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Headlines:
Catch a Glimpse of Our New Video
Dr. Toby Stuart Joins as Acting Faculty Director
Congrats to Haas Alumni Company IndieGoGo On Their Funding Round
WE Generation Students For Women in Entrepreneurship
Hub Ventures Accelerates Promising Social Entrepreneurs
Upcoming Events:
Venture Innovation Program Symposium on Digital Health:
Interactions, Games & Incentives in Healthcare
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum:
Food Entrepreneurship: Surviving the Recession—
Strategies to Remain Profitable in Hard Times
Thursday, September 22, 2011
Health Data Hackathon at UC Berkeley
September 30-October 1, 2011
Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series:
Opportunity Recognition &
Business Plan Competitions Launch
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Catch a Glimpse of Our New Video
The Lester Center is proud to announce the unveiling of our new promotional video, highlighting the entrepreneurial spirit at Berkeley-Haas. The Lester Center sits at the center of entrepreneurial activity in the Silicon Valley ecosystem: with world class faculty, mentors, alumni, and business partners, we are the hub of entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. This video offers just a glimpse into our exciting programs, resources, and successful alums!
Take a look at what we do, join our mailing list, and come be a part of entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley. Don't forget you can find us on Twitter and Facebook.
If you have trouble viewing this video, try this link.
Dr. Toby Stuart Joins as Acting Faculty Director
The Lester Center is very pleased to welcome Toby E. Stuart as our Acting Faculty Director. Toby comes to us from Harvard Business School and has been a visiting professor of entrepreneurship at Haas since the Fall of 2010. Dr. Stuart takes the helm from Jerome Engel, the Lester Center’s Founding Executive Director Emeritus and current Senior Fellow.
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| Dr. Toby Stuart |
"Dr. Stuart is an award winning and extensively published scholar as well as one of our very highest rated teachers. He brings his incredible depth and breadth to the entrepreneurship program here a Haas," says Lester Center Executive Director Andre Marquis.
Dr. Stuart's research has examined the formulation of firm strategies in a number of industries; the formation, governance, and consequences of strategic alliances; organizational design and new venture formation in established firms; venture capital networks, and the role of networks in the creation of new firms. He has published numerous articles in refereed management, strategy, and general field journals, including Administrative Science Quarterly, American Journal of Sociology, Science, Strategic Management Journal, Management Science, Research Policy, and Industrial and Corporate Change.
He is the recipient of the 2007 Kauffman Prize Medal for Distinguished Research in Entrepreneurship, which is granted every other year to recognize one individual's contributions to entrepreneurship research, for his pioneering research into social networks and their effects on entrepreneurship. He has also received the Administrative Science Quarterly's Scholarly Contribution (best paper) award, as well as the Columbia Business School's Dean's Award for Teaching Excellence.
Dr. Stuart has been the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and the Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Organizations & Strategy and Academic Director of the Eugene M. Lang Entrepreneurship Center at Columbia Business School. He received his Ph.D. from the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University. He holds an A.B., summa cum laude, in economics from Carleton College.
Congrats to Haas Alumni Company IndieGoGo On Their Funding Round
Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell (both MBA 08) have come a long way since their days working on IndieGoGo in the Lester Center’s Berkeley Entrepreneurship Laboratory housed in the Bancroft Hotel. Last week, the company announced a $1.5 million funding round led by Metamorphic Ventures and Zynga cofounder Steve Schoettler.
Ringelmann and Schell officially launched the company, a global crowd funding platform, with former Schell colleague Slava Rubin at the Sundance Film Festival in 2008. Initially created as social marketplace for independent filmmakers to raise money, interact with fans, and build a following, the company has since expanded to become a crowd funding platform for all creative, cause, and entrepreneurial projects, from games and books to iPhone apps and charities.
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| Danae Ringelmann | Eric Schell |
IndieGoGo’s mission is to enable anyone to raise money for anything, anywhere in the world. IndieGoGo provides an open platform where people create funding campaigns optimized for social media, offer perks to contributors, and ultimately get their idea funded.
"As a launchpad for ideas across the world, it’s truly exciting to come full circle and share our funding news with the Lester Center at Haas - the very launchpad that gave IndieGoGo our start." IndieGoGo has now been used to power 40,000 campaigns since it launched, and is distributing “millions of dollars each month to customers in over 200 countries”. The company plans to use the money to build out its product team and boost their marketing and customer happiness efforts. They are growing from four people to twenty five. One notable recent hire is Kate Zimmermann (MBA 11), IndieGoGo’s new Director of Customer Happiness.
IndieGoGo is growing! Meet the team (from left to right and back to front): Slava Rubin, Kate Zimmermann (Haas MBA 11), David Varvel, Sandy Huang (Cal BA 11), Nicholas Fowler, Erin Spahn, Erica Labovitz, Kat Popiel, Danae Ringelmann (Haas MBA 08) with Monk, Dylan Fergus, and Eric Schell (Haas MBA 08). The company is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices in New York and Los Angeles.
Congrats to IndieGoGo on this momentous feat. We’re sure this will be the first of many exciting announcements from the growing company. For more information or to start a campaign, visit: www.indiegogo.com.
WE Generation Students For Women in Entrepreneurship
Genevieve Wang and Sarah Friedman (both MBA 12) were delighted to end the second week of classes with the long list of new member sign-ups for WE Generation@Haas, the new student club they launched last spring. “There is a lot of energy from the incoming class, both about getting more women involved in high-growth entrepreneurship, as well as getting more female entrepreneur role models onto campus,” explains Sarah. That support comes from a very diverse group, including men.
