Three new Haas School Board members are adding diversity and depth of corporate experience to the group of advisors helping the dean and senior leaders strengthen the brand and reputation of Haas. “I’m proud that our Haas Board has become more representative with the addition of new board members, including those from underrepresented minority groups,” says Dean Ann Harrison. “These voices will help us achieve our audacious vision to forge business leaders who will work to create a more innovative, inclusive, and sustainable world.”
“Equity fluency and leadership excellence go hand in hand. As a board member, I’m thrilled to serve with Dean Ann Harrison and others to help meld and magnify those tenets for Haas and the broader community. We can expand the pie so everyone gets a meaningful and fulfilling slice—there is enough for everyone to enjoy and benefit.”
Monica Stevens, MBA 96 Senior Vice President and Credit and Risk Leader, Wells Fargo Merchant Services
“Excellence requires help. That simple fact has motivated me to provide whatever support and guidance I can give to help students thrive. I saw the potential to contribute to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), promoting activities that expand student capability in sustainability, and continuing to elevate the reputation of Haas.”
Frank Cooper III, BS 86 Senior Managing Director and Global Chief Marketing Officer, BlackRock
“I’m very interested in Haas remaining in the top rank among its peers in all key measures. My hope is also that I will be able to contribute to the ongoing and developing activities regarding DEI. As a Black American, DEI is a topic of particular resonance and interest to me.”
Eric McKissack, BCEMBA 04 Founder and Former CEO, Channing Capital Management LLC; Independent Board Director
Summer 2021|By Laura Counts| ILLUSTRATION: JON KRAUSE
The cost of partisanship among federal workers
A president appoints just 0.23% of the federal workforce. The vast majority of civil servants, then, carry on regardless of their party affiliation. But this inevitable political mismatch takes a toll—a new study has found reduced performance from workers misaligned with the president’s party.
“Some people might think there’s some sort of ‘deep state’ slowing things down,” says Haas Asst. Prof. Guo Xu, who conducted the research along with colleagues from Northwestern University, “but we see the same thing from the Republican side as the Democratic side. Based on our evidence, it looks like misaligned civil servants just become less motivated overall.”
The study spanned four administrations: Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump, and focused on some 7,200 procurement officers, who select and monitor federal contracts for services, construction projects, and more, amounting to over 9% of the federal budget.
Comparing similar contracts, the researchers found an 8% increase in cost overruns among contractors who were registered as Democrats under a Republican president and vice versa—even among officers within the same department in the same year.
“We didn’t see any change in how people were choosing contractors or the types of contracts, so the decline in performance occurred while they were overseeing the contract,” Xu says. “These overruns really do seem to be due to a decline in morale, which we corroborated through data from employee surveys.”
The relative continuity of the U.S. civil service contrasts with countries such as India, where there is far more political churn, which is in many ways a sign of a well-functioning bureaucracy, Xu says. However, he notes, the research underscores the potential costs and significant impact of mission misalignment in any organization.
When you insist you’re not racist, you may unwittingly be sending the opposite message.
That’s the conclusion of a new study by Berkeley Haas researchers who conducted experiments with white participants claiming to hold egalitarian views. After assessing their underlying racial attitudes then asking them to write statements explaining why they weren’t prejudiced against Black people, they found that other white people could nevertheless gauge the writers’ underlying racism.
“Our results suggest that the explicit goal of appearing egalitarian might blind people to the possibility that they could be communicating, and perpetuating, prejudicial attitudes,” says Asst. Prof. Drew Jacoby-Senghor.
What were those linguistic cues? The most powerful indicator, they found, was language that dehumanized or objectified African Americans—for example, “I have a great relationship with the Blacks.”
Co-authored by Derek Brown, PhD 23, and Michael Rosenblum, PhD 20, the research also found that white readers reported greater racism toward Black people after reading statements from self-avowed white egalitarians who scored high on underlying prejudice. In other words, the readers mirrored the attitudes of the writers, even when they reported they were ideologically dissimilar (conservative vs liberal).
Summer 2021|By Michael Blanding| ILLUSTRATION: JAMES YANG
Why brands should care about our imperfect memory
Quick: List your three favorite fast-food restaurants.
If you’re like many people, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and Burger King may come to mind—even if you much prefer In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A.
A new Haas study combining decision-making experiments with brain scans found that when it comes to making choices, we frequently and predictably forget about the things we like best and are instead swayed by what we remember—a finding that explains the importance of brands for consumers and has implications for crafting public policy and managing neurodegenerative diseases.
The findings challenge the fundamental tenets of traditional economic models that assume people make rational decisions from all available options. Because most decisions don’t come with multiple-choice answers, we instead conjure options from our imperfect memories.
“Everyone knows that human memory is limited, but scientists know surprisingly little about how this limit impacts our decisions,” says lead author Zhihao Zhang, a Haas postdoctoral scholar, who conducted the research with Assoc. Prof. Ming Hsu and UCSF neurologist Andrew Kayser.
To measure the influence of memory on decisions, the researchers examined people’s choices for different types of branded and nonbranded consumer goods, such as fast food, fruit, and sneakers. In one open-ended study, 30% of people said McDonald’s was their preferred fast food; yet for those given a list of restaurants, only half that many chose the golden arches, while the other half chose restaurants like In-N-Out or Chick-fil-A.
The researchers also scanned the brains of a group of participants using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging). When people were asked to make open-ended choices, the memory retrieval regions of their brains lit up. That didn’t happen when people chose from a list.
All told, the findings show that our memories limit our choices. “What we observed for McDonald’s is true for every product category we investigated and really speaks to the power of brands,” says Hsu.
When cryptominers come to town, local residents and small businesses pay a price in surging electricity rates.
That’s because “proof-of-work” cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, demand brute computational power to solve the complex math problems required to verify transactions on a blockchain. Cryptomining server farms guzzle electricity by the megawatt.
A new Berkeley Haas working paper—the first to quantify the negative economic impacts of cryptomining on local communities—estimates that the power demands of mining operations in upstate New York push up annual electric bills by about $79 million for individuals and $165 million for small businesses.
“Small businesses operate on very thin margins, so I don’t think they’d be happy to pay for the energy that cryptominers are using,” says Asst. Prof. Matteo Benetton, who co-authored the paper with finance colleagues Assoc. Prof. Adair Morse and Giovanni Compiani, now at Chicago Booth.
Miners choose northern locales to keep servers cool and are lured by abundant, cheap power—sometimes with discounts. While those excess costs are slightly offset by tax revenue of about $40 million, the miners’ massive server farms employ just a handful of people, and profits aren’t local. “The real profits from bitcoin mining can be moved from upstate New York to Italy or Colombia or China in a second,” Benetton says.
Every four years, presidential elections roil the stock market amid uncertainty over who will hold power in Washington.
Yet for investors, the more important election milestone may be the midterms. New research by Berkeley Haas Prof. Emeritus Terry Marsh has documented significantly above-average returns in the six months following midterm elections over the past 145 years.
In fact, since 1872, average annualized equity market returns were over 15.4% in the months following midterms, compared with just under 3% in other months, Marsh and co-author Kam Fong Chan documented. They found the post-midterm months outperformed the post-presidential months in roughly two-thirds of the past 36 election cycles.
Marsh says he was puzzled at first about the significance of the midterms. He and Chan speculated that the cause is a decrease in uncertainty—a theory the researchers were able to back up by analyzing indices that measure economic uncertainty and partisan conflict monthly.
“When you’re dealing with the stock market you’re dealing with expectations,” says Marsh, CEO of risk-management firm Quantal International. “Midterm voters tend to penalize the president’s party to maintain checks and balances. Uncertainty about the political division in Washington—and what that means for economic policy—peaks in the months leading up to the midterm.”
Above: Six-month average returns in U.S. equity prices surrounding November for the different years of the election cycle (data period: 1871–2015).
Above: The researchers plotted returns for a range of portfolios from December to April in midterm years versus other years. They found that riskier investments (portfolios with higher beta, a measure of volatility relative to a benchmark) yield higher returns in midterm years. In other years, risk decreases returns.
Summer 2021|By Laura Counts| ILLUSTRATION: DAN PAGE
The myth of the rational CEO
CEOs are paid big bucks for their ability to make rational, objective decisions that boost company performance. But do they really do better than the average worker?
A new analysis by Berkeley Haas behavioral finance researchers shows convincing evidence that CEOs are just as susceptible to biased decision-making as the rest of us—in some cases, even more so. For example, past research has found CEOs to be substantially more optimistic than both the lay population and CFOs.
“Biases don’t stem from a lack of education, intelligence, or ability—they’re a hard-wired part of human behavior that affect even the most educated and influential decision makers,” says Marius Guenzel, MS 17, PhD 21, who conducted the analysis with Prof. Ulrike Malmendier, the Edward J. and Mollie Arnold Professor of Finance.
Economists have long assumed that powerful market forces ensure that the elite group of people who steer companies through complex decisions are exceptionally rational. Guenzel, now an assistant professor at the Wharton School, and Malmendier argue that 15 years of behavioral finance research (much of it by Malmendier, a leader in the field) has whittled away at those assumptions.
The first assumption in the so-called “rational-manager paradigm” is that smart, highly trained people strive for the top jobs, and the competitive selection process weeds out those with potentially harmful biases. Yet research has shown that overconfident decision-makers—biased by definition—are more likely to be appointed as CEOs. One reason is that boards looking for a candidate with the “best” past performance might select someone who made a risky move that happened to pay off. And biased board members themselves may choose candidates who match their way of thinking.
