Category: Sutardja Center News

Blockchain is one of the most exciting new technologies that continues to make its mark not only around the world but also right here on UC Berkeley campus. The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology has introduced a Blockchain Lab to teach students how to start companies implementing blockchain technology. Companies ranging from medical data trackers to voting assurance have started to use blockchain to prevent hacker threats and ensure safety amongst clients and customers.

On February 1st, UC Berkeley students attended the Sutardja Center’s first ever Blockchain Lab. Like other labs, the Blockchain Lab features a series of speakers, primarily industry leaders, and faculty who work to teach students about the foundation of entrepreneurship.

During the first class, Professor Po Chi Wu brought in entrepreneurs who have started companies that implement Blockchain technology.  One entrepreneur started the company Neighborly, which makes municipal bonds accessible and transparent. It provides a better way for people to invest in public projects that they care about and allows for communities to approach civic capital formation. To clarify, civic capital is the result of people coming together to create solutions to immediate problems at hand.

 

Intellus Learning, created by David Kim, empowers instructors to access open educational resources and its academic library materials to help replace expensive course materials. After speaking more about his company, Kim spoke further about how each team can start to form Blockchain related ideas for the entirety of the class.

Wu later talked about the structure of the course and what the first ever Blockchain Lab hopes to achieve. Initially, students in the class must form teams after participating in a series of challenges. Each team then must brainstorm how to implement Blockchain in its startup and what problems can be solved with the use of such technology. Later, the teams must validate and score their ideas so that they can ensure their idea is one that solves a problem for a large enough market size. Lastly, each team is required to understand the customer pain by conducting customer interviews, which will allow them to make the pivots necessary to move forward.

To learn more about Blockchain Lab, click here.

 

The post New course helps students create blockchain startups appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

The post Alt.Meat & Greet podcast Episode 2: How do you mimic the flavor of meat? appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

About LAUNCH

LAUNCH is The University of California’s startup accelerator, purposed to transform early-stage startups into fundable companies. During the fall, judges select a small group of startups in the UC system. Teams are then paired with serial-entrepreneur mentors and led through a rigorous curriculum with UC Berkeley faculty. LAUNCH hosts two bootcamps and one launchathon before its final demo day in May where the cohort pitches their final product or service to a kaleidoscope of investors. The three month long accelerating process is designed so that the startups can grow significantly in a smaller amount of time.

 

 

Bootcamp One

On February 2nd and 3rd, LAUNCH hosted a bootcamp for its Spring 2018 Cohort. This year’s cohort consists of 24 teams ranging from startups in biotechnology, machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other areas. LAUNCH co-chairs, Jordan Sale and Christian Keil, kicked off the event with a brief introduction on what the cohort will be working on for the next three months and what to expect from the accelerator.

Guest speakers and industry leaders spoke throughout the weekend to engage with the startups on how to be successful. One speaker, Aman Verjee, COO of 500 startups, lectured on how the cohort can have a smooth experience for the next three months and beyond through team alignment, passion for their product or service, customer outreach and by having a scalable business model.

 

 

Later, a few of UC Berkeley’s faculty shared their stories on how they worked on their own startups. Andre Marquis, Executive Director, Innovation Acceleration Group, encouraged the cohort to ask as many questions as they could during their time in LAUNCH because “the accelerator will help you answer questions you don’t know the answer to.” He continued by telling the startups that they can expect highs and lows and to not be afraid of failure. Marquis motivated the cohort to pivot their ideas and decisions by stating “you are never right the first time.”

 

 

Later, each startup gave a brief five-minute introduction about what the mission of their company, what they plan to achieve in three months, and who their current customers are. To learn more about the cohort in detail, please visit the LAUNCH Medium article here.

The rest of the bootcamp consisted of lectures regarding company and risk validation, business models and value propositions, and customer outreach strategies. At the end of the first day, one of LAUNCH’s sponsors, WilmerHale, provided the startups with a “Legal 101” training to ensure a track of legal guidance and decision making.

The following day, the LAUNCH leadership team hosted various workshops for the startups to work together and understand what kind of problems they are trying to tackle in the coming weeks. One of the workshops, “Risky Assumptions”, helped the startups decide which assumptions about their company high or low risk and of those, which are hard to validate.

Make sure to visit the LAUNCH website to learn more about the mission, cohort, leadership team, and more!

