UC Berkeley Startup Accelerator@Skydeck
We are excited to announce that the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Lab is officially moving from it’s current location at the Bancroft Hotel to Skydeck, and is re-launching the program as UC Berkeley Startup Accelerator@Skydeck or UCBSA@Skydeck.
Incubation at UC Berkeely-Haas has a long tradition (it’s been around since 1997!) of promoting entrepreneurship at Berkeley, and we are proud to be part of the new Skydeck incubation space, together with the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences School at Berkeley.
To learn more about UCBSA@Skydeck – click here.
To apply to the program – click here.
Update: Haas Venture Fellows application process
Thanks to all the class of 2013 Applicants that applied to the Haas Venture Fellows program earlier this week.
We have received an impressive set of applications, both in number and in quality. We were excited with the thoughtfulness of the applications across the board and we are looking forward to move forward in the process.
Interview invitations have already been sent out. Invited students should either use the link included in the email sent to them yesterday to sign up for a time slot early next week, or reach out to us if you are having issues with the proposed time slots.
If you have not received an interview invitation, please be patient. After our first group of interviews, we will be reassessing our next steps, which could very well include bringing more people in. So hold tight.
On timing, as mentioned, interviews will be next week and we hope to be able to offer admission to the program by the end of the September or in the first week of October.
A new year at HVF
We are excited to be back at school and get back to our roles at Haas Venture Fellows.
On top of our traditional priorities: delivering successful projects for Venture Capital firms, managing the Berkeley Entrepreneurship Lab (BEL) incubator, and helping Berkeley startups with fund raise in our pitch-labs, we are looking forward to some new and exciting activities.
Our plans for this year are to deepen our relationships with other clubs and activities at Haas, and do an even better job as the liaison between the Venture Community and Haas. We plan to bring more venture firms to campus, we are thinking about coming up with a new VC speaker series, and are working with the Lester Center as part of the SkyDeck incubation strategy – a new vision for incubation at Berkeley.
With all those exciting activities planned for 2012, We are also looking forward to have five new Haas MBA 2013 full-time students join us. To learn more about the application, which is due in Sep. 19th, please click here.
We also setup two Info Session for MBA 2013 students:
Info Session #1
Date: Thu, Sep 8
Time: 6-7PM
Location: Tentative – C335 (We will update the location as soon as we have a final confirmation)
Info Session #2
Date: Wed, Sep 14
Time: 1:15-2PM
Location: C330
Eastern Europe Is Shy But Ripe
I recently spent a week in Bulgaria — in February. It was cold!
Why would I leave California to spend a week in the former communist state? More importantly, why is this relevant to the Haas Venture Fellows?
Well, I was in Sofia to attend a conference on Eastern European venture capital. It turns out this is an emerging sector in early-stage investing thanks to firms like NEVEQ.
I was even fortunate to sit on the ‘startup jury’. A panel of some seriously accomplished folks and I judged 9 pitches. I was thoroughly impressed by ideas throughout media and software. From a company trying to transform the living room to another disrupting the hospitality concierge space. Seedcamp, a UK based incubator, was there to offer the winner a spot in their next cohort.
What surprised me most was the combination of humility and intelligence. Many entrepreneurs in attendance have advanced degrees in math, science and engineering. They all spoke solid English without ever having visited an English speaking country. But it was a struggle to learn about them! They didn’t talk about themselves.
When pitching a VC in the US, it’s almost a given – and practically required – to include a ‘team’ slide with a few bullet points on each founder. In fact I know a lot of VCs who would argue that this is the most important slide in the deck! But not one of these pitches had this slide. I was shocked at this cultural difference and later learned that folks in Eastern Europe are much less likely to self-promote. Perhaps this is a cultural artifact stemming from 40+ years of communism that left people scared to stand out.
Regardless, the region is a landgrab. Private capital markets are much less efficient. Opportunities that in the US are driven to profit-eliminating semi-perfect competition are yet to be tapped. The labor pool is intelligent, hard-working and with a little help can produce some serious products.
