Tag: Startups

Q&A: eHub Executive Director Dawn McGee on why entrepreneurship is for everyone

| by Kim Girard

Dawn McGee has loved entrepreneurship since she was a kid “playing company” with family and friends. 

photo of a woman wearing large earrings
Dawn McGee, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Hub.

That love, anchored by the belief that business should benefit society, turned into her career. As the executive director of the new Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Hub (eHub), set to open this fall on Piedmont Avenue just steps away from Haas, McGee, along with eHub Faculty Director Saikat Chaudhuri, will help shepherd startup ideas from the next generation of Haas and Berkeley students. For McGee, that group includes novices who previously held no interest in the startup world to students who are well on their way to building a company. 

The eHub, housed in an elegant Julia Morgan-designed building that’s been fully renovated, promises to be a haven for students to connect, build, and be discovered. In this interview, McGee, who joined Haas from UC Davis, where she co-led the Student Startup Center, discussed programming plans and UC Berkeley’s important role in the innovation ecosystem.

First of all, the new eHub building is beautiful. Can you talk about your role there and how you’ll be working with students?

My number one job right now is to market the eHub and to get students involved. Next, we’ll focus on amplifying what already exists. There is a wealth of innovation and entrepreneurship resources on Berkeley’s campus—so many colleagues are doing so many things well. So the first programming task is to connect students to those resources through the eHub Navigator, who is a member of our team. Any student on campus can visit the Navigator to get help planning their unique entrepreneurship journey. The Navigator will learn about you and your aspirations, and then they’ll help you figure out what the next steps and right resources are for you.

What interested you in entrepreneurship as a kid?

Very early on, I had this idea that business was about being of service. I was a young child who loved designing business models. And my key partners were always friends and family members, so I could design their business models, too. 

When I was in my 20s working for startups, I was introduced to the idea of social entrepreneurship by my brother, who was an Echoing Green fellow. I worked with him to build his organization’s vision,and I loved it. His venture was extra special because its ultimate impact was to help people create change in their lives. I’ve supported a variety of profit-driven entrepreneurs, and I enjoy the exercise of developing founders and helping them to develop their businesses. But personally, I am most passionate about social entrepreneurship.

new entrepreneurship hub at Haas (rendition)
The Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Hub (architect design)

How will the eHub programming support innovation and entrepreneurship?

We will host events that engage students in practicing entrepreneurship and events that are built for community building. We’re designing micro-communities around students’ interests and their stage within their entrepreneurship journey. We’ll also provide data-driven matchmaking to help students meet the right people. 

For those who want to build something, we will offer an eHub membership, which requires a small weekly time commitment. These low-commitment programs are designed to get students started, and then we’ll keep you moving until that next right resource is available.

How will the tracks work?

We have three tracks: SEARCH, TEST, and BUILD. 

In the SEARCH track, students will look for a problem worth solving—something that’s meaningful enough that it motivates them to do the work required of an entrepreneur. Then, they’ll brainstorm and try to find solutions that are worth testing. Over 10 weeks, for just 50 minutes a week, they’ll use a methodology for figuring out which solutions should be at the top of their list. 

The TEST track is for students who already have ideas. These students will collect a body of evidence that demonstrates that their ideas are worth investment. Every week, in 50 minutes, they’ll set up a new test of their idea. If they decide that they want to do the legwork, they’ll invest extra time to run the tests.

The BUILD track is for students who have collected sufficient evidence showing that their business model is viable, desirable, and feasible. These students will attend weekly hacking meetings with others in the BUILD track, spending two hours a week together making progress on their priorities. Students will also be matched with mentors who will help structure goals, provide advice and support, and hold their mentees accountable to their goals over the course of the semester.

You bring a wide variety of business experience to your new role, including two business degrees. Could you tell us a bit about your educational background?

I was an undergraduate at the Wharton School and studied entrepreneurial management. Then, I focused on social entrepreneurship at NYU Stern, where I got my MBA. Most recently, I’ve studied design thinking at Stanford’s d.school.

It’s great to be back to my business school roots here at Haas. I understand the language of the business school, the rhythms of the business school. It just feels more natural. And Haas is an exceptional school.

Your career has taken you in different directions, which led you back to entrepreneurship. 

I’ve worked three different tracks during my career. I worked with startups as an advisor, an employee, a founder, and a board member. I’ve worked in many capacities in finance: everything from an analyst doing solvency and valuation analysis to interim treasurer of a publicly-traded company navigating bankruptcy.

Then, I moved into higher ed as a faculty member for five years, leading undergraduate and graduate students in experiential entrepreneurship education. I’ve also been a leader of entrepreneurship centers on university campuses. 

So this isn’t your first time developing an entrepreneurship program?

This eHub will be my third. I directed one at a small college in Brooklyn. I was on the leadership team for four years at UC Davis’ Student Startup Center, which is where I really had the opportunity to experiment and try out a lot of different things. And now, I’m at Haas.

One thing I’ll underline about my background is that experiential education has always been really important to me. By far, the leading way for me to learn has been through experience. I am a huge advocate and champion for experiential education, and that’s one of the things that I’m excited to offer students at the eHub.

