senior to manager to senior manager.

And I was actually an early promote. So I got to senior earlier and I got to manager earlier than kind of a traditional career path for most. You're thrown different challenges that you may not have ever thought you were going to have to encounter and learning how to deal with, not necessarily the challenge itself, but being feeling like you don't know what to do.

Learning how to be comfortable, being uncomfortable. Accounting doesn't just mean audit. It doesn't just mean tax. There's a lot of different opportunities where you can transfer, where you can experience different things in a different places.

You can leverage what you've started with here at this MPAc program into so many different things.

Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging

My time here at the MPAc I had met a wonderful class. I had a core group of four or five folks that I still keep in touch with to this day, actually.

One of the members on one of my teams actually came from a class that graduated after me. She still working at PwC in San Jose, and she's done really well for herself. And you never know what kind of relationships and networks are going to grow out of this.

I use a lot of what I learned here at the MPAc and it led me to where I am today.

I definitely don't think I would have the profession I have, the career I've had and the connections I've had without kind of coming through the MPAc program."