The post LAUNCH Cohort: Ready for Lift Off appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

A lot of 22-year-olds aren’t sure what they want to do with their careers, but not Farhan Ahmed.

Ever since he was a freshman at Sri Ramaswami Memorial Institute of Science and Technology (SRM) in India, he’s been involved in the startup business, beginning when he created his first app: SRM Foodies, a way for hungry students to have food delivered straight to their dorms.

“That was a big moment where I just wanted to learn how it went,” Ahmed said. “I wanted to experience the feeling of having a startup.”

Now, as part of his university’s partnership with UC Berkeley, Ahmed is one of 20 students studying abroad at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (SCET) where he’s learning the practical skills he’ll need to make it in India’s burgeoning startup world.

During the first weeks of the semester, Ahmed attended his Intro to Silicon Valley class where he and his peers learned about common customs of the Bay Area’s tech culture: what to wear, how to pitch and to never take someone’s word at face value.

These are the real-life lessons that the students say makes studying at SCET so valuable.

At SCET, SRM students have a choice of taking classes that cover a variety of different topics relating to entrepreneurship and technology, such as data science, finance and leadership. They can also participate in the center’s “challenge labs” where they work to create their own startups relating to blockchain technology, cybersecurity, data privacy, disaster recovery in Puerto Rico or alternative meat.

“There’s practical sense to what I’m learning,” said Ahmed, who’s particularly interested in delving into SCET’s Blockchain Lab. “I get to gain hands-on experience.”

But where the students from SRM hope to apply that hands-on experience is vast. Arundhishaan Kanagaraja, 21, is working on a tool that can scrape data off talent pools, like Linkedin, for recruiters.

Abhinav Kannan, wants to use what he learns in his classes at SCET to address some of the largest social problems facing India. Overpopulation, poverty, child labor and high illiteracy rates –– these are all issues that he thinks technology can help solve.

But Kannan said that no matter what the interests of SRM students, now’s the time for them to get started on their tech ideas.

“Startup culture in India is booming right now,” Kannan said. “It is booming especially in places like Mumbai where there are people involved in finance and engineering coming together to create new opportunities.”

The President of SRM, Dr. P. Sathyanarayanan, has previously said that he hopes his partnership with SCET will help to bring new international and technological ideas back to his university so students are motivated to help build “a second Bay Area” in India.

Shreya Mondal, a 21-year-old computer science major, noted that her exposure in the program to new ideas about technology and to U.S. culture is already fueling her enthusiasm about entrepreneurship.

“They really are delivering everything that they promised about,” she said. “I’ve met Silicon Valley industry fellows, I’ve been pitching ideas. I’m really getting the entire experience.”  

The post Could these UC Berkeley students help build a 2nd Silicon Valley in India? appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

The post Alt.Meat & Greet podcast Episode 1: How can scientists give plant-based products the same texture as meat? appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

The night before Nikita Bier launched his app TBH, he was on the phone with his lawyer, asking how to liquidate a business. About three months later, more than 5 million people had downloaded his app and Facebook was acquiring it.

At the Newton Lecture Series Tuesday night in the Li-Ka Shing Auditorium, Bier spoke to UC Berkeley students about his journey to creating TBH, a viral app that allows teenagers to anonymously compliment each other through a series of polls. He was joined and interviewed by House Fund founder Jeremy Fiance, one of his early investors.

“Everything seems like an overnight success in Silicon Valley, but it was tough,” Bier said. “I got really good at shutting down apps, really good at failing.”

In total, Bier shut down 14 apps on his way to creating the viral TBH.

Bier had his first major success in the tech world during the 2012 presidential campaign cycle as a student in UC Berkeley. His app Politify allowed users to input personal information and receive a prediction of whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney’s policies would financially benefit them most. It quickly went viral, reaching 4 million people in the first month after it was launched and receiving coverage from dozens of major news outlets.

But when he launched TBH in the summer of 2017, his luck seemed to be running out. He had put together a team that wanted to develop the next big social app, but after five years their investment money was dwindling.

He chose to launch TBH in a high school in Georgia because it had the earliest semester start date he could find and he wasn’t sure that his company was going to last much longer. But his doubts were soon proved wrong.

Within two days of the launch, 40 percent of the original high school had downloaded the app and it had spread to three more schools. The next day it was in 3,000 schools.

“Imagine a startup that has lost all hope and then Facebook’s arriving in six Ubers at your door and you’re giving them a presentation on the future of social,” Bier said.  