I am a huge advocate and champion for experiential education, and that’s one of the things that I’m excited to offer students at the eHub.

What excited you most about working at Berkeley Haas?

I am excited by Berkeley’s breadth of world-class research and academic programs. Students here have access to levels of knowledge that most people don’t. This allows you to solve problems at the highest of levels: you can go after the most complex problems, the ones that we have left unsolved for a long time. 

Second, Berkeley resides in the capital of innovation. If you look at the dollars invested in innovation in this region and compare it to everywhere else in the world, there is no competitor.

Third, Berkeley is a leader in social mobility. One of the primary reasons I’m an entrepreneurship educator is because I’m able to transform the lives of generations of families through just one student. But doing that at a university that already has a track record of catapulting students’ economic futures? That’s really exciting. 

Q&A: Saikat Chaudhuri on the new Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Hub

| by Kim Girard
a smiling man wearing a suit on Haas campus
Saikat Chaudhuri, faculty director of the new Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Hub. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small.

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! 

UC LAUNCH Demo Day founders pitch innovative startups

| by Kim Girard
large group of students, some holding large checks at a competition.
The 2024 LAUNCH Demo Day participants. Photo: Jim Block

Startup founders at UC LAUNCH Demo Day last week pitched ideas ranging from improving package delivery to crafting better athletic supplements to expediting the building permit process. 

Each year, 20 startups from across the UC system are are chosen from more than 100 applicants. The chosen startups founders are paired with entrepreneurs and mentors, and led through an intense three-month Lean Startup-focused curriculum. 

The program finishes with Demo Day, when teams pitch to judges for cash prizes in front of an audience. This years Demo Day judges included Noah Doyle, managing director of Javelin Venture Partners, Hina Dixit, a partner with M12, Kira Noodleman, a partner at Bee Partners, and David Bloom, a principal at the House Fund.

The top three teams that pitched on Demo Day:

First place: Doorstep AI:  The startup, cofounded by Rishabh Goel, BS/BA 22, (a graduate of the concurrent Robinson Life Science, Business, and Entrepreneurship program/business program), is working to simplify the last 500 feet of package delivery/pickup—particularly deliveries to apartments and multiple tenant dwellings. Doorstep AI,  which offers a visual guidance system to aid in package drop-offs, is kicking off a pilot in New York City.

man standing on stage holding a microphone
Rishabh Goel, BS/BA 22, pitches startup Doorstep.ai. Photo: Jim Block

Second place: OptiGenix: The startup offers biologically tailored supplements for athletes; the two founders—Jai Williams, BS 23, a high jumper, and Gabe Abbes, BS 24, a distance runner—discovered that they were taking the same supplements, though their sports demanded different kinds of strength: Williams needed more power, while Abbes required prolonged energy.  Through genetic and quarterly blood testing, the startup aims to personalize supplement packages to help athletes meet their goals. 

two students holding microphones on stage
Jai Williams, BS 23, a high jumper, and Gabe Abbes, BS 24, a distance runner, presenting at LAUNCH. Photo: Jim Block

Third place: Citmit (UC San Diego & UC Berkeley founders) Citmit is working to expedite the building permitting process by up to six months, using AI tools to evaluate/accelerate documentation checks. The San Diego based startup is initially focused on accessory dwelling units (ADUs) such as mother-in-law units and cottages, as those are the most in-demand/problematic. Driven by its AI component, Citmit operates as a user-friendly chat box.

2023 FTMBA grads land record number of VC jobs

|By Jeanette Brown
two guys standing in front of a sedan
Will McKelvey, MBA 23, (right) met with 43 founders in five days on a cross-country trip to Berkeley in 2021 with his college roommate. McKelvey was planning on pursuing venture capital at Haas. He now works at VC fund Lerer Hippeau.

Before Will McKelvey arrived to enroll in the full-time MBA program at Berkeley Haas in 2021, he and his college roommate drove cross-country to California. Along the way, McKelvey, who was planning a career in venture capital, met with as many startups as possible—a whopping 43 founders in five days. McKelvey, an Ohio native, even launched a blog sharing his impressions of venture opportunities from Dayton to Detroit to Chicago.

“You can’t dabble in VC,” McKelvey, MBA 23, who became interested in the economic power of startups while working for Democratic Congressman Ro Khanna for four years, said. “If you decide it’s your thing, go all in. It’s not a space for tourists.” 

At Haas, McKelvey didn’t let up, interning at multiple venture firms and serving as co-president of the Haas VC Club. Now an investor at early-stage VC fund Lerer Hippeau, McKelvey is among a record number of 2023 Berkeley Haas MBA graduates working in the field of venture capital.

Will McKelvey is now an investor at early-stage VC fund Lerer Hippeau.

“VC is the second-biggest sector for finance jobs among our MBAs,” said William Rindfuss, a member of the Haas Professional Faculty who leads strategic programs for the finance faculty group and manages financial services recruiting at Haas. “Only investment banking drew more recent grads.”