While BRIC usually gets all the attention, I’m keeping my eye on Eastern Europe over the next few years.
Scott Shapiro is a 2nd year MBA student and membr of the Haas Venture Fellows at UC Berkeley-Haas. He is expected to graduate in 2011.
Rio Ventures Takes First Place at Venture Capital Investment Competition
The Lester Center and the Haas Entrepreneurs Association proudly co-hosted the 8th annual UC Berkeley Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) at Haas last week. A “reverse business plan competition,” VCIC offers students an opportunity to step into the shoes of a venture capitalist for the day.
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Six teams of five students each competed against one another on Friday February 4th in evaluating business plans of five early stage entrepreneurs currently seeking funding, selecting one investment opportunity to fund, and negotiating the term sheets with their chosen company in front of a panel of partners from top venture capital firms. After an intense day of competition, the Rio Ventures team of Justin Di Trolio (MBA 11), Mitch Gordon (EWMBA 12), Craig Hashi (EWMBA 12), Megan Rast (MBA 11) and Shannon Riley (MBA 12) emerged as this year’s winner. Judges hailed from Mayfield Fund, Claremont Creek Ventures, Javelin Venture Partners, Physic Ventures, and Hercules Technology Growth Capital.
Sarah Friedman (MBA 12), 2011 VCIC Chair and Andre Marquis, Lester Center Executive Director, with Rio Ventures
The VCIC continues to be extremely popular program on campus, drawing interest from another record number of applicants this year – 185 graduate students from Haas, the School of Engineering and the Boalt School of Law. The VCIC offers a unique opportunity to aspiring entrepreneurs and venture capitalists alike to get an inside perspective into the industry and gain valuable hands-on skills to complement their work in the classroom.
Not only do student competitors participate in a day of intense learning about the VC industry, the Competition also offers three pre-competition workshops which cover the basics of a term sheet, how to ask effective due diligence questions, and tips on how to negotiate a term sheet with an entrepreneur. The VCIC organizing committee would like to thank the following firms who gave their time to these very well received workshops- Dorsey & Whitney LLP, Garage Technology Ventures and Metricly.
The winning team from Berkeley will go on to compete in the VCIC regional finals at Santa Clara University on February 11th and hopefully go on to represent the region at the international finals at the University of North Carolina (UNC) in April. Now in its 14th year, the UNC competition attracts over 800 MBA students from more than 50 business schools worldwide.
sFund and the challenges of the Social Web
Intense discussions about the new era of Social in web and mobile have been all over the place this week. Those discussions are, rightfully, getting tons of media traction.
It started with the announcement of the new sFund from VC Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, who joined hands with Facebook, Amazon.com, and Zynga to announce a new $250 million fund for social networking startup (You can read more about that here: http://www.businessinsider.com/live-facebook-to-announce-new-vc-fund-2010-10#ixzz13DmAQGTd).
The new fund met with some criticism led by Chris Dixon, a leading angel investor, who kept shredding Kleiner Perkins initiative on twitter (you can see his tweets here: http://twitter.com/#!/cdixon). Chris basically suggests that Kleiner’s dedicated social startup fund is late to the party.
Thinking about Chris Dixon’s response and the opportunities out there I can’t help but wonder that:
- Nobody has yet to figure out how to successfully use Social Media for e-commerce. It’s clear that this is one of the Holy Grails of Social, yet no disruptive solution or technology has showed up. Not only have we not seen the first generation of successful Social solutions for e-commerce, we aren’t even seeing beta solutions that deliver solid value.
Unlike Brand Marketers, online retailers want performance based solutions and are willing to pay handsomely for leads that convert into paying customers.
- Social Network brand marketing tools have made a huge leap forward in the last year, but there are many optimization challenges ahead. This space is young and growing and we will surely see more disruptive technologies that would grab more advertisers’ dollars.