A second assumption is that CEOs learn from their mistakes and improve their decision-making over time, thus reducing biases. But big decisions, like acquisitions, happen so infrequently that there are limited opportunities to learn. An overconfident leader might plunge the company into a dicey deal. It’s also hard to distinguish between correlation and causation in most decisions, and a person with “self-attribution bias” tends to attribute successes to their own actions and blame failures on others.
Plus, biased CEOs may pad management ranks with like-minded colleagues who reinforce their biases: Malmendier has found that overconfident CEOs are seven times more likely to appoint overconfident CFOs. Malmendier also pioneered a line of research that shows people’s tolerance for financial risk is shaped by their lifetime experiences—another source of bias.
Finally, economists have argued that watchful boards keep bias-driven errors at bay, disciplining or replacing leaders who go astray. Yet there’s little evidence that boards objectively evaluate CEOs for bias, and biases at the top are not necessarily associated with higher rates of dismissal, the researchers conclude.
“Can a board link company performance to a CEO’s decision?” says Guenzel. “It’s hard to determine causality in a way that leads to their firing.”
Charles O’Reilly is worried about the future of workplace culture. As more companies prepare for a post-pandemic world of remote work, he says there’s only so much leaders can do to build cohesion via video calls. “You can create norms for how employees interact over Zoom,” he says, “but their identification with the organization? That goes away.”
O’Reilly has spent the last 45 years helping define and measure workplace culture—for researchers as well as some of the world’s largest companies, among them Intel, General Motors, and Novartis. “Culture isn’t about values,” he tells them. “It’s a pattern of behavior reinforced by people and systems over time.” In other words, forget lofty statements. Focus on the day-to-day.
As a top scholar of organizational behavior more broadly—he’s authored five books and more than 100 journal articles and taught at UCLA, Haas, and Stanford—O’Reilly has also generated insights into corporate diversity, compensation, innovation, and how to develop more effective, strategic, and visionary leaders—a topic that sparked his unexpected career path.
O’Reilly had no intention of becoming an academic when he entered Haas in 1969 after serving five years as an Army captain in the Vietnam War. But an MBA course on organizational behavior with Prof. Emeritus Karlene Roberts hooked him. “Suddenly, I understood why some units I served with were positive and cohesive and others were not and the role that leadership played in that. This notion of culture as social control fascinated me,” he says—a curiosity that continues to impact employees worldwide to this day.
A decade ago, Carlos Orellana and friend Javier Okhuysen took on one of Mexico’s biggest health crises: blindness. Loss of sight—often from cataracts—is the country’s second-leading cause of disability, according to the World Bank Group’s International Finance Corporation. But the public health system has a years-long waitlist for cataract surgeries.
Their company, salauno, provides comprehensive eye care to anyone in Mexico, regardless of income. They modeled it after a nonprofit in India that performs affordable cataract surgeries for low-income patients—a success built around high-volume, high-quality care and efficiencies via technology, a hub-and-spoke patient referral network, and a vertically integrated supply chain. Orellana and Okhuysen saw an opportunity to complement this model with private investment and digital marketing to build a for-profit company.
The pair opened their first clinic in 2011 and had positive cash flow within two months, eventually serving some 250,000 patients annually at 27 clinics located in easily accessible retail locations. By 2020, salauno’s independent-contractor doctors were performing about 800 cataract surgeries a month—four to five times the rate of the average ophthalmologist and at 30–40% below private market rates. Orellana and Okhuysen began eyeing other Latin American markets.
Then the pandemic forced a restructuring that in hindsight, Orellana says, was overdue. They refocused their resources on high-potential services and closed seven under-performing clinics. They also introduced agile sprints to better prioritize and adapt to business shifts. This spring, business rebounded to 108% of pre-COVID, same-clinic volume. “In many ways, we’re stronger today—more focused and more nimble,” says Orellana. Talk about vision.
When Nik Dehejia became the Oakland Zoo’s director of strategic initiatives in 2006, visitors could view a range of exotic creatures that included elephants, tigers, and lions. What a difference 15 years has made.
Dehejia’s efforts have not only helped to more than double the zoo’s footprint—from 45 to 100 acres—but introduced in 2018 its California Trail, a 56-acre expansion of native species that includes grizzly and black bears, California condors, bison, and bald eagles. Also roaming the native plant habitats are mountain lions, gray wolves, and jaguars.
All of the species featured in the new exhibit are rescue animals, many of them nursed back to health after being found injured on roadways or hurt in wildfires. In fact, the zoo’s conservation efforts are saving some species from potential extinction, including certain amphibians and California condors.
“[The California Trail expansion] represents native species in a way that hadn’t ever been done before,” says Dehejia, who in April began duties as the zoo’s CEO. “It allows us to tell the story of California’s natural and human history.”
The expansion was made possible by an 11-year, $72 million capital campaign that concluded in 2018—money Dehejia helped raise. These days, Dehejia is leading the facility back to vibrancy after two pandemic-related shutdowns, hoping to again approach a million annual visitors.
“My focus is on how we continue our mission activities, whether it’s animal care or welfare, our conservation efforts, or our educational programs in the community,” he says.
For Nigerian native Kernie Obimakinde, her career is all about paying it forward.
“My country is blessed with both natural resources and smart people, but many Nigerians are barely surviving,” she says. “I came to Haas to understand the world’s best business practices, to better manage resources and people, and then apply those tools to the gaps I see at home.”
After earning a bachelor’s degree in both electrical and computer engineering, Obimakinde worked for 10 years in Nigeria before entering Haas. After graduation, she became a strategic and privacy program manager for Google, working first in the U.S. then in Zurich to be closer to family in Nigeria.
Recently, Obimakinde was a fellow for the Google.org project, which supports nonprofits and social initiatives with everything from funding to pro bono employee time. Obimakinde spent six months as the lead program manager for Global.health, an open platform that makes epidemiological data freely available so diseases can be tracked in real time. She and her team helped Global.health with a major rebranding effort, which required her to manage people across seven time zones during the pandemic.
Obimakinde sees her career arc as a reflection of not only the networking support she’s received at Haas but also her own ability to translate her enthusiasm into good management.
“My experiences at Google and Global.health have been amazing,” she says. “I’m thankful for the opportunity to develop my program management skills so that when I go back to Nigeria, I can work with like-minded people in shaping a better nation.”
While many businesses struggled in 2020, Christine Tao’s virtual coaching startup Sounding Board began thriving, raising $13.1 million in funding.
Sounding Board offers remote professional coaching to company leaders ranging from high-level executives to first-time managers. “Our mission is to help create the world’s most impactful leaders,” says Tao.
Though investors were initially skeptical when Tao pitched the idea in 2016, the necessity for coaching became apparent when the pandemic shifted workers online.
“Managers were having to figure out: ‘How do I lead a team if I’m remote? How do I help employees prioritize their tasks?’” Tao says. “Those kinds of remote management and leadership skills are very much in demand.”
Tao herself realized the benefits of coaching while serving in her first executive leadership position. Her employer provided her a coach—future Sounding Board co-founder Lori Mazan.
Mazan’s influence included helping Tao to always exude confidence when speaking. “Leadership is often about other people’s perception of your actions,” Tao says. “Lori helped me understand behaviors I was doing that weren’t serving me.”
The woman-led Sounding Board also has an all-female board and a global network of hundreds of coaches. Its client list includes Bloomberg, Conagra, Dropbox, and Chime.
Tao, who still uses a coach to further her leadership growth, says it’s the kind of learning that offers a win-win for companies and employees. “If you invest in your people early, not only will it benefit them,” she says, “it benefits the company because you can better lead your teams.”
How one Haas alum is making the fashion industry more sustainable
Clothing is a fundamental need, right up there with food and shelter. But for many, it’s more: self-expression of the highest order. But there’s a price to looking good. According to a 2019 United Nations report, fashion is the second most-polluting industry globally. The culprit? Fast fashion, the dominant business model of mass-producing catwalk trends cheaply, encouraging customers to buy and discard clothes regularly. Since 2011, Manish Chandra, MBA 95, the founder and CEO of Poshmark, has been working to upend that model and promote sustainable consumption.
Poshmark is a leading social marketplace for new and secondhand styles for men, women, kids, pets, home, and more. Sellers use photos and videos to create listings for their merchandise—think Instagram meets eBay—bringing human connection to ecommerce. Poshmark holds no inventory and takes a 20% cut on sales of $15 or more. With over 4.5 million active sellers and over 80 million total users across the U.S., Canada, and Australia, Poshmark has not only recycled clothing worldwide, it’s also created cash flow for families and small businesses.
Milestones from 10 years of Poshmark
2011
Poshmark launches for iPhone only, complete with style-focused Posh Parties, virtual events for sellers to showcase their merchandise. About 100 loyal users spend ~20 minutes daily selling (and buying) clothes.
2012
Poshmark launches Showrooms, collections of curated items from the entire community. Poshmark grows (largely via referrals) to ~1,000 highly active users.
2013
To drive revenue, Poshmark focuses on monetization. Users increase tenfold, but technical infrastructure issues almost topple the company. In response, Chandra slashes his marketing budget by 80% and returns to growing via community.
