Author: Haas News

Haas for Students has received a record number of applicants this year seeking funding help for their internships in the nonprofit and public sector.

Seventeen students have applied to receive funds from the annual Haas for Students campaign. The campaign asks students with private sector summer internships to donate a day's salary to help cover basic living expenses for first-year students with nonprofit or public sector summer internships who will receive a sub-market salary.

The idea behind the campaign is to level the playing field so that there is less disincentive for students to work in the nonprofit field or public sector, explains organizer Jason Hirschhorn, MBA 10.

Haas for Students has raised $29,018 through student donations, while the campaign goal is to raise $33,000. Student organizers held a Scotch and bourbon tasting event last week as part of the campaign.

Thirty percent of the first-year class has donated to the campaign; second-year students are encouraged to donate, too.

"I give to reward the implied commitment someone is making to the public sector as a long-term career," says Sean Simplicio, MBA 10, who worked in the public sector before coming to Haas. "We should do all that we can to encourage bright people to enter the sector."

The organizations that applicants will work for include Coral Reef Alliance, the only international organization working to protect the planet's coral reefs; Education Pioneers, which develops leaders to improve and transform urban K-12 education; and Agora Partnerships, which fights poverty and inequality by unleashing the potential of developing world entrepreneurs. Six applicants will work in developing countries.

Students can donate a day's salary online at givetocal.berkeley.edu/egiving/index.cfm?Fund=FN1218000. (Make sure you enter 10265-55608 in the “Special Instructions” box.)

For more information, please contact Jason Hirschhorn, MBA 10, at [email protected].

A company that has developed a device to make tuberculosis detection more accurate and affordable took first place from among a tight field of eight finalists at the 11th annual UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition on April 30.

AutoTB was awarded $25,000 before a standing-room-only crowd of more than 300 in Arthur Andersen Auditorium. The competition, organized by the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, has become the premier entrepreneurship event for the wider Berkeley community and attracted more than 100 entries this year, setting a new record for participation.

Winners receive not only seed financing for their ventures, but also the chance to present their ideas to the high-caliber venture capitalists who serve as judges.

The $10,000 second-place prize went to Novophage, which plans to commercialize a biological solution to treat antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections in a clinical setting. Third place and the People’s Choice Award — voted on by the audience — went to Integrated Diagnostics. The company is developing a device that will bring early-stage HIV detection from the laboratory to the palm of the hand. The combined awards earned the team $10,000.

Judges noted that this year’s entries included a wider range of companies in medical technology, energy, and information technology than in past years.

The winning team will travel to Spain next month to compete in an entrepreneurship competition that is part of the HIT Barcelona World Innovation Summit (http://www.hitbarcelona.com/). The grand prize is 50,000 euros. All participants also are offered support to open European offices in Barcelona, with one year of free rent. The trip is the result of a relationship between the Lester Center and Josep Miquel Pique, CEO of the 22@Barcelona urban transformation project.

For more information, visit: bplan.berkeley.edu.

You can't convince teens to take BART by telling them they're saving the environment, said the poised, neatly dressed young woman confidently in Arthur Andersen Auditorium. “Teens … want to be liberated from their parents. It’s not cool to be driven to a party.”

She should know: She’s in tenth grade. The teenager was among four groups of middle and high school students who presented their winning ideas from the Young Entrepreneurs at Haas (YEAH) program on May 2 during YEAH's end-of-year showcase event. Prizes ranged from $1,000, divided among older student teams, to store gift cards.

High school sophomores were charged with helping the Bay Area Rapid Transit District increase ridership among 13- to 17-year olds, its most reluctant customer base. The winning team's solution? Partner with some favorite retailers like Jamba Juice and H&M to offer a new BART On-Line for Teens ridership rewards card, cleverly called the BART BOLT card

In the ninth-grade competition, the winning team was selected by YEAH partner Otis Spunkmeyer for its proposal to join forces with Disney to offer a cookie mix with a Disney character cookie-cutter, plus icing and sprinkles for customizing the cookies.