Chris surely recognizes that those opportunities are out there. True, Social is not all new and it’s already here, big time, but the industry is still pretty young and will probably see a lot of game changing products in the future.
Unfortunately, it took a long time for players in the industry to understand where there are headed to and what works best, but now as some of the key concepts are unveiled it’s officially the first round of the new web – the social web. Round 2 and maybe 3 are probably around the corner and it seems that there are many opportunities out there for entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
I would bet a small amount of my money on Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers new sFund. Would you do the same?
Sex with no sex appeal
These last two weeks, I’ve skipped all my classes to participate in two interesting conferences here in SF: TechCrunch Disrupt and Health 2.0. Both conferences are focused heavily on tech, particularly consumer tech, with the latter targeting healthcare specifically. And while my heart is in healthcare, it was hard not to be severely disappointed in Health 2.0 after going to TCDisrupt.
I’m proud to work in healthcare. It’s an industry that focuses on advancing science and improving lives. Nearly every company I see progresses the world in some way. However, the innovations in healthcare lack major sex appeal — something which the consumer tech industry has nailed perfectly — and this leads to clumsy products with (unsurprisingly) no consumer uptake. At Health 2.0, almost every website demoed (aside from ShareCare with handsome Dr. Oz and powerful Oprah backing it) reminded me of either browsing Craigslist or reading an ad-ridden junky page that I’d never trust for my health information, let alone input my health information. Where are the talented programmers? Where are the visionary designers? Let’s make products and have presentations that grab the same attention, laughter and memory space that IDEO and Qpid.me did (who, interestingly, presented on sex and STDs)! Improving lives is such a noble, amazing cause, but so many healthcare companies completely lose sight of who the audience is — ironic for a conference focused on bringing healthcare to the consumer level.
Another thing severely lacking in the Health 2.0 conference was the obsessive,entrepreneurial, crazy-driven excitement that TCDisrupt had. It’s an unfortunate day when the panel with three government officials (Aneesh Chopra – CTO of US, Todd Park – CTO of HHS, Peter Levin – CTO of VA) is the most energetic and entrepreneurial panel of the conference. Sure, Aneesh and Todd may be outliers, but shouldn’t all successful entrepreneurs be too? Instead, panel after panel was filled with grey hair, complaining voices about the challenges in healthcare, and uninspiring product launches.
But I want to end this post on a less sour note, and point out two companies that actually excited me at the conference. One was Castlight. All the buzz, secrecy and VC funding did not disappoint. The website helps patients with employer-sponsored high deductible health plans navigate the hugely variable out-of-pocket costs of doctors and hospitals in the area. The website looked easy to use and convincing, while the underlying computational processing is undoubtedly complex. The second was Bill Doctor, which helped individuals negotiate their bills with hospitals. The business model charges $20 plus 10% of all savings from consumers. While this is still a cost-shifting mechanism, I think it will really help a lot of individuals and bring market-based mechanisms to medical pricing.
jailbreaking healthcare
Last week two of us from HVF went to the VLab event at Stanford about mobile health. One really interesting fact is that the amount of mobile data transferred is doubling every 9 months, twice Moore’s law. It was a reasonable discussion with an interesting company pitch. Overall, it seems like there are a lot of unknowns – it will be interesting to see how mobile health plays out over the coming years – will it be consumer focused? provider focused? Is it really the next big area in healthcare or is just hype?
In other news, we have have been hard at work picking the new class and we are almost there…we will be announcing the new class next week. It will be fun to have some new faces in the group and we have some great projects lining up.
It's a new year at HVF!
We are excited to be kicking off a new year here at Haas! We are looking forward to meeting the new first year students, and selecting the next five students who will represent the class of 2012 on the HVFs.
We are looking for some great new projects or interesting research themes to work on this semester, so if you would like to submit a project or research theme, or talk to one of the current HVFs in order to learn more about our team, please contact haasventurefellows@gmail.com.