Dylan Tang MSEI ’22 is off to a fast start in his entrepreneurial career. As founder and president of Tang’s Vineyards, he sells his patented variety, “Blueberry Grape,” across H Mart, Bristol Farms, and Ranch 99. For his early success, Tang was recognized in the 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 List 2025 (Food and Drink category), which honors the brightest young minds in their fields.
Tang graduated from USC Marshall’s Master of Science in Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MSEI) program. He credits the program, faculty, and the school with teaching him a new mindset, allowing him to redistribute responsibilities and expand his entrepreneurial horizons.
“I found that MSEI was a perfect fit for me,” Tang said. “What’s most popular in the entrepreneur world is AI, finance, those high technologies. I knew many of the students in the MSEI program were in those industries. It was a great way for me to get some connections and some inspiration.”
Prior to Marshall, Tang was an up-and-coming founder with a burgeoning agricultural business he started as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. New to the daily challenges of entrepreneurial life, Tang says he micro-managed his business and had trouble delegating key responsibilities.
At Marshall, however, Tang developed an alternate approach and quickly observed a change in himself and his employees.
“I noticed that I’m putting more trust in my managers and also the supervisors and my teams. Therefore, they [became] more motivated to do things and it provided them the freedom to try out things,” Tang said. “Eventually a successful company needs all the people working together to make it successful instead of only just the owner trying to make it successful.”
As a young entrepreneur, Tang felt responsible for every little task, but his Marshall professors Albert Napoli, senior lecturer of clinical entrepreneurship, and Paul Orfalea, founder of Kinko’s and adjunct professor of entrepreneurship, urged him to take a step back and find balance.
“Don’t let the business own you. You need to own the business,” Tang reflected on a lesson imparted by Orfalea. “I started thinking more on how I can manage my employees better instead of putting all of the job on myself … The benefit of it is that now I have more time to think about other things.”
Those “other things” include scaling Tang’s Vineyards, expanding distribution, and investing in other agricultural ventures.
“Without that mindset change, I wouldn’t be able to do that,” Tang said of his new investments. “I might still be fully in the farming industry, just thinking all about my daily operation, my seeding, my planting all the time. I wouldn’t have the time and energy to deal with other stuff.”