Other winners included Atomic Totes cloth shopping bags, proposed by a group of seventh graders, and Team JVR, 11th graders who spent months carefully modeling how a 17-year-old girl from a hypothetical working-class family could afford to go to either a community college or a competitive out-of-state university.

This year, YEAH matched 103 mentors — mostly Berkeley MBA students but also some Haas undergrads — with 140 middle school students and 135 high school students, all from public schools. To be eligible for YEAH, the students must be the first in a low-income family to go to college and have average grades. YEAH is launching a pilot summer program called the UC Berkeley Business Academy in June for students who don’t quite fit those criteria; its fees will help fund the nonprofit YEAH program (haas.berkeley.edu/businessacademy).

YEAH mentors work an astonishing 120 hours per middle school student and 76 hours per high school student, teaching computer skills, financial literacy, and business concepts throughout the year.

The experience benefits mentors and students alike, emphasizes Jennifer Delgadillo Bevington, executive director of YEAH. “YEAH is also really about experiential learning,” she says. “What better way for Haas students to know they have really learned something than to teach it to someone else.”

Making high-quality bricks from abundantly available cow dung – instead of depleting scarce firewood and clay – earned EcoFaeBrick from Prasetiya Mulya Business School in Indonesia the $25,000 top prize at the tenth annual Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) at the Haas School this weekend.

EcoFaeBrick not only reduces home building costs for rural Indonesians in the rapidly developing region of Godean and Sayegan, it also solves a major hygiene problem and promises attractive returns to its investors.

GSVC is an international MBA competition founded by five Berkeley MBA students in 1999 to promote the creation of social ventures with a measurable impact on society or the environment. Over the past ten years, the competition has grown into a thriving global initiative.

The $10,000 second prize went to the mPedigree Logistics team from Dartmouth University's Tuck School of Business. mPedigree Logistics provides pharmaceutical companies with solutions to the growing global counterfeit drug market via mobile marketing and supply chain technologies. Up to 30 percent of drugs sold in developing nations are fakes, containing little to no active ingredients or laced with malicious chemicals, according to the World Health Organization.

SolarCycle from the George Washington University School of Business won the competition's $5,000 third prize. SolarCycle allows low-income, urban Africans to apply the reflective, solar-concentrating characteristics of trash, such as used plastic bags and the inside of metalized chip bags, to solar-powered cooking and water pasteurization.

BrightMind Labs won the $5,000 Social Impact Assessment prize, which was awarded to the team that best demonstrated social impact or value creation in financial terms. BrightMind Labs, from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, uses electronic games to teach children on the autistic spectrum to recognize and respond to emotions.

Today, GSVC's partnership includes the Haas School of Business, Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business, and Thammasat University (Thailand). It is supported by outreach partners from the University of Geneva (Switzerland), ESSEC Business School (France), ALTIS–Postgraduate School Business and Society at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore di Milano (Italy), Yale School of Management, and a consortium of business schools in South Korea.

Khuram Hussain, MBA 10, had layoffs in mind when he wrote "The L-Word," the winning case in this year's Reaching Out Case Writing Competition.

Hussain will be recognized for his efforts at the 2009 Reaching Out Conference, an annual conference for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) MBA students, in Atlanta in October.

Hussain's case, titled "The L-Word," deals with the complexity of layoff decisions during an acquisition in the financial services sector when one employee who the firm is considering laying off has been a vital part of the firm's LGBT efforts.

"The case was extremely topical considering the impending economic crisis and the consolidation within the financial services industry," says Hussain, who drew from his own experience in the financial services sector.

Hussain received a $1,500 research stipend for reaching competition milestones and was then awarded a $3,500 scholarship for writing the winning case. He bested six competitors, those from other MBA programs, in blind judging by industry experts and academics. Cases were judged on criteria that included relevance to current LGBT issues, significance of the issues analyzed, and educational value of the case.

Faculty, PhD candidates, students, and alumni from MBA programs worldwide were invited to research and write an original business case for this year's competition. The case-writing competition was added as a component of the Reaching Out conference in 2006 to expand on the pool of MBA-level business school cases which address contemporary LGBT issues. The best of the submissions become part of the Reaching Out Case Library.