The key to TBH’s success, Bier noted, is its constraints. He had seen how other anonymous apps had crumbled because they were unable to control users’ cyberbullying or racist comments.

Bier’s solution was to take away the keyboard in order to keep people focused on positive comments. TBH asks users questions like “Who has the best smile?” or “Who makes you laugh the hardest?” and gives the user an option to choose between four friends. The friend who is chosen is notified that an anonymous person selected them in the poll.

When Facebook acquired TBH in October 2017, Bier was also hired on as a lead product manager for the company, where he currently works. He teased that new updates were on the way for the app, but could not disclose them.

Bier noted that throughout all his endeavors, his greatest asset has been his self-doubt and his ability to question whether or not a product is working.

“If you’re going to do a startup be prepared for a very long journey,” Bier told students in the audience. “Expect the first idea to be wrong, but it might lead you to the right idea.”  

The post How to build a viral app: TBH founder gives startup advice at UC Berkeley appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

The night before Nikita Bier launched his app TBH, he was on the phone with his lawyer, asking how to liquidate a business. About three months later, more than 5 million people had downloaded his app and Facebook was acquiring it.

At the Newton Lecture Series Tuesday night in the Li-Ka Shing Auditorium, Bier spoke to UC Berkeley students about his journey to creating TBH, a viral app that allows teenagers to anonymously compliment each other through a series of polls. He was joined and interviewed by House Fund founder Jeremy Fiance, one of his early investors.

“Everything seems like an overnight success in Silicon Valley, but it was tough,” Bier said. “I got really good at shutting down apps, really good at failing.”

In total, Bier shut down 14 apps on his way to creating the viral TBH.

Bier had his first major success in the tech world during the 2012 presidential campaign cycle as a student in UC Berkeley. His app Politify allowed users to input personal information and receive a prediction of whether Barack Obama or Mitt Romney’s policies would financially benefit them most. It quickly went viral, reaching 4 million people in the first month after it was launched and receiving coverage from dozens of major news outlets.

But when he launched TBH in the summer of 2017, his luck seemed to be running out. He had put together a team that wanted to develop the next big social app, but after five years their investment money was dwindling.

He chose to launch TBH in a high school in Georgia because it had the earliest semester start date he could find and he wasn’t sure that his company was going to last much longer. But his doubts were soon proved wrong.

Within two days of the launch, 40 percent of the original high school had downloaded the app and it had spread to three more schools. The next day it was in 3,000 schools.

“Imagine a startup that has lost all hope and then Facebook’s arriving in six Ubers at your door and you’re giving them a presentation on the future of social,” Bier said.  

The key to TBH’s success, Bier noted, is its constraints. He had seen how other anonymous apps had crumbled because they were unable to control users’ cyberbullying or racist comments.

Bier’s solution was to take away the keyboard in order to keep people focused on positive comments. TBH asks users questions like “Who has the best smile?” or “Who makes you laugh the hardest?” and gives the user an option to choose between four friends. The friend who is chosen is notified that an anonymous person selected them in the poll.

When Facebook acquired TBH in October 2017, Bier was also hired on as a lead product manager for the company, where he currently works. He teased that new updates were on the way for the app, but could not disclose them.

Bier noted that throughout all his endeavors, his greatest asset has been his self-doubt and his ability to question whether or not a product is working.

“If you’re going to do a startup be prepared for a very long journey,” Bier told students in the audience. “Expect the first idea to be wrong, but it might lead you to the right idea.”  

The post How to build a viral app: TBH founder gives startup advice at UC Berkeley appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

On Monday, January 22nd, IndieBio held its consumer biotechnology showcase, during which four biotech startups pitched and demoed their respective products. One of those four companies was Terramino Foods, a startup focused on creating alternatives to seafood using fungi and algae. The founders of Terramino Foods, Kimberlie Le and Joshua Nixon, are both University of California, Berkeley alumni and graduates of the Alternative Meat Lab here at SCET.

Since graduating from Berkeley, Kimberlie and Josh have formed Terramino Foods, which was one of fourteen biotech startups accepted into IndieBio, a startup accelerator that provides $250,000 in seed funding, lab and work space, and mentorship for four months. Because the accelerator program is only four months long, Kimberlie said that it has been a challenging process, “One semester at Cal I took 38 units, and this [IndieBio] is harder than that.” Simply put, IndieBio takes scientists and turns them into entrepreneurs. At the showcase on Monday, Kimberlie illustrated Terramino’s goal: to revolutionize protein consumption.