2014
To simplify shipping, Chandra buys thousands of prepaid labels from the USPS for sellers, figuring differences in package weights would even out. The USPS demands millions in shipping costs—and threatens to arrest Chandra. Instead, he negotiates a discounted shipping label.
2015
Wholesale launches. The most active sellers can now acquire retail merchandise directly from Poshmark boutiques and grow their own businesses.
2016
Poshmark expands into two new categories: kids and men’s.
2017
The company raises another $87.5 million, bringing total funding to $160 million. It focuses on expanding into new categories and building immersive, data-driven shopping experiences.
2018
A valuation of $625 million and Poshmark’s anticipated 70% revenue growth earn it a spot on Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups list. Its community of sellers earn more than $1 billion for the first time, including the first seller to earn $1 million.
2019
Poshmark launches in Canada, growing to over 2.5 million Canadians to date. It also expands to include home decor.
2020
Poshmark introduces Posh Stories, which allow users to share short, shoppable videos and photos to bring their listings to life.
2021
Now with ~500 employees, Poshmark goes public in January valued at over $3 billion. Sellers have generated over $4 billion in sales; one sale is made every second in the U.S. The company expands into Australia and offers a pets category.
Summer 2021|By Dana R. Carney, Assoc. Prof.| ILLUSTRATIONS BY Brown Bird Design
Ten things every manager should know about nonverbal behavior
Managers influence the people they work with every day—not only through their words and decisions but also through their nonverbal behaviors. Whether they’re aware of it or not, their posture, facial expressions, and reactions can all serve to build trust and enhance working relationships when handled well. But the same nonverbal cues can also undermine trust and cause problems in the long run when handled poorly. Here are ten things to keep in mind when interacting with direct reports.
BACKGROUND:
In 1960, psychologist Robert Rosenthal conducted a landmark research study on the role of expectations on performance. He discovered that when rats in a maze were treated more kindly and encouragingly by examiners, they were able to find solutions more quickly and remember them longer.
Rosenthal was then curious to see whether an examiner’s biases could influence the performance of a group of rats at the same skill level. When examiners were told beforehand that an assigned rat was particularly bright and could solve mazes quickly, they were more inclined to treat the rat encouragingly. When examiners were told that a rat was dull and had little ability, they held low expectations and treated the rat worse. Despite there being no difference between the rats at first, the “maze bright” and “maze dull” rats soon began to diverge significantly in their performance. The examiners’ expectations had a direct influence on performance.
This finding was tested again on schoolchildren. It was found that “bright” students were treated differently by their teachers, performed better in school, raised their hands more often, and demonstrated an increase in IQ of 27 points after a year of study when compared to their peers. Rosenthal’s research had a profound effect on the study of psychology, popularizing the idea of the “self-fulfilling prophesy.”
As Rosenthal demonstrated, unconscious behaviors can have a significant effect on others—how they feel about themselves, how they perform, and whether they feel validated and included.
1—Listening
Many people struggle with feeling unheard at work. It’s important for managers to truly focus on others while they are speaking: Make eye contact and be sure not to look at a computer or phone screen.
2—Liking and valuing others
It’s important for managers to engage with others in a way that is relatable and collaborative. One way is through synchrony—simultaneous action of two or more people at once. This could be as simple as eating lunch at the same time. Mimicry is similar. People who are close have a natural tendency to mimic: If someone moves closer to the table, another will follow suit shortly after. Finally, managers should prioritize their listening and conversational turn-taking skills.
3—Intelligence
As a manager you want to be able to detect intelligence in others in addition to conveying intelligence, which will increase others’ perception of how capable you are. Behaviors that convey intelligence involve engagement. When we appear engaged by what others are doing or saying, it tends to reflect our intelligence and people’s perception of our competence. Affirmative paralinguistic utterances (such as “mm-hm” and “yes”) can accordingly signal intelligence.
4—Power
Conveying power through nonverbal behavior is simple. The real question is whether it is appropriate to express power in a given situation. Managers should assess whether the time is right to demonstrate a more authoritative tone and then seek to use an upright, expansive posture and speak for longer. Be careful, though: long speaking time can also be associated with those who struggle with self-regulation. Have something substantive to say.
5—Building trust & consensus
Signaling that you trust and can be trusted by others is easy. Managers should express an open body posture and look at people while they’re speaking. To make sure everyone feels included, make eye contact with those who have not spoken yet and give them a chance to contribute.
6—Using the wisdom of the crowd
Making sense of others’ thoughts, feelings, and intentions can take up quite a bit of mental bandwidth. But as you practice, your judgments will improve. Additionally, it can help to distribute the burden of judgment to a small group. Asking trusted advisors and averaging their impressions of a situation or another person can help you tap the wisdom of the crowd to achieve a more accurate overall assessment.
7—Detecting deception in strategic and ordinary operations
Detecting deception is difficult. On average, managers are only slightly better than chance unless they have had specific training. Open and honest communication is important, so lies—even minor ones—can damage culture and productivity. When a person lies about something inconsequential, they experience little to no fear of consequence, inner conflict, or guilt. As such, the lie is not revealed through body language. However, most of the time people feel at least a little inner conflict when they say something that isn’t true. Look out for changes in baseline behavior (like shifting uncomfortably) or seemingly fake facial expressions (like fake smiles) that don’t seem to correspond to the context.
8—Status (Respect And Admiration Of Others)
Like power, conveying status through nonverbal behavior is easy to do—but it’s important to note the difference between power and status. Power is defined as access to and control over people and resources. Status is the respect and admiration of others. The same nonverbal cues that can indicate power should be used in accordance with an individual’s management style—pick those that work best for you. There are also two specific behaviors that convey status. First, the use of deliberate, clear gestures while speaking. And second, the ability to laugh and make others laugh.
9—Avoiding resting “cranky” face
Has anyone ever seemed nervous around you? Do people think you disapprove of them even when you don’t? Many of us can look judgmental or upset as we listen to others. Pay attention to your eyes: Make sure you aren’t unconsciously squinting or glaring. By placing your thumb and forefinger on your chin, others’ perceptions of your furrowed brow can be converted from a face of judgment to a face of engagement.
10—Avoiding microaggressions
Scowls and eye rolls are obvious negative behaviors. But the absence of positive behavior is also a microaggression. Smiling, looking at, and speaking with
others all equally signal “I like working with you.” Avoiding positive cues can send a negative message.
No sporting event captivates the world quite like the Olympics.
The games celebrate athletic prowess and sheer excellence—and, with the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Games until this summer—patience. But they also honor dedication, resilience, and grit, qualities that resonate more deeply in the wake of the global pandemic. The Berkeley Haas community includes numerous Olympians, both current and former, who all made it to the pinnacle of the athletic world, showing they know how to succeed. But they also know about striving, handling disappointment, and moving on—lessons anyone can learn from. Here, a look at how being an Olympian has informed the lives of alumni and a current student.
World Records 100-meter backstroke, 4×100-meter medley relay
On his first trip to the Olympics, in 2016, Ryan Murphy defied his own expectations, taking home three gold medals and setting a world record for the backstroke.
“I expected to do well at the Olympics, but it was still a surprise to win,” he says. “There’s so much focus on trying to make sure things don’t go wrong, that when things go right, you go, ‘Holy cow! That’s awesome!’”
Unlike the Games in Rio, however, Murphy’s family wasn’t in the stands due to COVID-19 restrictions.
“It’s a bummer,” he says, “but we knew these games were going to look a little different and that sacrifices would have to be made.”
“There’s so much focus on trying to make sure things don’t go wrong, that when things go right, you go, ‘Holy cow! That’s awesome!”
In his second Olympics, Murphy again won three medals: a gold, a silver, and a bronze and added another world record to his list of accomplishments as part of the 4×100-meter medley relay team.
Rowing // U.S.A. Partner, DBO Partners, San Francisco
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Los Angeles, 1984
Additional honors
Gold Medal 1983 Pan American Games, Men’s Eights
1st Place 1981 Henley Royal Regatta, Thames Cup
David DeRuff already had a job lined up when he graduated from Haas in 1983. But that summer he rowed in the Pan American Games, and his eight-man boat won the gold medal. DeRuff decided to put the job on hold so he could train for the 1984 Olympics.
What followed was a year of all-out effort—though, of course, there was no guarantee of success. “In most situations in life, you don’t know if you’re going to get there,” DeRuff says. “But your only chance of getting there is to go for it.”
In the end he didn’t get a spot in the eight- or the four-man boat, but the coach recommended he train for the “coxless pair”—a technically challenging race in a two-man boat. After training only five weeks together, he and his partner beat out all the other pairs and won the Olympic trials (shown above). They were headed to Los Angeles.
David DeRuff, BS 83, and his teammate, John Strotbeck, moments after winning the Olympic trials. Photo: Courtesy David DeRuff
DeRuff grew up in Newport Beach, so the L.A. games were essentially in his backyard. “Both of my grandmas were there, my parents, friends, and coaches. It was wonderful.”
Johnny Hooper, BS 19
Water Polo // U.S.A. Member, Men’s Senior National Team, USA Water Polo// Pro Water Polo Player, A1 Ethniki League, Greece
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Tokyo, 2021
Additional Honors
Cal’s #2 all-time leading scorer with 245 goals; helped the squad win
the 2016 NCAA Championship
Finalist, Cutino Award (for top player in the NCAA), 2018
1st place and tournament’s highest goal scorer,
2019 Pan American Games
At 6 feet, 2 inches tall, Johnny Hooper is one of the shorter members of the U.S. men’s water polo team. Most of his teammates are three or more inches taller. But Hooper says his size has pushed him to excel. “I’d like to think I play the game pretty unconventionally. As a relatively small player, I’ve found creative ways to be better than larger or taller competitors.”
