Wharton West has been several years in the making.
"Over the years we have been telling ourselves that if California were a separate country, it would be the sixth largest country in the world," Mittelstaedt said. "The plans evolved over the past year; there was no bomb that dropped."
Mittelstaedt said that although the San Francisco location will place Wharton West next to Silicon Valley, the program is not targeted at dot-com executives.
Members of faculty of the Wharton School in Philadelphia will travel to California to teach the courses at Wharton West.
But Mittelstaedt said that he doubts that the new program will spread the Wharton School faculty too thin, as many Wharton faculty members on sabbatical already conduct research in the region.
"I think it's all going to have a positive benefit," he said.