ARZANPOULI · BUILDER-OPERATOR · 2026
CONFIDENTIAL · NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION
M.ARZANPOULI
SAN DIEGO
§00 · IDENTIFICATION · BUILDER-OPERATOR

I take what's stuck, broken, or nonexistent and turn it into a business.

Twenty years across HP, Monitor, and Deloitte — six builds spanning $40B+ of P&L. A strategic operator who designs the work and runs it through to outcome: market entry, PMF resets, $3B M&A, new category creation, and digital advertising platforms on XXM+ endpoints.

RUN DIAGNOSTIC→ SEE THE BUILDS↓
UCHICAGO BOOTH · EXEC ED MBA + MS IND. ENG. · TENNESSEE BS IND. & SYSTEMS ENG. · VIRGINIA TECH
SYS · BUILDER-OPERATOR · 20YR OUTPUT
v.20.04
$0B+
BUSINESS VALUE
TOUCHED
0M+
ENDPOINTS
REACHED
$0B+
M&A VALUE
LED
0
BUSINESS
BUILDS
25% profit lift · 12 consecutive growth quarters
$40B PERSONAL SYSTEMS · 2016–2019
BUILDS · '16 → '26 ▮ STUCK   ▮ BROKEN   ▮ NONEXISTENT
STRATEGIC POV CURRENT · AI MOMENT

AI is a category-creation moment, not a feature wave.

The current discourse treats AI as a feature layer applied to existing products — a smarter assistant, a faster search, a better summary. The pattern in the field, including inside HP's NVIDIA work, suggests something more structural.

AI is producing genuinely new categories at the intersection of compute, surface, and use case — Physical AI, Edge AI, Agentic AI — rather than incremental capability inside the existing ones. The companies that win the next decade will not be the ones that bolt AI onto last decade's products.

They will be the ones that recognize when a category is being created — which requires re-asking who the customer is, what the value is, and where the structural advantage lives — and that have the operating discipline to build into that category before its boundaries become conventional.

THE OPERATING SYSTEM · HOW THE WORK CONNECTSOPERATOR_VIEW · v.01
SECTION01
INTERACTIVE · BUILDER'S LENS

Pick the state. See the diagnosis, the levers, and the way it goes wrong.

A repeatable approach to diagnosing root cause, designing strategy, and implementing at scale. Refined across six builds and $40B+ of P&L. Pick a state to see how it applies.
SECTION02
INTERACTIVE · SIX BUILDS · $40B+ TOUCHED

Six builds. Six different problems. The same way of thinking through them.

Click any tile to expand the full case: the situation, the three moves, the outcome, and the lesson that ported to the next build.
SECTION03
OPERATING PRINCIPLES

The principles I work from.