Fourteen of the 2023 FTMBA graduates accepted employment in venture capital, a record high. Of that group, half work for venture funds, and half have joined venture arms of tech, health care, and financial services companies, Rindfuss said. 

Rindfuss attributes the growth to the support of the Berkeley Haas alumni network, comprehensive courses in venture capital, including New Venture Finance, an increase in campus resources for VC, and the school’s Bay Area location. 

Proximity to venture firms gives students the ability to explore VC through both in-semester internships and summer internships over the course of the two-year MBA program. Such a portfolio of experiences can lead to full-time offers. But as Rindfuss notes, landing a job in venture capital differs widely from investment banking.

Proximity to venture firms gives students the ability to explore VC through both in-semester internships and summer internships over the course of the two-year MBA program.

That’s where the students’ hard work comes in with landing internships and jobs. While big banks recruit on campus through a structured process, VC firms expect students to get their attention and come to them, which might mean writing whitepapers on emerging subsectors or reaching out to firms with project ideas in order to build their networks.

Just as the Haas Finance Club has long been a major source of support for Haas students pursuing investment banking, the VC Club has grown into a similar resource, Rindfuss said. The club leads an annual VC Speaker Series course, drawing senior partners and associates from Bay Area VC funds, who offer both big picture and tactical advice.

A pivot from tech to VC

For Aparna Chaganty, MBA 23, breaking into venture capital meant landing an internship with Bessemer Venture Partners. An engineer from India with a master’s in information systems (MIS) degree from Carnegie Mellon, Chaganty was a data scientist and product manager at Salesforce when she started exploring a career pivot.

Aparna Chaganty, MBA 23, works for Bessemer Venture Partners in India.

“I really enjoyed building new technology, but I also wanted to know what other paths there were out there,” she said.

Venture capital piqued her interest as a perfect way to combine her tech background with entrepreneurship. “I have always found the growth story of startups extremely inspiring,” she said. “In VC, you can be really close to bringing about change and creating new value in the economy.”

Chaganty ended up accepting a full-time role as an investor at Bessemer Venture Partners in India, an opportunity to return to her home country. Though it hadn’t been her plan at the start, she said she was thrilled by the opportunity to join after Bessemer raised its first India fund. “There is so much entrepreneurship coming out of India,” she said. “Being part of that zero-to-one story is a once-in-a-generation opportunity and being a VC at Bessemer gives me a front-row seat to witness and contribute to that change.”

Crafting your own opportunities

Alex Rohrbach, MBA 23, came to Haas after several years working as a consultant at McKinsey and at an on-demand staffing startup. 

portrait of a man in a blue shirt
Alex Rohrbach, MBA 23, is at Thomvest Ventures.

He discovered that both experiences were applicable in VC. “Very quickly, I could add value to busy VCs who needed extra help,” he said. By doing projects with multiple VC firms during the school year in his free time, Rohrbach got exposure to various funds and VCs, helping him learn how they think and structure deals. 

“Many MBAs don’t realize that they have a lot of skills they can apply on day one with a VC firm,” Rohrbach said. “Aspiring VCs can develop a thesis about an industry, source companies on campus, and help organize events. If you figure out what you’re good at, you can craft your own opportunities.”

Rohrbach graduated with a job at Thomvest Ventures, a 25-year-old San Francisco fund. He spent his summer internship with Thomvest but says it was never a direct path to full-time employment. 

“Each fellowship and internship was a stepping stone, but I didn’t know exactly where I would end up,” he said. In his first year at Haas, he got a fellowship at Pear VC, an early-stage venture firm. He also received a Haas Entrepreneurial Finance Fellowship, providing a $5,000 cash award and mentorship with a Haas alum. “Even more valuable than the money was the access to a mentor – in my case, Andrew Krowne at Dolby Family Ventures,” Rohrbach said. 

Rohrbach also consulted during his first year with Union Labs, a VC firm that past Haasies worked for. 

“I started to build a portfolio of work so that by the time I was interviewing for summer internships, I had a lot I could talk about,” he said. 

Rindfuss and others at Haas hope the number of students pursuing venture capital will only continue to grow as Haasies find homes at more VC firms and bring their experience and advice to future students. 

“As more of our graduates succeed in venture capital, we are developing a stronger pool of alumni that will support our students,” Rindfuss said. “It’s an exciting time.”

UC LAUNCH teams gear up for Demo Day pitches

|By Aria Yang
drone shot of Chou Hall and campus
2023 Demo Day will be held in Chou Hall.

Student-led startup teams tackling a diverse range of challenges—from carbon emissions to the use of AI in education—will come together to pitch this week at the University of California LAUNCH Accelerator’s Fall 2023 Demo Day. 

The event, a chance for startups to pitch their ventures to a panel of judges, will be held Thursday, Nov. 30, at Spieker Forum in Chou Hall. All eight finalists will compete for up to $50,000 in non-dilutive funding.

Rhonda Shrader, MBA 96, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program, noted the strong turnout of women this year.

“For the first time in UC LAUNCH history, seven of the eight finalists have at least one female co-founder,” she said. “We are super excited to celebrate them on Demo Day.” 

