Meet the Spieker Scholars: Rohan Toc

This is the second of four profiles of the inaugural Spieker Scholars.

Rohan Toc, BS 28, is one of the first four Berkeley Haas undergraduate students named as Spieker Scholars in the Spieker Undergraduate Business Program. He’s an entrepreneur with a plan to take on the world by questioning the status quo in fashion and business. 

In this video interview, Toc discusses growing up in Los Angeles, his adventures so far at UC Berkeley—including meeting Google co-founder Sergey Brin—and tapping resources across campus to build his startup. 

“I’m from Los Angeles. I went to high school at El Camino Real Charter High School in the Valley. I wanted to go to either engineering school or business school. When I was in high school applying to the UC programs, I came across the Haas School of Business and learned that they were doing the first four-year program. Instantly, I knew I wanted to apply.

I’m a creative person, and so I surrounded myself with a lot of creatives in high school. The way I got into business is by reselling a lot of clothes in middle school and high school. I had a couple of different accounts and storefronts where I would resell vintage clothing or designer clothing. 

When I came to Berkeley, I got into the Business Careers in Entertainment Club (BCEC), and I was able to do consulting for Adidas and Fear of God, two pretty big fashion labels. And on one of the projects, Adidas ended up flying us out to LA, where we got to go to the headquarters and present our research project. 

That was really cool because it made me view my hometown from a different lens because I was able to take what I learned at Berkeley and apply it back home. In LA, everyone wants to create great things or do great things. At Berkeley, everyone wants to maximize the amount of time they work on something to be able to build something really cool.

I also started a company last semester and the Entrepreneurs at Berkeley Club has been so supportive. I’ve learned so much by going through their incubator program. It’s been a couple of months now and the journey has been insane. When I started, I had no idea how to pitch, how to raise capital, how to build a demo or anything like that, but we all just taught ourselves. There were days that we stayed up all night, practicing, pitching, or just building and refining what the product was. It’s been incredible to be able to go from this idea to being able to introduce myself as a founder.

Questioning the status quo

In life, one of my biggest things is trying to be as fearless as possible. Last fall, my roommate and I thought, ‘OK, we’re here at Berkeley. We’ve got to do something crazy.’ We got student scholarships to go to the All-In Podcast Summit in San Francisco, and when we got there we snuck past all the security to the VIP section. 

The NVIDIA team was there, Sergey Brin was there. Both of us are just pitching—pitching ourselves as founders to angel investors and owners of VC firms. We just wanted to divide and conquer and soak up everything we could. So there was one introduction after another. ‘Hi, I’m Rohan. Nice to meet you. This is my startup. I’m building this. This is who I work with. This is what I do. I’m 18. I’m so hungry for this opportunity.’

I asked them, ‘What would you do if you were in my shoes?’ I was just rapid-firing questions and looking for opportunities. But it was really cool because I think I was able to really push the status quo. We were the youngest people at that whole event and we completely stuck out like sore thumbs. But we were there,  just pushing the boundaries of what’s normal. I met Sergey Brin, only for a really brief moment, but it was really cool just to see someone like that in person.

On being a Spieker Scholar

Being around other ambitious students here at Berkeley, kids who are hungry to be able to make change and make products and just work on things is so valuable. When I told my faculty mentor, Jonathan Heyne, about my startup, he connected me to so many people and to resources that I could use to help me to continue to scale. That was so helpful and I used some of his advice to land a partnership with this company called Shaped AI.

It’s been such an amazing opportunity to have this foundation to stand on, because whenever I go to push the status quo and do all these crazy things, I can always come back and return to a community of people who are here to really support me. 

Being a Spieker Scholar means that I feel recognized and believed in. I think the biggest thing is there’s such a strong community of people who’ve genuinely put tangible effort into helping me push forward and succeed. There’s been such a solid foundation and community of people that I’ve been able to rely on and it’s been such an amazing opportunity to have this foundation to stand on. Having that community of people has been so influential in allowing me to become who I am sitting here right now, today.”