Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series
The Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series brings to UC Berkeley and the Haas School the best practitioners from the Berkeley and Silicon Valley community to speak about the practical aspects of entrepreneurial activity. The series is timed to match the academic year and also the business plan competition season, particularly the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition and the Global Social Venture Competition.
Entrepreneurs from the Berkeley campus and the community in general are encouraged to come to each of the sessions.
There is no registration for this event.
The program starts with food and networking at 6:30. The presentation will open at 6:55pm.For more information about the Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series, call 510-642-4255 or email lester@haas.berkeley.edu.
Complete schedule for 2009-2010
(all sessions 6:30-8:30 pm):
Tuesday |
Opportunity Recognition & UCB BPlan/GSVC Launch (AutoTB/Karns presentation available: pdf)
|
Andersen Auditorium |
Tuesday |
IP and Legal Issues
|
Wells Fargo Room |
Tuesday |
Internet Marketing & Business Strategies (more information)
|
Andersen Auditorium |
Monday |
How to Write a Business Plan |
Wells Fargo Room |
Tuesday 12/8/09 |
Social Ventures
|
Wells Fargo Room |
Tuesday 2/9/10 |
Building Better
|
Wells Fargo Room |
Tuesday |
Financial Modeling & Management
|
Location TBD |
Monday |
Business Models / Pitching
|
Wells Fargo Room |
Tuesday |
Incorporation and Compensation
|
Location TBD |
Tuesday |
Financing
|
Location TBD |
Each session will start with light refreshments and networking.
Sign up to receive email notifications of events here.
Program Details
Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series:
Opportunity Recognition
Launch of the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition and the Global Social Venture Competition
Tuesday, October 6, 2009
6:30-8:30pm
Andersen Auditorium - Haas School of Business
Please join us for the first workshop of the 2009-2010 Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series and the launch of the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition and the Global Social Venture Competition. This session will focus on opportunity recognition. There are lots of opportunities out there - how do you know which one is right for you? This session will bring three entrepreneurs who have made their choices and have launched their companies. They will tell you how they found their opportunity and the decisions they made in starting their ventures. Many entered our business plan competitions - come hear why you should too.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Kelly Karns
Co-Founder and CEO, AutoTB
Kelly and her team at AutoTB won first place in the 2009 Berkeley Business Plan Competition. Founded in 2007, AutoTB is developing an innovative diagnostic test for tuberculosis for use in both developed and developing countries. More than one-third of the world’s population is infected with tuberculosis, and AutoTB’s automated sputum microscopy device improves upon current procedures by decreasing analysis time, increasing sensitivity and eliminating the human error present in current procedures. AutoTB has been successful in raising funds in several international business plan competitions and is in the process of advancing product development, securing IP and forming initial customer contacts.
Kelly is also a graduate student in bioengineering at UC Berkeley where she is researching electrophoretic microfluidic systems that allow for rapid, analytical quantification of disease-specific biomarkers. Prior to graduate school at Berkeley, Kelly completed an MPhil in bioscience enterprise from the University of Cambridge where AutoTB was conceived and incubated.
Antony Passemard
Co-Founder, ulteamail
Antony and his team at ulteamail were one of the eight finalist teams at the 2009 UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition and won the Adobe technology company prize. ulteamail provides a team collaboration platform which leverages the design of a personal email interface to foster communication among entire teams with great transparency.
Antony is a 2009 Full time MBA graduate from the HaasSchool of Business where ulteamail came to life. Prior to Haas, Antony was General Manager of Iniflux, a company providing services around network security and opensource software tosmall andmedium size companies in France. Antony improved revenue of Iniflux by 5 folds in less than 2 years, reaching cashflow positive after years of loss. He also spent four years as CTO and co-founder of Integrity, a Value added Reseller of Network and IT Security solutions. Antony is proud father of 2 little girls, 4.5 and 8 months old.
Jason Kibbey
CEO & Co-Founder, PACT Apparel
Jason Kibbey is the CEO and co-founder of PACT Apparel. PACT is an online apparel company offering design-driven, responsibly manufactured, premium organic cotton underwear connected to powerful social and environmental causes. While working at Patagonia, he co-founded and served as Executive Director for Freedom to Roam, a non-profit initiative that brings together people, organizations and businesses to enhance and protect wildlife corridors and landscape connectivity in North America. Before business school, Jason ran Defense of Place, a non-profit land conservation organization that works to assure parks, open space, and wildlife refuges stay protected in perpetuity. Jason has participated in the development of several successful early stage companies. Jason was an Associate Consultant at Bain & Company, where he worked on turnaround and product strategies for high-tech companies. Jason graduated with degrees from UC Berkeley including Environmental Economics and Policy (B.S.) and Religious Studies and received his MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business in May 2008.
The Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series is held in conjunction with the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition and the Global Social Venture Competition. The Best Practices Series invites experts from Berkeley and the Silicon Valley to speak about practical aspects of entrepreneurship. Each session begins with pizza and networking at 6:30pm, followed by the session at 7:00pm. The event is free and no registration is required. For more information, visit the Best Practices website or contact the Lester Center at 510-642-4255 or lester@haas.berkeley.edu.
