Ian Yamaguchi ’15

When Ian Yamaguchi was picking a college, Drexel’s co-op program looked appealing — and the academic offerings at LeBow helped seal the deal.

“Back in high school, I was very undecided,” he says. The chance to explore both business studies and engineering disciplines through LeBow’s Business and Engineering (B&E) major “was something I didn’t see at other schools.”

In B&E, Yamaguchi says, “we had the core business classes — accounting, finance, operations. We also got to try out the basics in a lot of engineering disciplines: architectural, electrical, chemical and others.”

After co-ops in marketing and business, Yamaguchi worked in various consulting roles for IBM, then returned to school for an MBA through INSEAD, an international business graduate school based in France. Today, he combines his business and engineering skills to help bring new virtual worlds to life.

He’s working for Samsung on the development of consumer electronics in the realm of virtual reality and augmented reality — known collectively as “XR” products. With the “smart glasses” he’s developing, he says, “you can take phone calls, listen to music, talk to an AI assistant... You can hear your notifications, send messages and interact with different third-party apps as well.”

As part of the XR product planning team, he’s focused on “the actual product strategy — how we’re going to build and launch the first smart glasses product for Samsung.”

“I cover a lot of different areas, depending on the stage of the project and the priority in the moment.”

The work offers him a chance to leverage the range of skills that he acquired at LeBow. “The breadth of the B&E major has resulted in being able to wear a lot of different hats throughout my career,” he says.

Currently, he’s involving in managing relationships with Google, a primary partner on the smart-glasses project, and with eyewear companies Warby Parker and Gentle Monster. At the same time, he’s also active on the product-development side.

“We’re looking at how we should move forward over the next five years or even 10 years,” he says. “We’re asking how we should plan different features and what other products we should plan on launching.”

It’s challenging work for an electronics company to enter this new consumer space: “There’s a lot of unique challenges and a lot of those logistics issues around how we get these things to market. A lot of my day-to-day right now is very much down in the weeds of supply chain and getting ready to actually have a product ready to launch.”

In 2025, Yamaguchi won the Early Career Alumni Achievement Award at the Business & Engineering program’s 100th Anniversary celebration, and he notes how his undergraduate experience played a key role in setting him up for success at Samsung.

“My three co-ops gave me a very good foundation going into my career, along with the breadth of academic experiences,” he says. “I’m generally more focused on the business side, but I still get involved in hardware- or software-related discussions. The vocabulary that I learned at LeBow still makes a big difference."