Scaling a company

The UC LAUNCH program guides students through the steps of scaling a company using the lean methodology, with mentorship provided by experts in the field. All teams must include at least one current UC student, alum, or faculty member. More than 250 startups that have participated in the program have gone on to raise more than $1.4 billion collectively, according to UC LAUNCH organizers.

This year’s finalists include CarbonSustain, providing a way for companies to efficiently track and analyze carbon emissions. 

man wearing a light blue shirt standing in front of a tree
Paul Bryzek, MBA 24

Co-founder Paul Bryzek, MBA 24, said the team interviewed more than 85 potential customers, competitors, business owners, and subject matter experts while in UC LAUNCH. “Our interviews yielded 10 potential customers, three distinct customer target groups, an understanding of their willingness to pay, and gaps with the existing solutions,” he said. “We’re grateful for the mentorship from Rhonda Shrader and the UC LAUNCH volunteers who helped us to achieve product-market fit.”

Finalist Rumi’s platform helps schools integrate AI to enhance student learning through writing. 

Co-founder Mohammad Hossein Ghasemzadeh, MIMS 16, said the team did extensive research in forming the startup and believes that AI will play a key role in the future of education. “We’ve talked with over 150 instructors across the country, and we’re very excited to share our story and provide some insights into what the future of AI in education will look like,” he said.

Eight finalists pitching

Other LAUNCH finalists include OmBiome, a regenerative health company creating algae-based products for oral and gut health; Rely, simplifying property management for landlords and offers renters a comprehensive real estate meta-search engine; Materri, a materials marketplace focused on sustainable materials for footwear and apparel; Insta Chef, which is providing nutritious, easy-to-prepare meals to senior living facilities; Essence Labs, an AI-powered platform optimizing work schedules for female employees based on hormonal cycles; and AidRx, providing custom AI charting solutions to ease the documentation burden for pharmacists and other non physician clinicians.

The judging panel includes Ben Goldfein of WilmerHale, Jed Katz of Javelin Venture Partners, and Kat Mañalac of Y Combinator.

Register to attend Demo Day.

Startup Spotlight: Hate nagging your team? Try installing Chaser

| by Nathan Allen
man wearing white t-shirt and dark jacket
Josh Martow, founder of Chaser

As the director of product in his last role, Josh Martow, MBA 23, dreaded nagging his team members to make sure work got done. When he arrived at Berkeley Haas, he started mapping out an idea to solve his own problem, which led to the launch of startup Chaser.

In this interview, Martow explains how Chaser makes people more productive.

Could you give us a quick synopsis of what Chaser does?

Chaser follows up with your co-workers on the things they need to do. There are other project management tools out there that are supposed to solve this problem, but they break down because most teams struggle to constantly keep them up to date; no one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I’m going to check Trello.”

With Chaser, you can delegate a task to anybody from within Slack. Chaser sends them the task, collects progress updates, and follows up until it’s complete. It works like magic because your co-workers never have to open Chaser. They don’t have to sign up for it or even know what it is! Their tasks just arrive in their inbox, and they can click “complete” right there.

How did you come up with the idea?

At my last job, so much of my work as a manager required making sure work was being taken across the finish line, which meant following up with people a lot. It’s not fun to be a nag and feel like you’re a babysitter to your team. It’s also not productive. And on the other end, no one likes to constantly receive these types of messages. 

We’re doing with Chaser what Google did for calendars.

We’re doing with Chaser what Google did for calendars. It’s amazing that my friends and co-workers can put events right on my calendar for me and all of the sudden our calendars are synced up. Why doesn’t this exist for to-do lists? Imagine if your co-workers helped populate your to-do list for you and all you had to do was hit “complete” or “change date” and it would reflect on their end too, just like when you RSVP on Google Calendar, or move an event around.

How does a manager use Chaser?

So anyone can add Chaser to a Slack workspace. Once it’s added, just type “/todo,” tag the assignee, write the task, and include a due date, if there is one. The task will appear in your direct messages and Chaser will take it from there! You can follow along in your dashboard, which also lives inside Slack, while Chaser goes out and makes sure it gets done.

For now we’re actually offering Chaser for free, so everyone can give it a try here.

What was your background before coming to Haas? 

Before Haas, I was the first employee at a startup Thriver Technologies. I got to wear every hat there. Throughout my time there I led sales, product, growth, and business intelligence. I was just running around doing whatever I could to help set up everything the company needed. We grew it to 150 people and raised a Series B, and after five years, I really got bit by that entrepreneurship bug and decided I wanted to do this myself. I ended up teaming up with the director of engineering and we set off to start our own thing.

man speaking holding a microphone
Josh Martow presenting at the recent entrepreneurial network event, B-school Disrupt.

How has Haas helped you as an entrepreneur?

The two biggest things for me have been extracurriculars and classmates. For extracurriculars, some free accelerators connect you with mentors, help you hone your pitch, and help you figure out your business. After competing in one of the Demo Days, one of the judges, who was also a VC, ended up putting in $100,000 after hearing the pitch. 

