Saikat Chaudhuri believes that the next 10 years will be among the most exciting in history—and that some of the most disruptive ideas will be hatched within the walls of the new Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Hub (eHub).
In a recent interview with Haas News, we spoke to Chaudhuri about his role as faculty director of the eHub, which will open to all UC Berkeley students this fall on the Berkeley Haas campus. Dawn McGee joins Chaudhuri as eHub executive director.
Chaudhuri, who arrived at Haas in 2021 from Wharton, is also the faculty director of the undergraduate Management, Entrepreneurship, and Technology (M.E.T.) program.
You came to Haas from Wharton, where you taught management and ran the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. What do you believe sets UC Berkeley apart as a startup and innovation machine?
Berkeley is pretty phenomenal when it comes to producing all kinds of ventures. It’s not just the Apples and the Intels and the Teslas and the Databricks that we’ve co-founded. It’s also the OpenAIs, for instance, and other household names, and thousands of startups overall across sectors. I’m proud that we’re the No. 1 university in the world for producing venture-backed startups in the PitchBook rankings, but what truly sets us apart is that founders at Berkeley are driven by a mission to change the world for the better.
But what I think about is: How do we make that even bigger? How do we produce even more incredible startups that go and disrupt the world and create positive change? We do it by helping the entire ecosystem become more productive and build the pipeline.
How will the eHub build that pipeline?
We’ve got 60 to 100 different units on campus involved with entrepreneurship or innovation in some way, whether it’s labs, technology commercialization entities, or academic programs to help you get from an idea to a startup. We’ve got funding opportunities and all kinds of venture competitions and hackathons and an accelerator in SkyDeck as well. But there are a couple of things that are missing.
First, we need to do a better job with the business side. Science and technology ideas are great, but we need to make the ideas sustainable and economical. We also need a space for people to be able to collide, connect, and find other founders and co-founders and share experiences to build community. We also found that though we have many different resources on campus, students have a hard time figuring out where to go to take an idea forward.
Finally, there’s also no easy way to connect with mentors. We have so many alumni who are both entrepreneurs and investors, but there’s no easy way to connect with them. The eHub will unite the entire university ecosystem and bring the strengths of Berkeley Haas and UC Berkeley together.
Our mission is to make entrepreneurship easier and more accessible for all by allowing people from across campus to connect, build, and be discovered. Whether you just have an idea or already have a prototype, we will help you navigate the ecosystem, and thereby also feed all the amazing units on campus by complementing what they do.
Our mission is to make entrepreneurship easier and more accessible for all.
Why did you want to serve as faculty director of the eHub, in addition to your role running M.E.T.?
I firmly believe that to solve the world’s most pressing challenges, we need to take an interdisciplinary approach, and I love working across fields and schools at a great campus like ours. There are natural areas that come together with innovation and entrepreneurship. M.E.T is one of those programs that does so, and so is the eHub, where technology and science are coupled with the management and the business side. Since I was working on building that synergy across areas with M.E.T., it made sense to bring these things together in a different capacity. Former dean Ann Harrison asked me at some point if I was interested in building it out and serving the entire campus, and I just found it to be an extremely exciting opportunity.
The eHub building restoration is beautiful. How does the space align with the startup mission?
We hope that when you come in, you will be hooked by the beauty of the building—a Julia Morgan building and an architectural masterpiece that’s iconic in so many ways. But the building is more than just iconic. It’s designed to be a place where people will get to spend time getting exposed to new ideas, accessing resources that are free to them, and hanging out with like-minded folks.
So when students are in class with peers working on things that cut across these boundaries, they get excited, too. People want to collaborate with each other. This opens up opportunities. All I want to do is create more mechanisms to really get people to collaborate and unlock those synergies.
Why is learning about entrepreneurship important, regardless of whether a student will become an entrepreneur?
We call many students “entreprecurious,” or interested in entrepreneurship even though they haven’t tried it yet. Learning to be entrepreneurial matters in any industry and for any job role. Every industry is being disrupted in some way right now. Take artificial intelligence. Transportation is affected by AI, as are consumer goods, finance and health care. It’s not just affecting the tech industry. There are so many industries that will change; and students, even if they don’t become entrepreneurs, need to learn how to prepare for these changes.
So let’s take every single industry and revolutionize it, make it work in such a way that it’s more cost-effective, more productive, more impactful, and generates greater returns economically and for society.
How will you make sure that the hub draws many kinds of students from different programs?
I like to think about the commonalities rather than the differences across these different communities at Berkeley. We have people in Berkeley’s vast undergrad program, in our MBA program at Haas, PhDs across fields, as well as the faculty in disciplines ranging from English to biology to engineering to business, who have entrepreneurial ideas. There are entrepreneurs who are doing innovative things all over campus. We are looking to draw many categories of stakeholders to the eHub, including alumni who will come to campus to check out everything that’s going on. And I’m hoping we’ll be able to tempt the venture capital community in the South Bay to drive across the bridge because they don’t want to miss out!