"We Are GSM" - Meet Lecturer Marc Lowe

Marc Lowe brings a rare blend of Silicon Valley experience and a passion for teaching as a popular lecturer at the UC Davis Graduate School of Management.

With a deep background in product management, business planning and launching new ventures, Lowe helps shape the next generation of business leaders by drawing directly from his career in the tech and venture capital world.

Reflecting Lowe's impact in the classroom and as a mentor, UC Davis MBA students have honored him with the Graduate School of Management's Teacher of the Year Award in 2023, 2024 and again in 2025.

As the founder and managing partner of Praxis Ventures, Lowe has advised high-growth tech companies on strategy, venture financing, and mergers and acquisitions—raising over $200 million in venture capital and guiding $3 billion+ in M&A and IPO transactions.

His industry background includes executive leadership roles at Adaptec Inc., where he helped double revenues and triple profits, and as CEO of New Moon Systems, which was acquired by Sun Microsystems. He’s also held senior roles at Hewlett-Packard, leading North American PC marketing.

He's also an Aggie, having earned his Bachelor in Science in genetics from UC Davis and and later an MBA from UCLA. 

At UC Davis, Marc shares his industry experiences with MBA students, teaching courses in Product Management, New and Small Business Ventures, and Business Planning, and advising students' startups and bringing cutting-edge, practical business knowledge into the classroom.

Video Transcript

I'm not a typical tenure-track faculty member in that, in my professional life, I was a product manager for a Fortune 20 company, Hewlett-Packard, in the personal computer area. I was a general manager and I ran a division within a mid-sized, publicly traded company, consulted to, I don't know, 30 companies during the dot-com boom. I raised money for them. I served on boards. I did a lot of advisory kind of gigs. 

What I bring to the classroom is a lot of experience from my career, and actually, I think of myself more as a person who can inspire rather than teach techniques. And so I feel like my courses and my classroom are places where students can learn to dream and learn to think about how they can advance and how they can build their careers. 

Building the Product Management Pipeline

I'm really interested in product management. I've been a proponent of product management as a career track. I mean, I teach a product management course, so it may seem a bit self-serving, but it's really because that's the career path that I took. And I think that careers in product management are careers that allow students to sort of know a little bit about everything, which is what you learn in business school. 

And setting up this career track, we have a lot of graduates from GSM who are product managers now in software companies, internet companies, technology companies, consumer packaged goods companies. And, for the most part, historically, with the training that they got at GSM, but no special focus in terms of curriculum or advisory services or internships or anything of that nature. So, you know, they kind of did it on their own. 

And over the last couple of years, we've developed the structure and skeleton of the product management career track. Where students now get a prescribed list of courses that they might want to take. And we give them more support to get into that line of that field. 

I keep learning from my own students. The relationship that I've had with my students over the last 15 years teaching here at the GSM. My courses have always been popular. And so I'm lucky and fortunate for that. And because of that, there's always been a pretty tight bond between me and alumni from my courses. 

And so I keep in touch with past students, in the same way that they educate me in the classroom when they're here. They continue to educate me when they go away. So I'm here, I don't change, but then they keep changing, and they keep kind of feeding back to me what's going on. 

And they come back for events. We've had a couple of product management career events, we'll get a dozen product management alumni to come back and talk, and they come to my classroom.

From the Classroom to the Open Road

I like cars. Since I was a kid, I worked on cars, I fixed cars, I've owned, like, over 50 cars since I was 16. They don't have to be fancy cars because I love all kinds of cars. 

My most recent acquisitions have been kind of on two ends of a spectrum. One of them is a 2003 Toyota Tacoma pickup truck with 88,000 miles on it. With, like, under 100,000 miles. And these things last for 300,000 miles. 

The other one, on the other extreme, I have a 2024 Porsche GT4 RS. And so for those of you who are not car people, it’s like a really special sports car. It's basically a race car that happens to be able to ride and drive on the street. Do track days, on the tracks, and on very secluded backroads. 

Staying just over the speed limit, through twisty roads down through Livermore, etc. So, that's where you can find me on most weekends. Something to do with four or two-wheel vehicles. 

We Are GSM.