But my favorite thing about Haas is the Haasies. There are just a ton of great people who are interested in and want to talk about startups, and everyone comes from such diverse professional backgrounds. Just having people to bounce ideas around with is just so valuable.

What made you want to get an MBA to launch a company rather than launch without going to business school?

I didn’t study business as an undergrad and I wanted formal business training. I also needed time to develop more clarity and conviction around what we wanted to build. 

But also, you hear that business school is a great place to start a company. And it’s 100% true. 

Not having a full-time job gives you the freedom to explore, and being around Haasies realy helps you with that exploration. Not to mention access to the resources available, the accelerators, and being in the Bay Area. All of these things kind of just make it the perfect place to start a company.

What advice do you have for people considering launching a business while earning an MBA?

The No. 1 piece of advice is to cut out the things that are not 100% critical, and don’t succumb to FOMO when you see classmates doing things you just frankly won’t have time for. I definitely did not appreciate this enough at the start and was signing up for more than I could handle and would often be disappointed when I needed to miss out on things. It would have been a lot easier if I came into it understanding that you can’t do it all while you’re trying to get a startup off the ground.

That said, it’s a great experience, and it’s immensely valuable to be in school learning while thinking about your business and applying the things in class to your business every day. 

Startup Spotlight: Xepelin’s rise in fintech services

| by Kim Girard

Xepelin, co-founded by Sebastian Kreis, MBA 18, rocketed to No. 3 on Poets & Quants’ 2023 Top 100 MBA startups list this year. The company, based in Mexico City, has raised $567 million so far and will use the funds to invest in new markets in Latin America.

headshot of a man

Haas News asked Kreis a few questions about his startup’s success.

Tell us about Xepelin. Xepelin was founded in 2019, the year after I graduated from Haas. Our aim is to be the “digital CFO” for small- to mid-size companies, offering an online platform that helps businesses organize their accounts and automate payments to suppliers and payment advances from customers.  

You’ve had quite a lot of success getting the company funded over the past year. Tell me a little about that.

Last year, the company secured $150 million in equity and a $140 million credit line from Goldman Sachs that we are using to expand software, payment, and working capital services in Mexico. We are headquartered in Mexico City and now have 400 employees. 

How big is the market for your services and what’s your expansion plan?

The companies we are targeting account for over 60% of Latin America’s GDP. These companies present an enormous opportunity for us, with more than $10 trillion in unmet needs. High acquisition and servicing costs have kept them underserved. Xepelin is committed to equipping these companies with efficient access to software tools, payments, and working capital.

The companies we are targeting account for over 60% of Latin America’s GDP.

What resources at Haas helped you become an entrepreneur?

There were two resources I tapped at Haas: learning from entrepreneurs and investors in the Bay Area who had already built successful startups, and working on fintech projects with Lecturer Greg La Blanc. I traveled to Mexico several times while I was at Berkeley because of the size of the market. I studied the metrics, such as credit and software market penetration, before committing to building a regional company, starting in Mexico and Chile. 

Berkeley named top university for number of venture-backed companies

| by Haas News

PitchBook has ranked Berkeley #1 for its number of venture-backed companies founded by undergraduate alumni and #2 for its number of founders, according to the 2023 PitchBook University rankings.

The 2023 PitchBook rankings also named Berkeley the #1 public university for startup founders.

A total of 1,433 Berkeley undergrad alumni founded 1,305 venture-backed companies, a virtual tie with Stanford, whose 1,435 founders started a total of 1,297 companies, according to Pitchbook.

Taking into account all graduate alumni, Berkeley ranked #5 in startups and founders. Berkeley Haas MBA alumni ranked #9, with a total of 447 founders who started 413 venture-backed startups. (The ranking doesn’t include many more startups that have been founded without venture capital funding.)

The 2023 PitchBook University rankings are based on the total number of founders whose companies received a round of venture funding between Jan. 1, 2013, and Sept. 1, 2023.

The analysis is based on PitchBook data for global VC investment, as well as the educational information of more than 150,000 founders. Since companies can have more than one founder, and founders may attend multiple schools, it is possible for the same company or founder to count toward multiple universities.

Read UC Berkeley’s article about this ranking.

FlowGPT cofounder on his visionary AI project that’s speeding ahead in the AI market

|By Aria Yang

Startup: FlowGPT
Co-founders: Lifan Wang, MBA 22, and Jay Dang, a former UC Berkeley Computer Science major

photo of a man in black and white
Lifan Wang, MBA 23, co-founder of startup FlowGPT (Wang used Lensa AI to generate the image.)

In this interview, Lifan Wang discusses how he met his FlowGPT co-founder, Jay Dang, at UC Berkeley, and why speed was critical for his startup in entering the AI market.

How did you  come up with the idea for FlowGPT?

We started this project in January. We both were power users of ChatGPT when it first came out. We would spend around 10 hours a day exploring different use cases of ChatGPT prompts and trying to leverage AI to increase our productivity. As we used it more, we realized that there are so many more use cases that people haven’t discovered.  So we started doing extensive research by talking to people who use ChatGPT and prompts. We talked with approximately 100 people from various online communities, such as Discord channels and found that people constantly post and share ChatGPT prompts with each other, which gave us the idea to create a dedicated platform for prompt creators to share their prompts.