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Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series:
IP AND LEGAL ISSUES
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
6:30-8:30pm
Wells Fargo Room - Haas School of Business
Intellectual property is one of the most valuable fruits of entrepreneurship’s labor, and has been the foundation upon which thousands of successful business enterprises have been built. This session will cover the legal issues surrounding intellectual property and its importance throughout a company’s lifespan. A team consisting of an IP lawyer and a startup corporate lawyer will provide a “crash course” on patents, trademarks, copyrights and trade secrets; discuss IP issues commonly faced at the time of forming new businesses; explain how IP is exploited during the business development stage of a new business; explore the role of IP when a new business raises financing; and consider the impact of IP on an acquisition of the business. Attend this session to gain a valuable understanding of how these most important legal concepts are applied in the business context, and you may avoid many of the common pitfalls that can damage or ruin your venture.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
TIMOTHY J. HARRIS
Mr. Harris joined Morrison & Foerster LLP in 1997 and is currently a partner in the firm’s Palo Alto office, where he represents public and private companies and venture capital firms in corporate and securities matters.
In his private company practice, Mr. Harris specializes in advising start-up and emerging growth technology enterprises from incorporation through acquisition or initial public offering in matters including venture capital financing, debt financing, equity incentive compensation and technology development (including licensing, joint development, distribution and other technology transfer matters). Mr. Harris also represents venture capital firms and angel investors in their investments in start-up companies.
Mr. Harris represents start-ups and venture capital investors in a variety of technology sectors with an emphasis on Internet- and software-based businesses, including the networking infrastructure, transaction processing, utility computing, online retailing, video games and gaming equipment, financial services, medical imaging, language translation services, telecommunications, online content syndication and semiconductor design industries.
MICHAEL A. STALLMAN
Michael A. Stallman is Of Counsel in the San Francisco office of Morrison & Foerster. In every respect, Mr. Stallman serves as a strategic business advisor to IP-driven companies, assisting clients through all phases of IP development and protection. He has more than 30 years of experience in the areas of business counseling, strategic IP planning, patent evaluation and due diligence, patent licensing, and IP litigation. His expertise includes cross-border issues involving foreign and multinational parties, as well as foreign tribunals and patent offices. The combination of his technical expertise, business savvy, and experience in every area of IP law enables him to efficiently provide his clients with innovative and practical solutions.
His adversarial practice also includes handling patent reexaminations before the USPTO. Through these reexamination proceedings, he has helped patent holders strengthen patents prior to licensing negotiations and possible litigation, as well as helped accused infringers attempt to invalidate alleged infringed patents.
Mr. Stallman is often retained to perform IP due diligence and investigate the strengths and risks of an acquisition target. In that role, he evaluates the strength of the patent holdings of the target and also studies the landscape of third-party patents to determine the level of risk to the acquirer. His extensive experience rendering legal opinions on a wide variety of patents has provided him with a comprehensive understanding of the patent landscape in a number of key optics and medical device fields.
Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series:
Internet Marketing & Business Strategies:
Adrenaline Startups and Rapid-Fire Marketing
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
6:30-8:30pm
Andersen Auditorium - Haas School of Business
Adrenaline Startups and Rapid-Fire Marketing
The whirlwind dance of understanding basic customer needs and delivering simple products
Many companies today can use existing platforms to build and grow their products without having to invest large sums of time or money. We try to make each such business even nimbler by first attempting to understand our customers’ needs and then quickly delivering simple products that we think meet them. This iterative process of customer and product development continues until we discover a winning formula. We call the ongoing dance “rapid-fire marketing,” and the companies that practice it “adrenaline startups.”
Sunil Bhargava of Tandem Entrepreneurs and the founder/CEOs of two Tandem companies, Sarah Eisner of JuiceBoxJungle and Ray Lau of PlayHaven, will review how they’ve applied this approach to building their own businesses.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Sunil Bhargava is a co-founder and partner at Tandem Entrepreneurs, which backs nimble startups with financial and human capital (funds and hands-on help). Sunil spent the first ten years of his career in deep technology, working at Xerox PARC, HP and Oracle. He then was on the founding team at Webvan and co-founded Business Signatures, where he played a key role in every aspect of the business, including defining, marketing and selling the product until the company’s acquisition by Entrust in 2006.
Sunil holds a B.S.E.E. from Indian Institute of Technology, an M.S.C.S. from Rice University, and an M.S. in Management from Stanford University.
Sarah Eisner is a founder at at JuiceBoxJungle. Sarah loves building brands from the ground up and creating buzz. She spent the first ten years of her career utilizing her tech education in product marketing and marketing strategy at Cisco. After the birth of her two rambunctious sons, she left Cisco for a tech startup and then just a short year later, in 2006, left the tech startup to co-run an innovative baby bottle company, Adiri, with two other local moms. At Adiri she handled all manner of marketing strategy, branding and outreach (where she learned that she LOVES guerrilla Internet marketing) and also ran sales, PR, advertising, and customer service while weighing in on design, manufacturing, distribution and fulfillment.