“I’d like to think I play the game pretty unconventionally. As a relatively small player, I’ve found creative ways to be better than larger or taller competitors.”
Hooper had long had his eye on the 2020 Olympics, so naturally their postponement last year was a letdown. “The day we found out was a little tough,” he says. “But then you pick yourself up and figure out the best way to keep going.” The team trained remotely, and Hooper, along with many of his teammates, spent part of the last year playing professionally in Europe. At the Olympics, they made it to the quarterfinals.
Hooper is half-Japanese, so attending the games in Tokyo had special meaning for him. His grandmother still lives there, and although a last-minute ruling barred spectators, Hooper knew she was nearby, proudly cheering him on.
Johnny Hooper, BS 19, shooting a ball during a water polo match in the Tokyo Olympics. Photo: Patrick Smith/Getty Images
Record Holder U.S. Junior and Collegiate Triple Jump
As a public speaker, Erica McLain used to talk about the qualities it takes to reach the Olympics. But while her audiences were undoubtedly impressed by her achievements, she sensed that some found her accomplishments hard to relate to.
“Any grand goal can seem totally out of reach,” says McLain. So she revised her narrative, shifting her brand as an Olympian. Now she focuses less on reaching big, impressive goals and more on the resilience it takes to overcome adversity, no matter what the goal is.
That’s something McLain knows a lot about. She was just 22 when she competed in the triple jump at the 2008 Olympics, and she thought she had two or three more games ahead of her. “Jumpers tend to peak somewhere between 29 and 33,” McLain says. But in 2012, a serious ankle injury and a subsequent treatment gone awry forced her immediate retirement.
McLain’s resilience kicked in, and she wasted no time moving on to her second act. She was still recovering from surgery when she began working on her application for Haas’s MBA program.
Silver Medal 2006 European Junior Championships,
50-meter backstroke
National runner-up 2010 NCAA Championships, 100-yard butterfly
From an early age, Mathias Gydesen loved competing. “When you’re standing in front of a few thousand people, or even just racing at practice,” he says, “there’s an intensity I haven’t experienced in many other places in my life. You’re very, very present.”
Gydesen says that one of the lasting benefits of going to the Olympics in 2012 is that it gave him the license to aim high. “You’ve proven to yourself that the dream you had when you were 10—you actually achieved it,” he says. “It’s a kind of confirmation that you really can do it.”
“You’ve proven to yourself that the dream you had when you were 10—you actually achieved it.”
Although swimming in the Olympics was the culmination of a dream, Gydesen wasn’t happy with his performance, and shortly after the games, he retired from competing. Yet he took something important away from that disappointment: The wisdom that whatever you do in life, it really is the journey and notthe destination.
Water Polo // Serbia Head of Digital Products, Nelt Grupa, Belgrade, Serbia
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics London, 2012
Bronze Medal
Additional Honors
Gold Medal European Championships, 2012
Gold Medal FINA World League, 2013
In Aleksa Šaponjić’s home country of Serbia, water polo is a big deal, ranking in popularity with soccer and basketball. Šaponjić started playing professionally when he was 16, but he also stayed in school, which made him a rarity among his teammates. Most other players dropped academics in favor of their sport. And in fact, in his senior year of high school, Šaponjić’s coach suspended him from the team for two months because he’d decided to prioritize his education.
“I think having an option B in life is very important.”
Nevertheless, while a freshman at Haas, Šaponjić was selected to go to the London Olympics with his nation’s team, and he took home a bronze medal. Even though he’d already played at a very high level, he says going to the Olympics was a dream come true.
But he always had his eye on his post-athletic career. “I think having an option B in life is very important,” Šaponjić says. After graduation he took a job at McKinsey and then went to work at the company his father co-founded more than 25 years ago, Nelt Grupa, which handles distribution and logistics for major brands such as Procter & Gamble in 11 countries.
Aleksa Šaponjić, BS 15 Photo: Michael J. Burns
Bengt Baron, BS 85, MBA 88
Swimming // Sweden Board of Directors Chair, Thule Group, Stockholm
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Los Angeles, 1984
Moscow, 1980
Bronze Medal // L.A. 4×100-meter freestyle relay
Gold Medal // Moscow 100-meter backstroke
Over three decades, Bengt Baron has held leadership positions at some of the world’s top consumer brands: Coca-Cola, Kodak, Absolut Vodka. Most recently, Baron was the CEO of Cloetta, a Swedish confectionary company, before stepping down in 2015. He currently chairs the Thule Group’s Board of Directors.
But before scaling the heights of the business world, Baron competed in two Olympics for Sweden, winning a gold medal at the 1980 games when he was still in high school. Four years later, his relay team took home the bronze.
Baron says his early experience with swimming gave him a toolbox that he’s used throughout his life. “Being crazy enough to embark on that [Olympic] journey, you practice a number of skills that you’ll have for whatever you decide to do,” he says. One such skill is the ability to learn from setbacks. “You did something that didn’t yield expected results, so now you need to do something slightly different. That’s how you learn and improve.”
Swimming // Israel Co-Founder and CEO, Weekends At, Tel Aviv, Israel // Commentator, Tokyo Games
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Beijing, 2008
Additional Honors
Silver medal 2012 European Short Course Swimming Championships, 50-meter backstroke
Bronze medal 2012 European Aquatics Championships, 50-meter backstroke
Israeli National Record 2015 European Short Course Swimming Championships, 100-meter butterfly
Growing up in a small town in Israel, Guy Barnea heard that in the U.S., swimmers were treated like kings. As he would later find out when he earned a scholarship to swim at Cal, that wasn’t so far from reality.
Competing in the 100-meter backstroke at the Beijing Olympics, says Barnea, was a peak experience, but there were others, too, including winning the NCAA championships in 2011, the first time Cal had done so in 30 years.
“Disappointments hurt, but I found a way to use that burn to push to be better or stronger or smarter.”
Like any athlete, Barnea’s had his share of disappointments. He missed qualifying for the 2012 and 2016 Olympics by a few hundredths of a second. “Disappointments hurt,” he says. “But I found a way to use that burn to push to be better or stronger or smarter.”
Barnea retired from swimming in 2018 and started a line of men’s swimwear called Weekends At with designs that easily transition from the beach to city streets. Initially sold online only, Weekends At has opened pop-up shops in Tel Aviv and started selling with two U.S. retailers. They also launched an official Back to the Future edition in collaboration with Universal Studios and Amblin Entertainment.
Guy Barnea, BS 12 Photo: Richard Heathcote/Getty images
Lauren Boyle, BS 11
Swimming // New Zealand Senior Associate, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Auckland, New Zealand
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Rio de Janeiro, 2016
London, 2012
Beijing, 2008
Additional Honors
Gold Medal, Silver Medal (x2), Bronze Medal (x4)
2012–2015 FINA World Championships, 400-, 800-, and 1,500-meter freestyle
Appointed to the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to swimming, 2020
When Lauren Boyle was eight, she watched fellow New Zealander Danyon Loader swim to gold at the Atlanta Summer Olympics. Seeing him on the world stage sparked a dream of her own. She wanted to go to the Olympics too. And so she did—as a three-time Olympian; her best finish was fourth in the 800-meter freestyle at the 2012 London Games.
Boyle peaked as a swimmer later than most and says she relied heavily on what she learned from her time at Cal with coach Teri McKeever. “I learned a different way of thinking about swimming techniques,” Boyle says. “There were subtle differences in McKeever’s approach that I embraced and built on in my professional career.”
Injury forced Boyle to retire from swimming in 2017, and following that she started in banking at Commonwealth Bank of Australia’s Institutional Banking and Markets team, in Auckland.
“A key part of being an elite athlete is managing stakeholder relationships,” she says, “and I’ve found crossover in my team’s role managing the bank’s relationships with clients.”
Lauren Boyle, BS 11 Photo: Reuters/Stefan Wermuth
Collin Morikawa, BS 19
Golf // U.S.A. Pro Golfer
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Tokyo, 2021
Additional Honors
Winner
2020 PGA Championship
Winner
2021 Open Championship (British Open)
While golf is essentially a solo sport, Collin Morikawa realized early on that it takes others to succeed. “I’m the one hitting the shots, but I have so many people helping me,” he says. “I have my agents, my caddies, it’s a whole team reaching for the same goal.” He’s close to his goal of being best in the world—he’s #3 as of this writing—and now has the Olympics (where he barely missed a bronze) to add to his list of accomplishments.
Morikawa took his team mentality to the Tokyo Games. “I’m playing for Team USA even though it still is an individual medal race,” Morikawa told the Fore Play podcast. “You want to add another gold medal to the tally at the end of the Olympics.”
Admittedly, with four major championships each year (of which he’s won two), the Olympics aren’t as prestigious for golfers, but for Morikawa it’s thrilling. “It gives me chills thinking about it,” he says. “I’m…an Olympian for life.”