On a campus where flip-flops and pajama bottoms suffice for a fashion statement, a magazine devoted to high style might stick out like Prada at a political rally.

But Doreen Bloch, BS 10, editor, publisher and founder of Bare magazine, has proven that fashion consciousness does coexist with Berkeley's famous political consciousness.

"There's always been an underground fashion culture at Cal – even though it's sort of made fun of," says Bloch, who sought out Haas Lecturer Stephen Etter, BS 83, MBA 89, with her idea during her freshman year. "It's been cool for us to show off that eclectic Berkeley style, and we espouse the values that Berkeley is known for."

Bare – a word play on Cal's mascot – is a standout among the 20-or-so campus publications. Its fourth issue — the first to be printed on Hewlett-Packard's new Web-based MagCloud self-publishing service – was featured in the New York Times in March (nytimes.com/2009/03/30/technology/internet/30mag.html). Bloch oversees an army of about 100 students to produce it.

The full-color quarterly's slick photo spreads showcase a diverse array of student models posed in thrift-shop finds and local designers' creations. Features explore eco-friendly clothing, global fashion, and budget beauty tips. The Bare blog (blog.baremagazine.org/) attracted 11,000 unique readers last month, magazine readership has reached 3,000, and the May issue will double in size.

Yet Bloch had some trepidation when she pitched Etter about a fashion glossy targeting students. "I thought a business professor might laugh, but he loved how niche it was, and how it would target students as well as local businesses like salons and clothing stores."

She credits Etter and Senior Lecturer David Robinson in the Haas Marketing Group with boosting her business savvy. Bare broke even by the third issue, and made a slight profit by the fourth. The magazine receives some funding from the ASUC and operates on a $15,000 annual budget, Bloch says.

Bloch's discovery of MagCloud, then in beta, helped. The traditional printer she used for the first three issues charged $60 per page for changes to proofs. With MagCloud, users upload PDFs and receive as many free proofs as necessary. Printing is farmed out to HP's partners at a cost of 20 cents per page.

Despite Bare's success, Bloch doesn't see herself as the next Tina Brown. She's already passed along her editor duties, and is recruiting more business students to ensure Bare stays solid. She'll continue as publisher while training a successor. "I have so many interests, and Haas has given me so many skills to run my own business," she says. "I really see myself as an entrepreneur."

To reach Bloch about partnerships or potential collaborations, e-mail [email protected].

A team of 114 Berkeley MBA students and their significant others proved their prowess beyond the classroom as they took fourth place in a frenzy of activities at the Challenge for Charity (C4C) Weekend at Stanford from April 17 to April 18.

From baseball to bocce ball and basketball to bowling, with a few trivia contests and spelling bees thrown in to test mental agility, the competition involved eight California schools and the University of Washington. All of the schools are members of Challenge for Charity, a 25-year-old nonprofit organization that fosters volunteerism and fundraising at MBA programs to help create socially responsible business leaders.

Among the Haas star athletes were Kent Newman, MBA 10, who won the 5K run, and Niloufar Aazam-Zanganeh, MBA 10, winner of 11 Swiss national golf titles, who took first place in women's golf. The five members of the Haas School's ultimate Frisbee team also claimed first place.

The weekend culminated a yearlong volunteering and fundraising effort to benefit the Special Olympics and a local charity of each school's choice. The schools cumulatively raised $400,339 and volunteered 13,030 hours. For the third year in a row, UCLA was the overall winner, taking home the coveted Golden Briefcase. Haas came in eighth. The results were based on the number of hours volunteered, money raised, and performance during the weekend.

Haas students volunteered 937 hours on a variety of activities that included coaching Special Olympics and building bikes at the Alameda Point Collaborative, a community of formerly homeless people. They raised $16,000 through several events, the largest of which was a Halloween party.

"With every event that I helped organize, I became more passionate," says Anna Lee, MBA 10, the organizations' vice-president of sports weekend. "There are no other clubs at Haas like it. It creates a certain sense of community within the school."

Haas School alumni from Goldman Sachs, BrightSource Energy, and Barclays Global Investors will speak at the undergraduate, Berkeley MBA, and PhD commencement ceremonies in May.

