Industrial Engineering & Finance · Purdue University

Mateo
Heitner

Figuring things out by building things — robots, nonprofits, businesses, and whatever comes next.

West Lafayette, IN  ·  Miami, FL

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Hey, I'm Mateo.

I'm a sophomore at Purdue studying Industrial Engineering and Finance, originally from Miami. I've spent a lot of time building things — robots, a nonprofit, a couple of businesses — and I'm slowly figuring out how all of it connects. Right now I'm most interested in the intersection of how companies work and how technology shapes them. Outside of that I play cello, cook, speedcube, and watch more Giants games than I probably should.

This site is a work in progress, just like everything else.

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What I'm Into

Some things I genuinely love outside of work and school. I'm a pretty eclectic person — a lot of these don't really go together, which I think is the fun part.

Sports

Sports Analytics

I got into sports analytics kind of sideways — a lot of my robotics work involved analyzing match footage and scoring data to influence strategy, and at some point I realized I was doing the same thing when watching Giants games. There's something genuinely satisfying about finding the signal in how a team is built or why a play works, beyond just watching it happen.

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Favorite Teams

Giants & Yankees

The Giants and Yankees have been constants in my life — through good seasons and the kind of years you'd rather not talk about. Growing up in Miami as a New York fan meant always having something to argue about. I follow both closely, less as a passive fan and more as someone who's always thinking about roster construction, coaching decisions, and what the numbers say versus what the broadcast says.

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In the Kitchen

Cooking

Cooking is something I started doing out of necessity in college and ended up actually enjoying. Growing up in Miami gave me a strong foundation in Cuban and Latin food, and I've been slowly expanding from there. I like the improvisational side of it — you learn enough technique and then you stop needing the recipe as much. It's also a good excuse to feed people.

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On the Court

Pickleball

I picked up pickleball more recently and it's become something I play pretty regularly. It's an easy game to get into and a hard one to actually get good at. I appreciate sports where the ceiling is high but the barrier to entry is low — it makes every level of play genuinely fun rather than just a stepping stone to something else.

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Building Things

Dye Table

Add your blurb here — what drew you to building it, what the process was like, what you learned or what went wrong. This is a good place to be specific and unpretentious about it.

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Building Things

Skateboard

Add your blurb here — how you built it, what decisions you made, what it taught you about working with your hands versus working on a computer. Feel free to be honest about what was harder than expected.

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Music

Cello

I've played cello for a long time, including competing at the International Youth Music Festival. It's not something I perform much publicly these days, but it shaped how I think about practice and patience — you can't shortcut your way to playing well, and that carries over into a lot of other areas. I still play for myself when I get the chance.

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Listening

70s Country Music

This one surprises people. I love Outlaw Country from the 70s — Willie Nelson, Waylon Jennings, Kris Kristofferson. It's unpretentious music made by people who didn't really fit in anywhere else. There's a storytelling quality to it I find genuinely compelling, and it's a nice counterpoint to everything else I'm usually listening to.

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Puzzle Solving

Speedcubing

I've been solving Rubik's cubes for years, and it's one of those hobbies that sounds impressive until you meet the people who are actually fast. There's a whole community, a whole set of algorithms, and a surprising amount of pattern recognition involved. I'm no world record holder, but I enjoy it as a way to disconnect — it's a problem you can actually finish.

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The Robotics Journey

Robotics is where I learned how to actually build things. It started as a hobby and became something much bigger — a team, a nonprofit, and eventually a way to give other kids the same start I got. This is the VEX side of that story.

2025 – Present
Push Back
Purdue ACM SIGBots · President
~1M Users Served $30k Budget 80-person Team
Leading strategy and operations for Purdue's competitive robotics club — overseeing four student organizations and a World Championship team. PROS OS and the SIGBots Wiki serve roughly a million users globally. I analyze match footage and scoring data to help shape robot design decisions, which honestly isn't that different from what I was doing in high school.
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2024 – 2025
High Stakes
Team 360X · Co-Founder & Lead
Top 10 Worldwide 9 International Awards Most in Season
Co-founded team 360X under Vexcellent Minds and led the engineering and programming side. Finishing top 10 in the world came from a lot of iteration and a team willing to throw out what wasn't working. Nine international awards across the season was the most of any team that year — something we didn't expect when we started.
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2023 – 2024
Over Under
Vexcellent Minds · Founder
501(c)(3) Founded Venezuela + U.S. 100+ Students
Founded Vexcellent Minds to make robotics education more accessible — first in Venezuela, then the U.S. The idea came from a simple observation: the kids who got into robotics early had a big head start, and that access wasn't evenly distributed. We raised enough to support over 20 students in Venezuela, eventually growing to 100+ students in the U.S.
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2022 – 2023
Spin Up
Early Competitive Years
Google Community Award
Where it all started. Getting into competitive VEX meant learning to build and program from scratch — mostly through trial and error. The Google Community Award came as recognition for Vexcellent Minds' community work, which felt meaningful because it wasn't about winning matches; it was about what robotics could open up for other people.
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Now at Purdue SIGBots

At Purdue I've had the chance to join one of the most storied robotics clubs in the country — a team with a World Championship and decades of open-source contributions behind it. It's a different scale than anything I'd worked on before, and I'm still learning from it every day.

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Awards & Highlights

A running log of competition results and recognition across the years. Add or remove rows as things come in.

Year Event / Competition Award Team
2025 VEX Robotics World Championship Google Community Award Vexcellent Minds
2024–25 International Competitions (×9) Most Awards in Season Team 360X
2024–25 VEX Robotics World Rankings Top 10 Worldwide Team 360X
2025 APS Global Summit Presenter Open Source Tweezing

Professional Work

I came to finance through an honest interest in how businesses actually work — the mechanics of deals, the logic behind capital allocation, and what it takes to build something that lasts. These are the experiences that have shaped that understanding so far.