Collin Morikawa, BS 19 Photo: Reuters/Lee Smith
Ryan Patterson, BS 16
Gymnastics // South Africa Senior Director, IEQ Capital, San Francisco Bay Area
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Rio de Janeiro, 2016
Additional Honors
All-American Vault, 2015
Competitor
World Artistic Gymnastics Championships, 2014 & 2015
Competitor Summer Youth Olympics, 2010
Ryan Patterson left South Africa at the age of four but not before attending his first gymnastic class. Yet it wasn’t until middle school that his passion for the sport really took hold. A coach raised the idea of going to the Olympics, suggesting that Patterson consider competing for his home country.
“I’ve learned more from being a gymnast than anything else in my life.”
It took some time to forge a bond with the South African team, but he ultimately did, and in 2016, Patterson went to the Olympic games in Rio, the first male gymnast to represent South Africa in more than 50 years.
After that highlight, Patterson decided to retire from the sport. But his gymnastics career is still a big part of him. “My time as a gymnast was 20 years of teamwork, of forming relationships, perfecting routines, attention to detail, and managing time. I’ve learned more from being a gymnast than anything else in my life.”
Ryan Patterson, BS 16 Photo: Matthew Stockman/ Getty Images
Alicia Wilson, BS 22
Swimming // Great Britain Berkeley Haas Student
Bragging Rights
Summer Olympics Tokyo, 2021
Additional Honors
Gold medal 2019 World University Games, 200-meter individual medley (IM)
Individual conference champ
2021 Pac-12 Women’s Swimming Championships, 200-yard IM
When Alicia Wilson joined the Cal swim team, she wasn’t thinking about the Olympics. In fact, she places herself near the bottom of the team. But a breakout freshman year followed by an even better sophomore year changed her mind. “The Olympics have always been a dream of mine but never a goal,” she says. “And then the momentum kept going and I thought, ‘Wow, I could do this.’”
She attributes her success to Coach Teri McKeever, who encourages unconventional training, like gymnastics or dance. The result for Wilson was a lifetime best in the 200-meter individual medley (equal parts butterfly, backstroke, breaststroke, and freestyle) in her Olympic trials and making the finals at the Olympics.
The trick to such a challenging race, Wilson says, is staying focused on herself. “You’re going to have one stroke that you don’t favor,” she says. “There will be a length where I’ll be behind or ahead. In the end, it’s who touches the wall first.”
Alicia Wilson, BS 22, competing in the Tokyo Olympics. Photo: Maddie Meyer/Getty Images
Spring 2021|By Laura Counts| ILLUSTRATION: BRIAN STAUFFER
Just how accurate are election polls?
Public confidence in election polls plummeted after Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton in 2016 despite trailing her in the polls. Even so, horse race-style coverage of the latest polls continues to dominate election news cycles.
A recent Berkeley Haas study suggests that election poll accuracy hasn’t actually declined. Rather, it was never as accurate as pollsters claimed.
Most election polls report a 95% confidence interval. Yet an analysis of polls from 11 election cycles dating back to 2008 found that the outcome lands within the poll’s result just 60% of the time. And that’s for polls just one week before an election—accuracy drops even more further out.
A 95% confidence interval means that if the same sampling procedure were followed 100 times, 95 of those samples would reflect the true voter population. These statistical “sampling errors,” however, do not include errors and unknowns, such as surveying the wrong set of people.
“There are many reasons why an actual outcome and poll could differ, and the way pollsters compute confidence intervals doesn’t take those issues into account,” says Prof. Don Moore, who conducted the analysis with Aditya Kotak, BA 20 (computer science and statistics).
“Perhaps the way we interpret polls as a whole needs to be adjusted to account for this uncertainty,” Kotak says.
MARGINS OF ERROR In order to be 95% accurate, pollsters need to greatly increase the margins of error they report.
ACCURACY OF POLLS Most polls ask, “If the election were held today,…” yet accuracy declines the further from an election the poll was conducted.
Spring 2021|By Nancy Davis Kho| Illustration by Derek Brahney
Thomas Phinney, MBA 03, uncovers forgeries and solves modern-day crimes
Thomas Phinney was working as the product manager in Adobe Systems’ fonts group when his team received a request from an attorney about a suspected will forgery. The lawyer wondered whether the fonts in which the disputed document was typed might provide a clue. “I was the only one in the group to say, ‘Hey, that sounds cool!’” says Phinney.
Using a digital microscope and counting individual pixels, Phinney noticed speckles of stray ink around each letter and “wicking,” or bleeding, of ink along the paper fibers. He deduced that the document had been printed on an early inkjet printer at 300 dots per inch (dpi). “There was one small problem,” says Phinney. “That type of printer didn’t exist in 1983,” the year the document was purportedly written. The Case of the Wicked Will, as Phinney calls it—he affectionately names all of his investigations—was cracked.
An image from the disputed will in Phinney’s first case, Exhibit A shows “wicking” (bleeding) of ink along paper fibers, as well as bigger streaking from the printing process, both visible at top of the “o.” Also visible is a stairstep pattern on the inside of the “o,” an effect of the 300 dots-per-inch resolution of the inkjet printer. By contrast, Exhibit B shows offset lithography, like book printing.
Phinney’s fascination with all things fonts and typography have led him to become the world’s foremost forensic font expert, capable of dating and identifying fonts and the technology used to print them. He’s been an expert witness for numerous court cases and evaluated questioned documents for the U.S. Treasury, The Washington Post, the BBC, the PBS television show History Detectives, and more. He also consults for the likes of Microsoft and Google. Whether uncovering forgeries, verifying font sizes against mandated legal requirements, or a host of related typography conundrums, Font Detective Phinney relishes his work at the intersection of art, commerce, history, and technology.
Why typography matters
For a field with roots in Gutenberg’s printing press, fonts remain at the bleeding edge of our digital world. Digital typography underpins virtually every page with which we interact online. And yet, Phinney often finds himself defending why it all matters. Branding, for one thing, he says. “The selection of typefaces and the arrangement of them can be as important as the use of color, images, or abstract graphics in creating a brand,” Phinney wrote in Communication Arts magazine.
Psychological research has also shown that even subtle differences in typography, such as using small caps and old-style figures, can affect a reader’s mood (as indicated by use of the corrugator muscle in the forehead to frown) as well as one’s performance on creative cognitive tasks after reading.
Type design, a craft that blends art and science, is like fashion or furniture, says Phinney, himself a type designer. “While true innovation is rare, people consistently come up with variations on existing themes or combine existing elements in new ways.”
He points to the ScienceGothic.com site, which displays an open-source, dynamic typeface he’s been working on with funding from Google. Users can quickly change the weight, width, contrast, and slant of the font to achieve different-looking results, all while still staying within the Science Gothic family—something that would require 200+ fonts to achieve using traditional methods. “It’s proof that there’s still so much new you can do with fonts,” says Phinney.
Turning up the ‘intellectual simmer’
Phinney earned undergraduate degrees in psychology and political science at the University of Alberta in Canada, where he grew up, then a master’s in graphic arts publishing with a specialization in design and typography at the Rochester Institute of Technology. He then began an 11-year career with Adobe Systems in Silicon Valley.
It was during his Adobe stint that he decided to pursue his Berkeley MBA via the evening and weekend program. Phinney was attracted to the school’s reputation and quality. “The level of intellectual simmer at Haas was really lovely,” he says. “People’s brains were always working to come up with new ideas and to challenge each other, and I liked being in an academic environment operating on that level.”
Earning an MBA might not have been the most obvious career path, Phinney says, but he used his Haas training to move up the product management chain at Adobe and later at font management software company Extensis in Portland, Oregon, where he currently lives. In 2014, Phinney joined FontLab, a creator of apps for type design and font creation, as VP, later becoming CEO.
While crediting a Haas course in negotiation as being particularly helpful in progressing through the management ranks, it was a class in managing technology-related businesses taught by Professor Emeritus Hal Varian that Phinney recalls as a game changer for his career.
The selection of typefaces and the arrangement of them can be as important as the use of color, images, or abstract graphics in creating a brand.
“That one class gave me fundamental tools and new ways of thinking about interconnected ideas that all played into my day job, like substitutability of goods and zero marginal cost for digital goods—including fonts,” says Phinney. “They’re essentially a weird form of mass-produced software.”
Driving demand for detective work
But even as his day jobs kept him busy, Phinney continued getting called to the work that had long fascinated him: unlocking the mysteries held by fonts and typography. Throughout his corporate work years, “Cases just kept popping up,” he says, with word of mouth driving font forensic questions to his personal inbox.
One such case involved a rabbi who had faked his credentials to land a job. A family in his congregation turned to Phinney to validate details of the man’s graduation certificate, or smichah. The rabbi had taken steps to make it harder to detect, degrading the quality of the document by providing only a faxed copy, not the original. But the deception couldn’t elude the font detective. “The document was dated 1968, but the font in which his name was printed didn’t exist until 1992,” Phinney says. And so ended The Case of the Reprehensible Rabbi.
By 2018, Phinney decided to make his side gig official. “I was having so much fun with this work,” he says. “I also realized that it wasn’t a trivial amount of money I could earn through these cases, especially if I took the time to publicize it in a formal way.” Just two years after hanging out his virtual shingle as The Font Detective, Phinney earns as much as half his revenue from font forensics; the remainder comes from designing fonts for clients like Google.
As a type designer, Phinney has created numerous typefaces, including commissions for open-source typefaces from Google, private designs, and a handful that have seen commercial use in supplements to the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. Shown here are those that are publicly available.