Stuart Bernstein, BS 85, a partner at Goldman, Sachs & Co., will speak at undergraduate commencement on May 24. John Woolard, MBA 97, CEO of BrightSource Energy, an Oakland company that recently brokered the world's largest solar energy deal, will address Berkeley MBA students on May 17. And Minder Cheng, MBA 89, PhD 94, global chief investment officer of equity and capital markets at Barclays, will give the PhD commencement speech on May 16.

Undergraduate Commencement

Bernstein, the undergraduate commencement speaker, serves as head of Goldman Sachs' Financial Institutions Capital Markets business. He leads a team that is responsible for sourcing, structuring, and marketing capital markets transactions as well as advising clients on strategic transactions in the financial institutions sector.

Last year, Bernstein executed the largest initial public offering in US history, a $20 billion IPO for Visa, as well as several multibillion-dollar offerings for institutions such as General Electric, Washington Mutual, Wachovia, National City, and Goldman Sachs.

In addition to being a member of the Haas Board, Bernstein serves on the Dean's Alumni Leadership Council at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government and the National Resource Defense Council's Center for Market Innovation, an environmental group dedicated to harnessing the power of the marketplace for positive environmental change.

Bernstein joined investment bank Goldman Sachs in 1986 after graduating from the Haas School Phi Beta Kappa in 1985. He also has earned an MBA from the Harvard Business School and an MPA, with a focus on public policy, from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Undergraduate commencement for the class of 2009 will begin at 9 a.m. Sunday, May 24 at the Greek Theatre.

Berkeley MBA Commencement

Woolard, a solar power pacesetter, will speak at the commencement ceremony for students in the Full-time, Evening & Weekend, and Berkeley-Columbia Executive MBA Programs, which begins at 2:00 p.m. May 17 in the Greek Theatre.

As CEO of BrightSource, Woolard helped broker a deal in February with Southern California Edison to provide 1,300 megawatts of clean solar power, enough to serve nearly 845,000 homes. This follows a deal with Pacific Gas & Electric to build plants in the Mojave Desert that will generate 900 megawatts of solar power.

BrightSource was named a 2009 Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in recognition of efforts to make solar energy cost competitive with fossil fuels. BrightSource was the only solar company among 34 winners, which were honored for their involvement in the development of life-changing technology innovation.

Woolard brings more than two decades of experience in the energy technology sector to his role as CEO of BrightSource, a position he has held since 2006. After business school, he co-founded Silicon Energy, one of the early successful clean-tech companies, and served as the company's president, CEO, and chairman. He then sold Silicon Energy to Itron, where he became vice president of software solutions and subsequently vice president of strategy and business development. He also previously served as an executive-in-residence in VantagePoint Venture Partner's CleanTech Group and remains a venture partner with the firm.

Woolard is a Crown Fellow at the Aspen Institute and has served on the board of the California Clean Energy Fund and the Strategic Advisory Board for Xcel Energy. He currently serves on boards for the Tuolumne River Preservation Trust and the Oakland Zoo and on the advisory board for the Haas School's Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation.

In addition to an MBA from the Haas School, Woolard holds a master's degree in environmental planning from the University of Virginia, and a BA in economics from the University of Virginia.

PhD Commencement

Minder Cheng, who earned both an MBA and PhD from Haas, has overall responsibility for Barclays Global Investors active equity, index equity, transition services, securities lending, and cash products worldwide. Previously, he was chief investment officer for the active equity products globally, and global head of trading with responsibility for the firm's equity and foreign exchange trading activities worldwide.

Prior to joining BGI in 1999, Cheng held roles as research analyst, proprietary trader, and senior strategist at Convergence Asset Management, Sumitomo Finance International, and Salomon Brothers. He worked in New York, London, and Tokyo with these firms. His direct trading experience covers equity, fixed income, currency, and derivatives in the US and international markets. Cheng also managed several projects for the research and planning division of the New York Stock Exchange.

Cheng received his PhD in finance and his MBA from the Haas School. He earned his BA from National Taiwan University in Taipei, Taiwan.

PhD commencement will begin at 10:30 a.m. in the Wells Fargo Room.