Trivest Partners
Summer 2026
Miami, FL
PE Summer Analyst

Incoming this summer

Trivest Partners is a Miami-based private equity firm focused on founder-led and family-owned businesses. I'll be joining as a Summer Analyst — looking forward to getting a closer look at how deals actually come together from sourcing through close.

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Private Equity M&A Miami
Alcon Partners
June 2025 – May 2026
Miami, FL
Research Analyst

Buy-side M&A advisory

Spent a year supporting the deal team with research and database management across 50+ PE firms and portfolio companies. The work was largely about getting the right information to the right people at the right time — which sounds simple but requires staying on top of a lot of moving pieces.

I researched target companies for two active deals, presenting findings to partners to help guide diligence decisions. A good introduction to how the buy-side actually works — the process is more methodical than you'd expect from the outside.

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Research Due Diligence Database Management
Banking & Markets Club
Sept 2025 – Present
Purdue University
Operations Committee

Building the infrastructure for a new club

Helped build and manage operations for a new club focused on getting Purdue students into high finance early — specifically as a pathway to IB Academy. Part of the work involved sourcing fund partners for search-fund initiatives and developing cohort opportunities for members targeting IB and PE.

Investment Banking Operations Club Leadership
Powershift Case Competition
2025
Purdue University
3rd Place

Stadium buyout financial modeling

Built a financial model justifying a stadium buyout for a new NWSL team. Case competitions are a good forcing function — you have to make defensible decisions with imperfect information under time pressure. Finishing third was decent; more importantly, the modeling work taught me a lot about structuring an argument around a capital investment thesis.

Financial Modeling Sports Finance NWSL

Involvement & Community

College has been as much about the people and organizations as the coursework. Here's where I've spent a lot of my time outside the classroom — and the experiences that have genuinely shaped how I think about leadership.

Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity

April 2026 – Present
Operations Director (VP) · Undergraduate Supreme Councilor

ZBT has been a bigger part of my Purdue experience than I expected when I joined. Alpha Alpha is the largest chapter in the country — 170+ members, 93 live-ins — and being Operations Director means a lot of the administrative and operational work that makes it actually function falls to you. Housing logistics, compliance, chapter standards — it's unglamorous stuff, but it matters.

One thing I'm genuinely proud of is the academic turnaround: the chapter went from 30th to top 10 in Purdue IFC GPA rankings, which is the highest standing of any chapter with 100+ members. That kind of thing doesn't happen by accident. I was also elected as a Voting Member of ZBT's International Board of Directors, which has been an interesting way to see how the organization operates at a larger scale.

The runner-up Brummer Cup finish (best chapter nationally) is more a reflection of a lot of brothers doing consistent work than any one thing.

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Interfraternity Council

January 2026 – Present
Associate VP of Programming & Education

Purdue's IFC is one of the largest fraternity populations in the country. In this role I organize programming and education for the executive board — financial literacy events, speaker series, and more. It's different from chapter-level work; you're serving a broad audience with different interests and different relationships to Greek life.

Good events require actually understanding what people want to show up for — which is harder than it sounds when you're dealing with hundreds of students across dozens of chapters.

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PurdueTHINK Consulting

September 2025 – Present
Strategy Consultant

Helped build out a new consulting club's infrastructure and brand early on — a different kind of challenge than joining something that already has its footing. Also worked with Purdue Grand Prix on a new financial management system and analyzed financials for future planning, which was a good practical application of what I was learning in class.

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Larsen Leaders Academy

2025 – Present
VP of Internal Data

Doing data analysis work that contributes to Purdue's U.S. News and World Report rankings. It's quieter work than most of my other involvements, but satisfying to know the analysis actually feeds into real decisions about the university.

Other Things I've Built

Not everything fits neatly into a category. These are projects where I was building something from scratch — some academic, some entrepreneurial, some just because the problem seemed interesting.

Research Engineering

Cost-Effective Optical Tweezer

April 2024 – May 2025 · Ransom Everglades / Young Researchers Program

Optical tweezers are scientific instruments that use laser light to manipulate microscopic objects — typically useful for biological research and costing around $20,000. As part of the Young Researchers Program, I co-led a project to build one for about $3,000 by modifying an OpenFlexure microscope through CAD and software work.

The cost reduction came from a lot of iterative prototyping — figuring out what you actually need versus what you're paying for in a commercial system. We presented the work at the 2025 American Physical Society Global Summit.

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Software Engineering

OnCall Air — ERP Platform

June 2023 – January 2024 · Watsco Ventures

Worked as a Junior Software Engineer on OnCall Air, a large-scale ERP platform operated by Watsco Ventures. I built features that improved internal support workflows and enhanced the customer-facing UI. It was my first real experience in a production codebase with actual users — a very different environment from building something from scratch.

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Entrepreneurship

Gables Pressure Washing

June 2022 – December 2024 · Coral Gables, FL

Started a pressure washing service in high school — went door to door, quoted jobs, did the work, and built a base of 25+ recurring customers. It taught me things about operations and sales that I don't think you can learn any other way. I also built custom quoting software to manage scheduling and pricing more consistently.

Generated around $5,000 in revenue over two and a half years, running it alongside everything else. Eventually wound it down as college commitments ramped up.

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Case Competition

Powershift — NWSL Stadium Buyout

2025 · Purdue University · 3rd Place

Built a financial model justifying the stadium buyout for a new National Women's Soccer League franchise. The competition required building a defensible investment thesis under time pressure — which pushed the team to make quick decisions about what assumptions to stand behind. A good experience with sports finance modeling.

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