Distilled from twenty years of hands-on strategy & operating leadership across HP, Monitor, and Deloitte. These are not aspirations or slogans — they are the operating beliefs that recurred across stuck, broken, and new businesses, refined through repeated application. They matter because strategic execution lives or dies on a small set of well-tested convictions.
P.01
Capital allocation, not effort, drives strategic outcomes at scale.
In businesses above $1B, the highest-leverage decision is where capital and management attention get pointed — not how hard the existing organization works inside the current allocation. Most stuck businesses are stuck because the portfolio is still defending the last decade's thesis.
USED IN · PS STRATEGY · DESKTOP PC
P.02
Strategy validation requires returning to first principles, not iterating on the existing model.
When a strategy stops compounding, the answer is rarely a tactical adjustment. It's reopening the foundational questions — who the customer is, what the value is, where the structural advantage actually lives. Iteration without that diagnosis just optimizes a model that's already wrong.
USED IN · PS STRATEGY · ENDPOINT SECURITY
P.03
The operating model precedes the team it scales.
Decision rights, accountability, P&L lines, and the rhythm of strategic vs. operating reviews have to be defined before the team is hired against them. Hiring into an undefined operating model converts ambiguity into headcount; the cost of unwinding that later is always greater than the cost of defining it first.
USED IN · ENDPOINT SECURITY · NVIDIA ALLIANCE
P.04
Product-market fit is necessary but not sufficient. Commercialization is a separate strategic discipline.
Building the right thing and bringing it to market are different problems with different failure modes. A product can win every internal review and every category award and still miss the market if the go-to-market, brand, and demand investment aren't sized to the opportunity.
USED IN · ENVY MOVE · ENDPOINT SECURITY
P.05
Sequence matters in turnarounds: ICP, then unit economics, then demand.
Every broken business has a tempting way to skip a layer — usually by scaling demand to mask the deeper problem. The result is faster losses with prettier dashboards. Fixing the layer underneath is always the higher-conviction move, even when it looks slower from the outside.
USED IN · ENDPOINT SECURITY · PC MEDIA NETWORK
P.06
Inorganic strategy is the right instrument when the build timeline exceeds the strategic window.
M&A is neither a shortcut nor a fallback. It's the appropriate move when the category, capability, or market position cannot be created internally inside the time the market gives you. The discipline lives in the integration thesis, not the deal terms.
USED IN · POLY ACQUISITION · OWL LABS
P.07
The strategic asset is rarely where the legacy P&L points.
Declining business lines often sit on top of an asset — a customer relationship, a data footprint, a distribution channel — that the existing model is mispricing. The strategic move is to re-identify the asset and re-architect the business around it, not to optimize the model that's already underpricing it.
USED IN · PC MEDIA NETWORK
P.08
Strategic alliances are businesses. Run them with a P&L and an operating model, or they default to procurement.
A partnership without an executive owner, a P&L view, and a defined operating model gravitates to the lowest-friction interaction — purchasing — regardless of the original ambition. The discipline is to run the relationship as a venture inside the larger organization.
USED IN · NVIDIA ALLIANCE
SECTION04
THE ARC + THE TOOLKIT

Twenty years of work, mapped to the capability set it produced.

Career history on the left. The capability map on the right — filterable by state. Each capability tied to the builds where it was tested.
THE ARC · 2002 → PRESENT12 STAGES
  1. 2024 → NOW
    NVIDIA Alliance + Ecosystem Strategy / IncubationHP · Senior Director
    $XB+ & GROWING
  2. 2023 → 2024
    PC Media NetworkHP · Senior Director & GM
    XXM+ ENDPOINTS
  3. 2022 → 2023
    Desktop PC & New Categories (Envy Move)HP · Senior Director & GM
    +35% OP
  4. 2021 → 2022
    Peripherals Product & Corporate DevelopmentHP · Senior Director
    $3B POLY · OWL LABS
  5. 2019 → 2021
    Endpoint SecurityHP · Senior Director & GM
    PMF RESET · 80 CUSTOMERS
  6. 2016 → 2019
    PS Strategy & TransformationHP · Senior Director & Head
    $40B · 25% PROFIT LIFT
  7. 2013 → 2016
    Associate PartnerDeloitte Consulting / Monitor Deloitte
    STRATEGY
  8. 2009 → 2013
    Senior ManagerMonitor Group
    STRATEGY
  9. 2007
    Executive EducationUChicago Booth
    EDU
  10. 2004 → 2008
    Market Analyst — Aircraft / Satellites / ShipbuildingNorthrop Grumman
    EARLY CAREER
  11. 2003 → 2004
    Technology AnalystOak Ridge National Lab
    EARLY CAREER
  12. 2002 → 2004
    MBA + MS Industrial EngineeringUniversity of Tennessee
    EDU
  13. 1998 → 2002
    BS Industrial & Systems EngineeringVirginia Tech
    FOUNDATION
PATTERN LIBRARY · CAPABILITY MAP12 PATTERNS
FILTER ·
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Mazi doesn't just execute strategy — he builds businesses from nothing and makes them work.
OPEN TO · ADVISORY ENGAGEMENTS WITH FOUNDERS SIZING WHETHER TO START · BOARDS CONSIDERING CEO TRANSITIONS