Sarah has a M.S.I.E./E.M. degree in Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management from Stanford, and a B.A. from the University of California at Santa Barbara. When not at her computer or snuggling with her boys, she can most often be found in the pool or on the soccer field.
Ray Lau is a founder and CEO at PlayHaven, which supports thousands of online communities for gamers. Prior to founding PlayHaven, Ray was an internal strategy consultant at IBM, where he advised senior executives on various business and operations strategy and organizational change issues.
Ray received his B.S. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University. While not working on PlayHaven or beating everyone in Starcraft, Ray enjoys traveling to different countries, tasting new wines, and trying various extreme sports.
Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series:
How to Write a Business Plan
Alex de Winter
Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Bruce Cohen
President & CEO and Founder, VitaPath Genetics
Monday, November 30, 2009
6:30-8:30pm
Wells Fargo Room- Haas School of Business
This session will provide practical insight into how to write a winning business plan, as well as provide both a VC’s and an entrepreneur’s perspective on business plans. The presentation will address the nuts and bolts detail of what is important in a plan. If you are planning to enter the UC Berkeley and/or Global Social Venture Business Plan Competitions, this is a session you should not miss.
FEATURED SPEAKERS
Alex de Winter
Partner, Mohr Davidow Ventures
Alex de Winter is a partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures, a venture capital firm with a long history of helping entrepreneurs commercialize innovation. Alex brings a background in bioscience and technology development to the MDV team. He supports the partnership in evaluating investments in the areas of life sciences and personalized medicine, and biotechnology-based cleantech.
Prior to MDV, Alex spent two years at Pacific Biosciences, where he researched single-molecule DNA sequencing, integrating biochemistry, optics, and nanotechnology. Alex previously worked at 454 Life Sciences (acquired by Roche), where he advanced the biochemistry behind the company's GS20, the first of the next-generation DNA sequencing instruments.
Alex received an MBA from the University of California, Berkeley. He also earned a doctorate in Chemistry from Stanford University, where he studied bacterial photosynthesis. He received his B.A. in English and Chemistry magna cum laude from Amherst College.
Bruce Cohen
President & CEO and Founder, VitaPath Genetics
Bruce Cohen has spent more than 25 years in leadership positions in life science and high technology companies. He was the founding President and CEO of two early stage biotechnology companies: Cellerant Therapeutics and Acacia BioSciences. He also served as Chief Financial Officer for GeneSoft Pharmaceuticals prior to its merger into Oscient Pharmaceuticals. In addition, he held senior positions in business development and marketing at SEQUUS Pharmaceuticals and Baxter. Mr. Cohen was the President and COO of ViTel International, a privately held, pre-internet electronic messaging company and was a management consultant with Monitor Company working in the health care and high technology sectors.
Mr. Cohen has an MBA, with distinction, from Harvard Business School, and a BA and MA from Tufts University. He was one of the founders of the Tufts Veterinary School and a co-founder of the Health Professions Information Bureau.
Entrepreneurial Best Practices Series:
Building Better Business Models
John Mullins
Associate Professor of Management Practice,
London Business School
Co-Author of Getting to Plan B
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
6:30-8:30pm
Location TBD
Drawing on a case study of a remarkable telecom start-up in Sub-Saharan Africa, this talk explores a new way to think about and develop breakthrough business models. In doing so, it debunks the “form-filling,” spreadsheet-driven mentality that characterizes so much of today’s business planning, and offers a systematic approach to developing business models that can revolutionize their industries.
FEATURED SPEAKER
John Mullins |
Getting to Plan B |
John Mullins is an Associate Professor of Management Practice at the London Business School and holds the David and Elaine Potter Foundation Term Chair in Entrepreneurship and Marketing at the London Business School. He earned his MBA at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota. An award-winning teacher, John brings to his teaching and research 20 years of executive experience in high-growth retailing firms including two ventures he founded and one he took public.
In Getting to Plan B, Mullins and Randy Komisar present a field-tested process for rigorously stress-testing your initial business idea, and using the evidence you uncover to make swift corrections that tip the business equation in your favor. Focusing on five elements that determine any business model’s economic viability— its revenue, gross margin, operating, working capital, and investment models—the authors’ approach significantly reduces your risk of failure by:
- Comparing your idea with existing models to steal what works, avoid what doesn’t, and add improvements
- Identifying “leaps of faith”: the as-yet-untested questions you are banking your business on
- Conducting fast, inexpensive, data-driven experiments to support or refute those questions
- Using this data to make smart strategic changes and course correct before it’s too late
Through examples from their first hand experience and research in businesses around the world, Mullins and Komisar reveal how companies have used such systematic experimentation to transform their current business into a viable Plan B. Whether launching a new venture in the marketplace or inside your company, Getting to Plan B will help you replace assumptions with evidence—and vastly improve your odds of success.