How did you get started in entrepreneurship at Haas? 

Haas is a great place for aspiring entrepreneurs. I’ve taken several entrepreneurship classes, including a class with Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program, that helped me understand the process of launching a startup — from searching for ideas to conducting user research to creating a prototype. 

Haas is a great place for aspiring entrepreneurs.

In the Business of AI,  taught by Pieter Abbeel, a renowned professor in the engineering school, I interacted with generative AI and learned about neural networks and the GAN (Generative Adversarial Network), which pits two different deep learning models against each other in a game. I also explored various technical imaging technologies. I firmly believe that AI, especially generative AI, is going to be a significant trend that will revolutionize the world.

Where did you meet your co-founder?

Jay and I met during our time at UC Berkeley SkyDeck, where we attended various events. Jay was seeking funding for his startup in his freshman year. As a part-time venture partner, I was interested in potential investment opportunities. He pitched me his startup, which connected to the work I had previously done in the industry. We had extensive discussions and got to know each other well.

Are you both seeking funding right now?

We secured our C round of funding in May and are currently preparing to launch a new funding round this month or next. Our user base has experienced robust growth, and based on the data we’ve gathered, now is the perfect time to accelerate expansion.

What are some of your concerns about the future of AI or its impact on work and society?

With every technological advancement, there are inherent risks. When computers were introduced, illegal activities emerged on websites and regulations evolved. Our aim is to empower people to be more productive and generate a positive impact while prioritizing safety. We must ensure the safe use of AI, which will become a powerful tool, similar to the internet and software. Many people are already leveraging new AI tools like ChatGPT and Prompt Engineering to increase their productivity. At FlowGPT, we use ChatGPT daily for coding, product management, messaging, and marketing, covering various aspects of our operations. AI represents the next generation of powerful tools that elevate human productivity to new heights.

Our aim is to empower people to be more productive and generate a positive impact while prioritizing safety.

Do you have any advice for aspiring entrepreneurs? 

Execution is crucial. That is the most important thing I learned from Jay, my co-founder. 

We launched the product in January, just one and a half months after ChatGPT’s release. Unlike many competitors, who were still in the ideation stage, we were already ahead. When competitors attempted to imitate us, we had already iterated three times and gained a million users. 

My advice is to start building right away. You don’t have to be an expert at product development to get started. During my time at Cal, I noticed many people getting stuck in the same phase. Some might say, “I’ve got all the business plans figured out, and all I need is one programmer to build the product.” However, as time passed, they were still searching for programmers. The ability to launch is crucial, especially in the initial stages.

 

Startup Spotlight: Download Scribble AI to write content faster than ever

| by Kim Girard
three students and a woman holding a check
Left-right: Dean Ann Harrison with Sahil Mehta, BS 23, (Business & Electrical Engineering/Computer Science); Jayaditya Sethi, BS 24 (double major in business and computer science); and Ethan Jagoda, BS 24. Their startup, Scribble AI, tied for third at LAUNCH.

Jayaditya Sethi, BS 24 (double major in business and computer science), along with Sahil Mehta, BS 23, (Business & Electrical Engineering/Computer Science)  and Ethan Jagoda, BS 24, (computer science), founded Scribble AI, an AI startup that placed third in the recent UC Berkeley LAUNCH accelerator pitch day. The startup is also part of the Batch 16Sethi, who will be a software engineering intern at PayPal this summer, five questions about Scribble AI. (Download the app here.)

Tell us what ScribbleAI is and how people use it?

Scribble AI is a simple mobile interface people can download that uses AI to effortlessly create customized written content live on iOS and Android phones. It can be used to generate emails, poems, tweets and everything in between across 12 different languages and 20+ style customizations.

What is your favorite way to use ChatGPT (an artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI)?

Our favorite use for ChatGPT is for debugging code as this was crucial for us to launch the app within two weeks without any prior mobile development experience.

How did you meet your co-founders Ethan and Sahil?

We have been close friends since starting at UC Berkeley. Sahil and Ethan met through the startup accelerator and consulting club Entrepreneurs@Berkeley. Ethan and I met through a class and are now roommates. We have all collaborated on previous projects, such as being part of Entrepreneurs@Berkeley leadership and co-founding a music club together.

What is the most important takeaway from participating in LAUNCH?

Our biggest takeaway from LAUNCH was to constantly challenge our assumptions about our business. During each workshop, the mentors at LAUNCH questioned our hypotheses about our product and its use cases, helping us find a scalable business model. For example, we learned to find the root causes of a customer’s problem, rather than simply take what a user says at face value. These are lessons we will carry for years as we continue our startup journey!

What are your plans for Scribble AI now?