WE Generation was formed with the mission of supporting women interested in high growth entrepreneurship and venture capital. The club is part of the We Own It Summit network, an international organization formed in 2010 with the same goals. Through “generational linking”, WE-Gen and We Own It are building a global network of women interested in growth entrepreneurship through a university affiliated chapter model. In starting the first official WE Generation student chapter, Sarah and Genevieve have worked closely with the Haas administration and the Lester Center, as well as the student leaders of both Women In Leadership and the Entrepreneurs Association.
Springworks and Astia are the club's founding sponsors, and have provided both monetary and networking support to the club’s active members. Jorge Calderon of Springworks has led the charge in connecting the We Own It collaboration with universities, and has been instrumental in starting WE Generation at Haas.
WE Generation is focused on offering its membership smaller-scale, interactive events that provide opportunities to collaborate, partner, and exchange advice/feedback amongst student attendees and guests. Key activities include a Role Model Breakfast series, which connects a successful female entrepreneur or VC with a small group of students over constructive dialogue and conversation. The leadership is also in the planning stages for Cross-Campus Collaboration events, which will bring together entrepreneurially-minded students from different departments and student groups to meet, network, and work on skill-building. The leadership of WE Generation @ Haas is also working with the Lester Center and the Entrepreneurs Association to increase the representation of women at existing events.
WE Generation @ Haas has had two successful events to date and looks forward to more opportunities to connect passionate students with women who have relevant and inspiring experiences to share. If you are interested in getting involved with We Own It or WE Generation, please reach out to Sarah or Genevieve: sarah_friedman@mba.berkeley.edu or genevieve_wang@mba.berkeley.edu
Hub Ventures Accelerates Promising Social Entrepreneurs
Talented entrepreneurs with world changing ideas now have a place where they can develop their start-ups, with the launch of Hub Ventures in San Francisco earlier this year. Hub Ventures is an accelerator program similar to TechStars, YCombinator, and 500 Startups – but with one key difference: the entrepreneurs in Hub Ventures are working on business models that address global issues ranging from poverty alleviation to public health. Hub Ventures provides these start-ups with seed funding, mentoring, peer support, and workshops on topics such as business model design (taught by Dave Charron, Lester Center Senior Fellow), customer development, and design for impact – with the goal of increasing their potential for success. Each 12-week cohort culminates with an Investor Day, when entrepreneurs pitch to a large audience of investors for an opportunity to secure additional funding.
“Hub Ventures is filling a big need for the growing number of bright entrepreneurs who want to apply their skills and passions to solving some of the world’s biggest problems,” said Wes Selke (MBA 07), Founding Director of Hub Ventures and Investment Manager at Good Capital. “We are creating a rich ecosystem that increases their potential for future success while also providing investors with high quality deals that can generate both attractive financial return and significant social impact.”
Hub Ventures runs a competitive selection process and works with extraordinary social entrepreneurs in diverse sectors. The spring 2011 cohort represented 16 social ventures working in mobile technology for development, off-grid power, healthy food systems, local economy, water, public health, and civic engagement. The cohort included the 2011 Global Social Venture Competition winner NextDrop, a start-up that harnesses the power of crowdsourcing to inform slum dwellers in India when their water is coming on. Another venture was MobileWorks, a YCombinator company that has developed a scalable web platform that outsources data entry tasks to low income workers in the developing world, enabling them to generate supplemental income using their mobile phones.
“Hub Ventures is probably the single best program for social entrepreneurs,” commented Jon Underwood, Founder of Cloud Currencies, a spring 2011 company that runs a marketing platform to increase consumer spending at local merchants. “I would hope that investors who want to invest at least a portion of their funds into harnessing the power of business to make the world a better place would see it as the center of the social investing universe.”
Hub Ventures is based at Hub Bay Area, which operates over 20,000 square feet of co-working space for social entrepreneurs and changemakers in San Francisco’s SOMA district and downtown Berkeley. The next Hub Ventures cohort will begin in early 2012.
Please visit http://hubventures.hubbayarea.com/ to learn how to apply, invest, or become a mentor.
SCHEDit Illustrates the Power of the Haas Network
SCHEDit, founded by Omar H. Tellez (MBA 96) enables a fun, content rich and truly social experience that answers two basic questions:
- What’s Happening in My City?
- Who Will Be Attending? (i.e.: demographic and psychographic proximity, Klout score, etc.)
There are over 17 million global monthly searches on Google for “things to do” that currently go unanswered and this is precisely the market that SCHEDit is going after.
After an extremely successful career in the software space including the most successful Software IPO of 2006 with Synchronoss Technologies (NASDAQ: SNCR), Tellez launched SCHEDit with the help and funding of other MBA 96 students including John Hanke (Keyhole – Google), Brad Raymond (Morgan Stanley – Stifel Nicolaus) and Ed Ruben (Netscape – Google).
By leveraging the Haas network, SCHEDit has been able to move extremely fast and in only four months, it has completed its Alpha Testing, been profiled in Tech Crunch and aligned a board that includes Dennis Phelps from Institutional Venture Partners and Rich Wong from Accel Partners among others, and is now closing the terms for a deal with a very large media/publishing company. The connections and "traction" of Schedit are illustrated by this chart.
“The guidance, feedback and funding that the Haas network allowed us has been a key enabler and differentiator in a very competitive startup world,” said Tellez. He added, “Being able to leverage the insight, clout and experience of my Haas classmates has made a huge difference and enabled a bi-coastal footprint.”
For more information on what the company is up to, please visit http://www.sched.it/.
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