The bad, the inadvertent, and the illegibly small
Phinney says that most forensic cases fall into one of two categories. The “nefarious” cases are those like the man who sought to prevent his wife from getting her fair share of assets in their divorce by forging debt documents, to bamboozle her into accepting a lower valuation of their communal property. Unfortunately for the soon-to-be ex-husband in Phinney’s Case of the Dastardly Divorce, those faked documents were not only printed on a 600 dpi printer that didn’t exist at the time they were dated but were created in a font that wouldn’t have been available either. “That case was slam-dunk easy,” says Phinney.
The other type of case Phinney commonly handles involves determining if documents meet typographical legal requirements, like whether what Phinney terms “the stupidly tiny” 5-point typography on Justin Timberlake’s CD liner notes were sufficient to stand as public notification of others’ copyrights on the album. (Phinney suggested not. The case was settled out of court.)
Even for organizations trying to be good font citizens, it can be challenging. “I feel for corporations, because legal typography requirements can differ in every state,” Phinney says. California, for instance, requires information on prescription labels to be printed in at least a 12-point font, while that may not be the case in other jurisdictions. In New York, legal requirements for both font point size and height work a bit differently than those of any other state. “Which is just another reason a lawyer might need to consult an expert,” notes Phinney.
The perfect case
Phinney’s dream case is “one that has major implications of some sort and exposes malfeasance that affects a lot of people.” He had a close brush back in 2004, when he was asked by journalists to examine memos related to President George W. Bush’s service in the Texas Air National Guard that seemed to prove that Bush had disobeyed orders and received outside help in cleaning up his military record. “Based on my research I could not support a conclusion that they were authentic—quite the contrary,” says Phinney, speaking of the high-profile case that ended with a public repudiation of the journalists who ran with the story without authenticating the forged documents first. So the hunt for the perfect case continues.
Reflecting on his career, Phinney has a message for anyone thinking of making a mid-career switch to a vocation that has been tugging at them.
“I could have been embarrassed or ashamed to switch paths out of my corporate management career to something that, on the surface, wouldn’t draw so broadly on my MBA training,” he says. “But I’m really glad I didn’t let those feelings deter me from doing what I wanted to do. Because I’m still making money but having way more fun!”
Spring 2021|By Krysten Crawford| Photos by Christina Gandolfo
Haas alumni accelerate healthcare’s future
For 200 years, the stethoscope has been the workhorse of physical exams. But a stethoscope is only as good as the human ear listening to it. How could it be adapted for the digital age? wondered Jason Bellet, BS 14, and two Berkeley friends: Connor Landgraf, BS 13, MEng 14 (bioengineering), and Tyler Crouch, BS 14 (mechanical engineering).
In 2013, the trio co-founded Eko Devices and, with support from Berkeley’s SkyDeck Accelerator Program, developed a $349 stethoscope that can amplify heart and lung sounds 40 times better than its analog cousin. Connected software generates sound waveforms and electrocardiograms that allow some 80,000 clinicians to “see what they hear” and share recordings as needed. Last fall, the Oakland-based company, with 115 employees, closed on $65 million in Series C funding and partnered with AstraZeneca to develop new screening tools.
“Heart disease is the No. 1 killer worldwide, and there are millions of people with undiagnosed cardiac problems that can now be detected with greater accuracy in 45 seconds during a routine checkup,” says Bellet (shown right). Early last year, the FDA cleared Eko’s algorithm for detecting heart murmurs and atrial fibrillation; a separate algorithm received an FDA emergency use authorization to help clinicians detect a weak heart pump in COVID-19 patients, an especially high-risk group.
Today, Eko is more than a device maker. It’s a software and data-science company aiming to develop artificial intelligence-powered screening tools that can detect a range of health conditions in 60 seconds during a routine checkup, says Bellet. His team is also building a virtual primary care platform.
Haas community healthcare innovations like Eko are booming. From startups to Fortune 500 companies, venture capital firms to nonprofits, alumni are leading monumental shifts in healthcare—often backed by huge sums of money. Some entrepreneurs, like Bellet, are focused on improving preventative care and disease diagnosis or helping to develop new drugs and treatments. Others are working to streamline features of healthcare that often hinder innovation: payment models, organizational structures, and regulations. In interviews, Haas alumni reveal a shared mission: to make medical care—a $3.8 trillion business in the U.S. in 2019, according to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services—more affordable, accessible, and scalable.
Using ‘real-world’ data
In Ohio’s Montgomery County, death rates from opioid overdoses have been among the nation’s highest and are surging anew amid the pandemic. It’s also the test site for an ambitious effort by Alphabet-owned Verily Life Sciences to reinvent addiction treatment and recovery. Called OneFifteen—named for the country’s average daily opioid death rate of 115 people in 2017—it features state-of-the-art medical and residential facilities on a 4.5-acre campus in Dayton.
Rebecca Messing Haigler, MBA-MPH 09
Treating substance abuse, with its sky-high relapse rates, is difficult for many reasons, says Rebecca Messing Haigler, MBA/MPH 09, Verily’s health economics lead and recently announced chief development officer of portfolio company Onduo. Doctors lack high-quality information about how different patients respond to various treatments, and little or no coordination exists among clinicians, communities, and families. Payment models are also broken, she says. Patients don’t receive the comprehensive care they need in part because insurers typically pay for services up front—not based on outcomes.
OneFifteen’s model, which Messing Haigler helped design, relies on a comprehensive care continuum powered by a technology infrastructure that enables better data collection throughout the treatment and recovery process, from data sources including state and county programs, mobile apps, family surveys, employer updates, and the criminal justice system, among others.
“When patients fall off the radar, we can find out what happened from families or the community or if they showed up for work from employers,” says Messing Haigler. This could lead to improvements in treatment and at a faster rate.
Messing Haigler is describing a relatively new phenomenon in healthcare known as “real-world” data. The term essentially refers to the multitude of health-related information generated outside of a doctor’s office. Think voluntary user health surveys, fitness trackers—even insurance claims. Verily’s mission is to combine this data (with member consent and rigorous privacy policies) with machine learning to better prevent, detect, and manage diseases. For Messing Haigler, it also means developing new economic models, including payment structures based on successful patient outcomes.
When patients fall off the radar, we can find out what happened from families or the community or if they showed up for work from employers.
Real-world data is a byproduct of the booming digital health market. Seed fund Rock Health estimates that venture capitalists poured a record $14 billion last year into U.S. digital health companies, a 72% jump from the previous peak in 2018. McKinsey & Company valued the global digital health market at $350 billion in 2019—before the pandemic.
Terrell Baptiste, MBA 20 (shown right), thinks about real-world data and its promise in another context: clinical drug trials. Last year, he joined Gilead Sciences as a senior manager to identify ways the pharmaceutical company can use information from nontraditional sources to speed the development and approval of new cancer drugs. A 2016 federal law mandated that the FDA incorporate data from outside traditional clinical trials into its approval process for pre-market pharmaceuticals. It’s early days for the FDA-developed framework for using real-world data, but the impact will be revolutionary: Trials can take eight years or more to conduct and are limited in scope because they depend on volunteers—who are often white, educated, and retired.
With the combination of real-world data and digital health technologies, such as smartphones, clinical-trial volunteers could participate from home, allowing for more frequent monitoring of a possible treatment and thus faster discoveries. FDA regulators could also monitor a drug’s effects over a longer period of time.
For Baptiste, using real-world data in clinical trials has another crucial advantage. Marginalized paitients—often an afterthought in healthcare generally, and drug development specifically—can participate in studies and benefit from new ways of working that have arisen from the pandemic.
“Clinical trials measure effectiveness at a specific point in time and for a patient population who may not be the only ones actually benefiting from it,” says Baptiste, whose work includes volunteer research on behalf of sickle cell disease patients, the majority of whom are African American. “Real-world evidence attempts to fill the large gaps in knowledge about who could benefit from a new treatment. I’m hopeful this will help usher in more effective, realistic, and diverse ways to conduct clinical trial research.”
Closing gaps in care
Lauren Dugard Thomas, MBA/MPH 17 (shown left), works to address health inequities by improving the innovation process itself. At Blue Shield of California, where she’s a senior manager in enterprise innovation, she empowers all employees to generate entrepreneurial solutions, like with internal design challenges à la Shark Tank. She also ensures that underserved populations are factored into every business decision, big or small.
Dugard Thomas says that for companies committed to reducing inequities, “the first step is educating internal decision makers about disparities and making it clear that maintaining the status quo will only widen the gaps.”
Since the increase in national awareness of racial injustice last summer, she’s seen a spike in LinkedIn job listings for experts in social determinants of health. Even so, Dugard Thomas says real change goes beyond budgets and head counts.
“It’s about the mindset, expectations, and practices of leaders at all levels of the organization,” she says. “Do you want to include more Black and brown individuals in program design? Great. How are you incentivizing that from a leadership standpoint?”
Supercharging blood tests
Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer deaths in the U.S., yet one-third of adults age 50 to 75 don’t get screened, according to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC). Newer tests using stool samples collected at home haven’t changed this.
Atul Sharan, MBA 91
Atul Sharan, MBA 91, has a solution. His company, CellMax Life, has developed what he says is the first blood test for preventive screening for colon cancer—one that, according to a recent study conducted at Stanford’s Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, successfully detects pre-cancerous polyps. It works by searching for extremely rare abnormal dysplastic epithelial cells and tiny traces of DNA that tumors shed. Other tests based on the company’s technology are already sold in Asia. CellMax plans to seek FDA approval before introducing the screening to the U.S. next year.