We plan to scale up traction in international markets, particularly among social media creators who need a tool to write content 10 times faster. We are also developing the premium version of our app, which will be tailored to each user’s specific needs

Startup Spotlight: How late-night crypto conversations led to hyphen labs launch

| by Nathan Allen
two men standing in downtown Berkeley
Tarek Mohammad and Jin Kim, both MFE 23, launched hyphen labs in November 2022.

When Jin Kim and Tarek Mohammad, both MFE 23, met at orientation for the Berkeley Haas Master of Financial Engineering program last year, they instantly connected over a shared passion for blockchain, crypto, financial systems, and entrepreneurship. 

Intense discussions, many times lasting until 4 a.m., led Kim and Mohammad to launch hyphen labs, a platform for industry decentralized finance (DeFi) trading. DeFi is a broad term for applications and projects in public blockchain geared toward disrupting traditional finance. 

While at Haas, hyphen labs was accepted to the UC Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator cohort, and was the first MFE-founded startup to make it into the Techstars accelerator program. Kim and Mohammad, who launched hyphen in November 2022, are now heading to Miami and Boston to raise a seed round.

In this interview, they discuss what led them to Haas, the experience of launching a fintech startup, and the challenges ahead.

Haas News: Tell us a bit about your background and what led you to Haas?

Tarek Mohammad: I have a unique story because I come from a unique place. I studied economics and actuarial science as an undergraduate in Lebanon. However, starting in 2019, Lebanon experienced huge economic turmoil. The government defaulted on its government bonds, and then the banking system defaulted. I lost all my personal savings. By that time, I was working for KPMG as a consultant. Then Covid hit. During that period, the ammonium nitrate explosion hit the Port of Beirut in August 2020. The KPMG office was five minutes walking distance away from the explosion and one of my managers died.

With all of this change and turmoil, I decided to create a fintech startup. I quit KPMG. By then, I’d decided that the banking system needed to be fixed, and the only way to do it was through blockchain because with blockchain, there are no intermediaries. Then I applied to the Master of Financial Engineering program at Berkeley Haas and arrived in the states in March 2022. During my studies, I won the Franklin Templeton Blockchain contest in Palo Alto. After this, Jin and I decided to partner on a venture together and never looked back.

I’d decided that the banking system needed to be fixed, and the only way to do it was through blockchain. — Tarek Mohammad.

Jin Kim: I am from South Korea and worked in AI research as a machine learning researcher. That got me interested in trading with AI algorithms and a professor at my school. I started and ran a small hedge fund focusing on U.S. equity and crypto investments using AI. Though trading was still my thing, crypto trade got me more into the blockchain itself. So, I went to work as an investment analyst intern at the VC arm of Dunamu, the biggest crypto exchange in Korea. Since I liked finance trading, algorithms, and crypto, I thought I should attend a master in financial engineering program. The best program out there happened to be Berkeley, which is also near Silicon Valley. It fit both of my goals: to get a bit more academic and hands-on experience in the field and exposure to people who like to take risks and try new things.

What does the company do?

Mohammad: What we’re trying to do is build an infrastructure for institutions to be able to get crypto exposure, specifically on DeFi. So, if say, BlackRock wants to access the DeFi infrastructure or trade on crypto on DeFi, they can use us because we provide a solution. We hold custody of their assets and provide them with a DeFi interface and infrastructure that provides some compliance and comfort. 

When did you realize that your idea was unique and could work? 

Kim: It wasn’t a simple “aha” moment. We interviewed our potential clients every day to hear what they needed and found that every client is different, so their respective needs are also different. It helped us greatly to pause every now and then to review what we learned. With these quick pauses and iterations, we saw a pattern emerging with many people dealing with a problem that was worth looking at. Then we had a feeling about what would work. 

We saw a pattern emerging with many people dealing with a problem that was worth looking at. — Jin Kim

What are some of the challenges that you all are facing while building a startup?

Mohammad: It’s a perfect time to be a builder, but it’s a challenging time for fundraising, especially over the last few weeks with the banking meltdown. On the personal side, we also have unique challenges. As international students, it isn’t easy with our visas. Many international classmates immediately go to work after graduating for visa reasons instead of going into entrepreneurship directly. But running a startup, we needed to consider our visas while we figured out the payroll, hiring, and acquiring talent. Moreover, we also needed to figure out the product itself. I’m talking to customers every single day. 

What did it mean to get accepted to Techstars, and how has the experience been?

Mohammad: It’s really a great community. It’s a hub for entrepreneurship, one of the biggest hubs in the world, and one of the biggest funds. Of course, the process was challenging, with a low acceptance rate. But it’s an ecosystem. You’re surrounded by people you can relate to, people who are builders and ex-founders. So, it’s more of an ecosystem for us. It’s a lifetime membership.

What are some ways in which the Berkeley Haas community has helped you throughout this process?

Mohammad: We worked within the MFE network and the broader Haas alumni network. We get a lot of answers regarding our product and our company’s direction from talking to these people. So mostly, we think about this from the networking side and how existing students and MBAs with industry experience can help us shape our direction.

What was something that really attracted you to Berkeley Haas and how has being in Berkeley helped you in your pursuits? 