 

Globally, protein consumption is increasing rapidly. To be more specific, seafood consumption is increasing. Currently, 67% of protein consumption in humans is from seafood sources. However, the alternative meat market does not reflect that seafood consumption, which has had a large environmental impact, as we consume fish faster than they can reproduce.That is where Terramino Foods comes in. By reverse engineering what animal products taste like, Terramino Foods has created an alternative to seafood that tastes like and has the same nutritional value as fish. Kimberlie and Josh have even managed to retain the flaky structure of fish in their seafood alternative.

The basis of Terramino Foods’ product is fungi. The fungi is put through a fermentation process, which results in a relatively flavorless, protein-dense product. This product is then flavored and colored with algae, which is what gives fish its distinctive taste. Terramino Foods’ first product line is a salmon-based product line that currently includes a salmon burger and will soon feature a fish filet. In the next six months, Terramino Foods will be scaling its production up and plans on selling its product to restaurants by the end of 2018.

After all of the teams had pitched their products, there was time to mingle with each team and ask them questions about their specific products. Terramino Foods’ specified area was particularly packed, as they had set out samples of their “salmon” product, which, to my pleasant surprise, tasted exactly like salmon.

The post Cal Alums wow at IndieBio showcase appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

The Blockchain Lab’s sponsor, NEO, a non-profit community developing the smart economy on blockchain, held their first DevCon this past week in San Francisco at the Intercontinental Hotel.  Speaker topics ranged from new solutions for decentralized databases for dApps (Bluzelle) to mobile wallets for the NEO economy (O3).  There was even a “NEO Anthem” performed by the rapper Hashbrown.  The conference was very well attended with numbers estimated as high as 700 developers, investors and exhibitors.

NEO has generously donated 250 backpacks from the conference, along with a variety of sweatshirts and caps to SCET for students.  Any remaining items will be donated to support local community, non-profit organizations.  SCET students are welcome to come by the Sutardja Center at the Stadium to put a NEO backpack or sweatshirt to good use.

Some photos and a listing of conference speakers can be seen below.

A list of presenters and their backgrounds can be seen here.SPEAKERS & PROJECTS DETAILS

The post NEO DevCon & Free Backpacks for SCET Students & our Community appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link

Welcome to the formal kickoff of 2018 activities by the Blockchain Lab at UC Berkeley Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology.  

The Sutardja Center has initiated the Center’s first course on Blockchain, led by Dr. Po Chi Wu (see Challenge Lab – INDENG 185 01 for more details) and is working with the leading student group in this space, Blockchain at Berkeley, to advance the industry and research domains.

To further efforts in this fundamental technology and through generous donations from our Blockchain Lab Sponsors – EchoLink and NEO – the Sutardja Center is issuing a general call for project funding nominations in the blockchain space and will be supporting efforts with unrestricted funding awards, as well as posting a Research Director.

Select projects will be awarded funding at the following levels –

• Up to $25,000 to a Berkeley faculty member
• Up to $5,000 each to student-led teams and possible units through independent study

If you would like your project to be considered for funding and/or awarding of units, please apply by filling out this brief form.  The criteria for project funding will be research or projects that directly impact and aid in the resolution of obstacles to mass adoption of blockchain or blockchain policy and regulatory issues.

If you are interested in our Research Director opening and are currently Berkeley researcher or faculty, or would like to nominate someone, please email resume/CV or contact information to Jocelyn Weber at jweberphipps@berkeley.edu.

Background:  Blockchain is among the most exciting recent developments in computer science.  While it has served the basis of the Bitcoin currency, it has significantly more potential because of its highly secure distributed database . Blockchain has the potential to offer trust, security, and smart contracts to a new generation of internet applications.

However, in its current state, there are still technical and policy challenges yet to be resolved before its full potential can be realized.  The Blockchain Lab at SCET is working to establish new emerging sectors through applied research into the following problems and projects:

• Creation of truly mobile blockchain applications
• Scalability of the blockchain itself in terms of both number of nodes and transaction speed
• Ability for broader smart contract creation and execution
• Policy and regulatory issues in blockchain

The post Working in Blockchain? The Sutardja Center is seeking Project Funding Nominations & Blockchain Lab Research Director appeared first on UC Berkeley Sutardja Center.

Source link