I’m hopeful [real-world evidence methods] will help usher in more effective, realistic, and diverse ways to conduct clinical trial research.
“The only real cure for cancer is early detection,” says Sharan, who started CellMax Life nearly a decade ago after his mother was diagnosed with late-stage, untreatable cancer and his wife with a malignant breast tumor shortly after being cleared by a negative mammogram. His company, which has raised more than $50million, is part of a growing market for non-invasive “liquid biopsies” that use advanced genomic sequencing and machine learning to identify diseases and potentially tailor treatments to individuals. Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, for example, poured over $100 million into liquid-biopsy company Grail, which sold last year for $8 billion.
Reinventing autism care
One in 54 children in the U.S. were diagnosed with autism in 2016, according to the CDC. Twenty years ago, it was just one in 150. No surprise, then, that waitlists for therapy can run up to six months.
Soaring demand for autism care isn’t the only problem, says Jia Jia Ye, MBA/MPH 11. Kids often need multiple forms of therapy—behavioral, speech, and physical—for up to 30 hours a week. Specialists often work independently, making it time-consuming and frustrating for parents to coordinate care and navigate labyrinthine insurance rules.
Jia Jia Ye, MBA-MPH 11. Photo: Chris Sorensen.
Ye’s groundbreaking solution is to combine expertise and payments at a single locale. A year ago, she co-founded Springtide Child Development with $18 million in Series A funding. Now with three clinics—two in Connecticut and one opening this summer in Massachusetts—the startup employs specialists from across disciplines, coordinates appointments, and handles insurance claims. Ye says consolidation enables an unprecedented degree of standardization in care.
Just as important: Ye and her team can quantify patient progress, which smaller operations can’t do for lack of money and data. “When you take an interdisciplinary approach to autism treatment, you see rapid improvement in kids’ progress,” says Ye. “And you can show it through consistent outcome metrics at all levels of care.”
Advancing women’s health
For Amy Fan, MBA/MPH 19, improving care is about making birth control more accessible and affordable for U.S. women—especially the 60% who are on Medicaid, uninsured, or underinsured—to get birth control. She co-founded Twentyeight Health in late 2018 to offer online reproductive services.
When you take an inter-disciplinary approach to autism treatment, you see rapid improvement in kids’ progress.
Her model is straightforward: Women complete an evaluation with a board-certified physician via a combination of asynchronous and live telemedicine—including phone and direct message—for a prescription for birth control pills, rings, patches, or shots. A monthly supply of pills starts at $18; for insured women, only co-pay fees (typically $0) apply. Twentyeight Health is the only online reproductive platform focused on underserved women, and it’s often the only player accepting Medicaid in the states where it’s active. It also partners with Bedsider’s Contraceptive Access Fund to provide a year of free birth control for uninsured women.
Twentyeight Health’s expansion has been gradual as the company navigates state-by-state Medicaid rules, but today, the company operates in nine states, including New York, North Carolina, and Florida. Last fall, the startup landed $5.1 million in seed funding.
“So much of healthcare is focused on people with a high ability to pay,” says Fan (shown right). “For low-income patients, and for women of color especially, we put so many burdens on them without trying to understand how we can make it easier for them to access healthcare.”
Powering innovation
Fan attributes much of Twentyeight Health’s success to networks of healthcare insiders—within Haas and beyond—who have offered advice and opened doors.
They include Juan José Orellana, BS 95 (shown left), a Los Angeles-based strategy consultant who’s held senior roles within startups and the Fortune 200 company Molina Healthcare. He helped Fan explore the potential of expanding Twentyeight Health through partnerships with payers and providers.
“To innovate in healthcare, you need to be part of an ecosystem,” Orellana says. “You need to be able to tap into a value network that can facilitate collaboration, accelerate learning, and provide matchmaking for your organization’s needs and offerings.”
Indu Subaiya, MBA 06 (shown right), has made a career out of fostering ecosystems in healthcare. First as a co-founder of Health 2.0 and now as president of Catalyst @ Health 2.0, she’s organized conferences, open-innovation challenges, and pilot programs to introduce new ideas to deep-pocketed stakeholders. Too often, she says, healthcare entrepreneurs can’t get the traction to scale up. “My primary mission is to introduce groundbreaking technology to the world,” she says.
In the last 15 years, Subaiya’s conference platform has debuted hundreds of startups, including Teladoc, a big provider of telehealth services, and Livongo Health, which helps patients manage diseases digitally. Last year, Teladoc bought Livongo for $18.5 billion. She and her team have also coordinated more than 90 contests, with $9 million in total prize money.
One competition, worth $100,000, drew scientists from 18 countries in a race to build a better COVID outbreak prediction model using government data and millions of Facebook user surveys tracking virus symptoms. The CDC has incorporated the winning model, developed by a Georgia Tech team, into its pandemic forecasting—and found it to be among the top five most accurate prediction tools. “That’s a phenomenal example of open innovation,” says Subaiya.
Innovation, accessibility, scaling up—just as in medicine, different balms can help to heal our healthcare system. And the Berkeley Haas community is shaping countless paths to greater wellness for everyone.
Spring 2021|By Jared Prescott & Amy Marcott| Photos: Courtesy Athletes Unlimited, LLC
Jazmyn Jackson and Asha Culhane-Husain, both BS 18, help new pro softball league change up competitive sports
Imagine questioning the status quo where pro sports are concerned. What if there were no actual teams or city affiliations? What if, instead of general managers or coaches, the players called all the shots? What if the national anthem were replaced by something else?
Such is the model for Athletes Unlimited, a new network of professional sports leagues—currently softball, indoor volleyball, and lacrosse—that’s reinventing women’s pro sports.
When Jazmyn Jackson, BS 18, a star for the Cal softball team and former member of the U.S. women’s national team, first heard about Athletes Unlimited, she was skeptical. The endeavor, created by Jonathan Soros and Jon Patricof, resembles a real-life fantasy league, with a weekly draft and players earning points based on their in-game stats: hits, stolen bases, strikeouts, and the like and whether they’re named a most valuable player at game’s end.
“I was thinking, I’m a traditional softball player, what is this?” says Jackson, an outfielder who helped Team USA win gold at the 2016 World Championship. “I don’t want to do it like this. I’m all about the team stats. But now being here, I’ve never played a more team-oriented game, because winning every inning and winning the game gets you so many points.”
And points equal money. The base pay with Athletes Unlimited is $10,000 for a six-week season, with bonuses of $1,000 to $15,000, depending on performance. The money comes from fan memberships and corporate sponsors. By contrast, in a typical pro league, women softball players earn about $5,000 a summer—$10,000 if they’re lucky, Jackson says. In her offseason, Jackson had to hustle to make ends meet, teaching lessons, clinics, or camps. “It made me realize how badly women’s sports needs recognition, pay, equity—all of these things.”
In Athletes Unlimited, players change teams every week. Draft days are heavily anticipated, Jackson says. That’s when the four players with the most points from the previous week become captains and choose new teams for three days of practice followed by three days of games—then the cycle starts again. One challenge, Jackson says, is learning to ride the waves of the schedule and not putting too much stress on yourself if you have a bad game. “As soon as you start feeling bad and then start feeling good again, you have one game left for the week.”
The business of blazing trails
Once Jackson was convinced to try the Athletes Unlimited business model, she went all in to make it the best league possible. As a part of the inaugural season, Jackson gets a share in the company. She’s also a member of the five-person player executive committee (PEC) and the racial equity working group. The PEC establishes the rules of the game and the guidelines for player conduct, as well as sets COVID-19 standards and procedures.
“With my business degree, I feel like I have the perfect background to make this happen,” says Jackson. “Being trailblazers is what Berkeley Haas is all about. And I feel like this is what my degree was supposed to be for.”
She’s leaning on her studies in marketing, as the Athletes Unlimited business model differs from other leagues in that regard. “We are advertised as a bunch of different personalities coming together to play this game instead of one team. You might be a huge fan of the Oakland Athletics, say, but you know nobody on the team,” says Jackson. “But the way Athletes Unlimited does their marketing is that they’re advertising our personalities, our stories.” Jackson, for example, is active in social justice issues, and the league highlights those efforts.
And because the league is player driven and player owned, the athletes are free to express their beliefs. “It’s nice because I am not representative of the whole Athletes Unlimited,” says Jackson. “It’s not like the NBA putting out a statement on a certain issue. It’s Jazmyn Jackson’s stance on an issue.”
Jazmyn Jackson, BS 18, was a member of Team USA from 2016 through 2019 and helped them win gold at the 2016 World Championship.
Jackson’s interest in social justice led her to the league’s racial equity working group, which formulated 45 recommendations for internal policies and procedures as well as external initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion, like involving historically Black colleges and universities in recruitment efforts, working with local nonprofits to bring inner-city children to games, and making sure vendors represent a variety of backgrounds.
Rethinking the national anthem
They also discussed the national anthem. Did the players want to stand or kneel? Did they want to raise their fists up to support people of color? Since it’s a new league, co-founder Soros proposed doing something completely different, a suggestion that initially took Jackson aback.
“As an athlete, the anthem is what always gets you in the game, ready to go. Whether you’re kneeling, whether you’re standing, the national anthem means something,” says Jackson, who is African American and Mexican. “When I heard the national anthem, it was an ode to how I got to stand with my peers in an integrated league and represent the color of my skin and my family at the highest level. That was huge for me, especially when I was on Team USA.”
