What is HTBA?
The High Tech Business Association is a student run professional club at the UCLA Anderson School of Management. We are one of the largest clubs on campus and we host some of the most prominent networking and recruiting events at Anderson.
Our Mission
The HTBA serves the UCLA Anderson community as the gateway to high tech industries. Through events such as Days-on-the-Job and High Tech Career Nights, HTBA strives to provide members opportunities to exercise leadership, build experience, and expand professional connections in the high tech industry.
Faculty Advisor
Robert Foster
bob.foster@(anderson.ucla.edu)
Professor Foster teaches High Technology Management, Business Plan Development and the management consulting Field Study. He taught half-time for 16 years, while a full-time executive, and then joined the faculty full time in 1999.
He created and teaches the popular High Technology Management course each year, teaching it to over 650 students during the past 13 years. The course was recognized by Business 2.0 magazine as one of the reasons why Anderson was selected as one of “the 20 tech-savviest business schools” in the U.S.
He has taught Business Plan Development every year since 1999, part of the school’s Price Center for Entrepreneurship. This entrepreneurship program is recognized as one of the leading programs in the world, with the Financial Times naming it the “#1 program in the world” for three consecutive years. He is also the faculty advisor for the school’s Venture Capital Investment Competition team.
Professor Foster is the Director of the Global Access Program (GAP), the international field study and MBA thesis requirement for Anderson’s Fully-Employed MBA students. He provides overall academic direction of the program including the design and development of GAP’s 6 month integrative, capstone course for over 180 students and a faculty of 8 professors. He manages executive seminars for participating international company executives and the formal business plan presentations at the conclusion of the course. He also manages the relationships with GAP’s international partners from trade and technology development agencies located in Finland, Australia, Italy, New Zealand, Spain and Chile.
Bob has taught Field Study every year since 1983, advising over 150 management consulting field studies, most of them for high technology firms such as Microsoft, Intel, Qualcomm, Nokia and Hewlett-Packard, as well as many startup technology firms. His teams have won many awards for outstanding consulting studies.
He is Executive Director of the Center for Management in the Information Economy, which focuses on analysis of business models and best practices in high technology businesses. Bob is the faculty advisor to the High Tech Business Association student club.
During a 17-year period from 1983 to 1999, he was president/CEO of four different high technology firms. Products include software (enterprise resource management, financial applications, customer relationship management, digital mapping, GPS), factory automation, industrial machinery, map publishing and composite plastics.
For seven years, Bob was President of Thomas Bros. Maps, the second largest map publisher in the U.S. He managed its conversion to digital mapping, introduced digital maps on CDs and the Internet. For 13 years, he worked at Xerox Computer Services, initially as VP of Software Development responsible for 300 programmers and analysts. Later he was VP of Marketing and Sales with a staff of 500 and 100 direct salesmen. XCS was a startup division that grew to a profitable $100 million division.
In 2002, the full-time MBA class voted him one of the top five Most Outstanding Professors at the UCLA Anderson School. The Fully Employed MBA class of 2003 and 2005 voted him the most outstanding professor. He is a member of the board of several high technology firms, ranging from $50 million to startups. He is a member of the Tech Coast Angels and the Pasadena Angels, both angel investing organizations.