But she took the idea to replace the national anthem to heart. Having just seen an ESPNW video celebrating the 48th anniversary of Title IX, Jackson immediately envisioned a video and spoken-word piece showcasing the athletes’ accomplishments. She thought of something that told the stories of all the players, accurately representing what they’ve endured, the sacrifices they’ve made to play the sport they love, and what it takes for the top 1% of softball players in the world just to make a living.
Asha Culhane-Husain, BS 18 (also seen performing in the below photo, on the field), has already had success as an actor. She appears in the documentary Accents, directed by Layla Menham, which will be released on a French public TV station, France 3, in mid-2021. The film captures her experience as the only American student at France’s National Academy of Dramatic Arts and having to learn to act in French. A short film she appears in, Pied de Biche, directed by Aurélie Reinhorn, will be released at the Champs-Élysées Film Festival in June 2021.
And Jackson knew who would be the best person to articulate such a vision: Former classmate and friend Asha Culhane-Husain, BS 18. The pair met at Haas and travelled in the same circles as student-athletes. Culhane-Husain was a member of the track and field team, competing in the heptathlon.
She also minored in theater, dance, and performance studies and studied abroad at the respected Gaiety School of Acting, Ireland’s national theater school. She’s now enrolled at the Conservatoire National Supérieur d’Art Dramatique, France’s National Academy of Dramatic Arts (like the Juilliard of France, says Culhane-Husain).
The first time Jackson heard Culhane-Husain speak publicly was at a student-athlete professional development event where she delivered a speech about female empowerment that moved Jackson to tears. The next time was at Haas’ graduation, when Culhane-Husain, the student speaker, mentioned a number of classmates in her speech, including Jackson, honoring her ability to graduate from a prestigious school while also representing Cal and the United States on the softball field.
“Asha is just an amazing artist, and I wanted her to be a part of this,” says Jackson. “I know how inspired I felt from her. That’s exactly what I envisioned for the piece.”
Jackson suggested Culhane-Husain to the racial equity working group and the league founders. They liked the idea, and after a selection process, Culhane-Husain began interviewing every softball, volleyball, and lacrosse player in Athletes United, asking them to share their experiences as women and athletes.
Channeling emotion
Culhane-Husain’s job was not an easy one: Convey the experiences of these athletes in an inspiring spoken-word piece short enough to be played before every game and do it in only two weeks.
“I told them, ‘You have a blank slate. I’m here to listen to whatever you want to express to the world. Feel free to be excited, be passionate, be angry, be happy. Be selfish with the space.’ And they were,” Culhane-Husain says. “They were willing to be vulnerable with me and share their stories. It was a humbling experience that they trusted me with all of those personal details.”
With full creative liberty from Athletes United, Culhane-Husain then set about crafting a piece that uplifted the athletes’ voices. “Part of what we learn in acting school is to approach, emotionally, the experience of another human,” she says. “I tried to enter into their emotions with them and channel that into words.”
The result was a five-minute piece Culhane-Husain debuted at the opening ceremonies for Athletes Unlimited (shown above) in front of all of the players. It was presented in concert with the national anthems of every country with competitors in the league. She also created 90- and 45-second versions, which have been turned into videos to be played before every Athletes Unlimited contest, both locally and on TV (the games are broadcast on CBS Sports Network and ESPN), replacing the national anthem.
As a part of the Athletes Unlimited inaugural season, Jackson gets a share in the company. She also helps establish rules of the game and guidelines for player conduct and helps formulate recommendations to promote diversity and inclusion.
For Jackson and the other players, Culhane-Husain’s work hit all the right notes. Jackson cried the first time she heard it and remembers thinking it wouldn’t have the same effect later, but she found that it does. “She made it personal to us and made us feel heard and represented,” Jackson says. “She didn’t say any names, but it was all of our stories. Feeling so represented but also so one with the group around you—I’ve never felt that during the national anthem the way I feel with this piece.”
Culhane-Husain says the athletes’ stories have stuck with her, especially the grit, determination, and tenacity shared by the women. “Now those stories are with me, and they inform all of my other artistic processes too,” she says. She’s proud that her creation will be played before every game, offering a continual platform for the athletes to reflect their lived experiences.
“If you love something, you want to make it better,” Culhane-Husain says. “I think that was the point behind this.”
In other words, questioning the status quo and trying to empower others. Just like Berkeley Haas taught them.
Spring 2021|By Amy Marcott| PHOTO: RICHARD LEVINE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
How Berkeley alumni changed the food-delivery game
Food-delivery apps weren’t new when Jason Wang, BS 09, and four co-founders launched Caviar, so differentiating themselves from the likes of Seamless and Grubhub was crucial. Their solution? Offer a curated assortment of restaurants with loyal customer bases (many exclusive to Caviar), invest in professional photography for every dish, and prioritize restaurant partners, for whom there were no commitments, no monthly fee, and no delivery infrastructure needed. The formula worked. Caviar became profitable in the first six months and earned a seven-figure annual revenue the first year. Just two years after launching, it was acquired by Square. Here, how Wang and his co-founders—Richard Din, BS/BA 08 (electrical engineering & computer science/economics); Shawn Tsao, BA 11 (architecture); Andy Zhang (former Berkeley student); and Abel Lin—quickly turned Caviar into a sensation.
Caviar’s four Berkeley co-founders: (left to right): Andy Zhang (former student); Jason Wang, BS 09; Richard Din, BS/BA 08 (electrical engineering & computer science/economics); and Shawn Tsao, BA 11 (architecture).
July 2012
Caviar launches in San Francisco, offering weekday lunch to companies. The co-founders start with just a few restaurants (like Ike’s Place, HRD, and Nick’s Cripsy Tacos) and do deliveries themselves for a few months, then hire couriers from Craigslist. Food messengers keep the $10 delivery fee and part of the gratuity, with the balance (and food surcharges) going to Caviar. Eventually, Caviar expands to 30 restaurants in SF. In year one, they focus on improving just two metrics: orders per week and revenue.
March 2013
Service opens to the general public (it had been invite-only for individuals).
November 2013
Caviar launches in New York City and Seattle with 15–20 restaurants in each locale.
January 2014
Caviar has 10 full-time employees. About 40% of customers are corporate, accounting for 65% of revenue.
July 2014
Now with $15 million in venture capital and 40 employees, Caviar launches in Los Angeles, bringing its total penetration to seven cities (also including Boston, Chicago, and Washington, D.C.). The company’s order volume has grown more than 500% year over year.
August 2014
Square acquires Caviar for $90 million in stock. Wang stays on as CEO until August 2016.
January 2015
Wang makes the Forbes 30 Under 30 list in the food & drink category.
February 2015
Six months after acquisition, Caviar triples orders, expands to 15 cities nationwide, and more than doubles employees, to 100+.
August 2019
DoorDash acquires Caviar from Square for $410 million.
Sept 2020
Wang is again honored by Forbes, this time as one of 10 game-changers who have appeared in 10 years of the Forbes 30 Under 30 list.
“Equity fluency and leadership excellence go hand in hand. As a board member, I’m thrilled to serve with Dean Ann Harrison and others to help meld and magnify those tenets for Haas and the broader community. We can expand the pie so everyone gets a meaningful and fulfilling slice—there is enough for everyone to enjoy and benefit.”
“Excellence requires help. That simple fact has motivated me to provide whatever support and guidance I can give to help students thrive. I saw the potential to contribute to advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), promoting activities that expand student capability in sustainability, and continuing to elevate the reputation of Haas.”
“I’m very interested in Haas remaining in the top rank among its peers in all key measures. My hope is also that I will be able to contribute to the ongoing and developing activities regarding DEI. As a Black American, DEI is a topic of particular resonance and interest to me.”
Above: Six-month average returns in U.S. equity prices surrounding November for the different years of the election cycle (data period: 1871–2015).
Above: The researchers plotted returns for a range of portfolios from December to April in midterm years versus other years. They found that riskier investments (portfolios with higher beta, a measure of volatility relative to a benchmark) yield higher returns in midterm years. In other years, risk decreases returns.
Terrell Baptiste, MBA 20 (shown right), thinks about real-world data and its promise in another context: clinical drug trials. Last year, he joined Gilead Sciences as a senior manager to identify ways the pharmaceutical company can use information from nontraditional 
Lauren Dugard Thomas, MBA/MPH 17 (shown left), works to address health inequities by improving the innovation process itself. At Blue Shield of California, where she’s a senior manager in enterprise innovation, she empowers all employees to generate entrepreneurial solutions, like with internal design challenges à la Shark Tank. She also ensures that underserved populations are factored into every business decision, big or small.
They include Juan José Orellana, BS 95 (shown left), a Los Angeles-based strategy consultant who’s held senior roles within startups and the Fortune 200 company Molina Healthcare. He helped Fan explore the potential of expanding Twentyeight Health through partnerships with payers and providers.
Indu Subaiya, MBA 06 (shown right), has made a career out of fostering ecosystems in healthcare. First as a co-founder of Health 2.0 and now as president of Catalyst @ Health 2.0, she’s organized conferences, open-innovation challenges, and pilot programs to introduce new ideas to deep-pocketed stakeholders. Too often, she says, healthcare entrepreneurs can’t get the traction to scale up. “My primary mission is to introduce groundbreaking technology to the world,” she says.