Mohammad: Maybe it’s a cliche, but some of the greatest startup companies come from Berkeley—firms like Intel, Tesla, and SanDisk. These companies are considered the north stars in their respective industries. Being in the Berkeley ecosystem pushes you every day to create and innovate. Beside Techstars, we got into SkyDeck, the incubator batch. This allowed us to connect to founders on campus. School for us was not just a place to study, but also a workspace to meet fellow founders and innovators. Finally, the campus location near Silicon Valley in the Bay Area boosted our reach outs and accelerated our product discovery. And I think that the international aspect and diversity here helps. On the mentor side, we are lucky to have Linda Kreitzman, founder of the MFE program and a current lecturer, and Professor Christine Parlour as mentors. 

School for us was not just a place to study, but also a workspace to meet fellow founders and innovators.— Tarek Mohammad

Kim: Berkeley was such a great place to connect with people from faculty to alumni. So many people helped us out or referred us to people who could be of help. It was a humbling experience. We often ask whether we deserved all this help. We hope to do the same for other Berkeley founders, peers, or alumni to pay it forward.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang on inventing new markets

| by Andrew Faught
Jensen Huang photo
Jensen Huang

Jensen Huang,  co-founder and CEO of Nvidia, solved the 3D graphic challenge for the personal computer in 1999 with the company’s release of the first-ever graphics processing unit (GPU).

Nvidia’s vision for the chips that fueled new video games existed before they had a name for it, Huang said during last week’s Dean’s Speaker Series at Haas.

“It’s OK that you don’t’ have the words to describe it, but you need to know what the company does and for what reason,” said Huang, whose company was named to Time Magazine’s annual list of the 100 most influential companies of 2022.

Nvidia set new standards in visual computing with interactive graphics on tablets, portable media players, and workstations. Its technology has been used in movies like Harry Potter, Iron Man and Avatar and is at the center of the most cutting-edge trends in technology: virtual reality, artificial intelligence and self-driving cars.

Now, Nvidia and other chip-makers’ stock shares are rising over their potential to power OpenAI’s language tool, ChatGPT, a “chatbot” that interacts in a conversational way with users.

(Watch the DSS talk here.)

Huang calls ChatGPT “the iPhone moment of artificial intelligence.”

“When was the last time that we saw a piece of technology that is so versatile that it can solve problems and surprise people in so many ways?” he said. “It can write a poem, fill out a spreadsheet, do a sequel theory, and write Python code. We’ve been waiting for this moment.”

Nvidia is constantly reinventing itself, which is the key for every entrepreneur, he said.

“Creating something out of nothing is a skill that I think every company or startup needs to have,” he said. “The energy of looking for something new – a new way of doing something – is always there.”

Leadership requires both dedication and empathy, he added.

“Being a CEO, being a leader, it’s a craft. You have to dedicate yourself to the craft. I don’t think there’s any easy answer aside from that. You have to have curiosity, you have to have deep empathy for other people’s work.”

Startup Spotlight: Alokee wants to be your virtual realtor

| by Kim Girard

Startup Spotlight profiles startups founded by current Berkeley Haas students or recent alumni.

Alokee

Team: Matthew Parker (co-founder and CEO), Hamed Adibnatanzi (co-founder and head of legal), Noman Shaukat (co-founder), Marcus Rossi (COO), and Mandy Kroetsch (CMO), all EMBA 23.

Photo of EMBA student Mandy Kroetsch
Mandy Kroetsch met Matt Parker in the EMBA program while she was bidding on houses.

When Mandy Kroetsch met Matthew Parker last year in the Berkeley Haas MBA for Executives Program, she was juggling classes while bidding on houses in southern California.  

“I was getting up at 4 a.m. and checking listings,” said Kroetsch, EMBA 23. “I found houses that came on the market before my agent even told me.”

Kroetsch started questioning the value of her real estate agent. Meanwhile, her challenges confirmed for Parker, a veteran Seattle real estate broker, that she probably didn’t need one.

So Parker decided to solve the problem by partnering with EMBA classmates to create startup Alokee. The company, which functions as a virtual real estate agent, empowers California home buyers to bid directly on properties.

The site is designed for people who grew up banking, paying bills, and shopping for most everything online without an intermediary, Parker said.

“Increasingly, Gen Z and other digital natives are baffled by why they have to talk to a real estate broker when they find all of the listings and tour the properties themselves and want to just make an offer,” Parker said.

“Increasingly, Gen Z and other digital natives are baffled by why they have to talk to a real estate broker.” —Matt Parker

Ease of use, money back

Launched nine months ago, the Alokee website is live in California, featuring photos of homes that have sold in San Jose and San Diego. The company plans to expand soon, and has a waiting list to beta test the site with customers in Washington, Oregon, Arizona, and Nevada. 

Alokee’s selling point is its ease of use: Create an account, provide proof of funds for a down payment, and then “make 12-to-15 decisions” on offer price, a closing date, loan payment schedule and amount, and other sales decisions. A buyer could potentially be in contract to buy a house in a matter of minutes, Parker said.  

Matt Parker in front of brown wall
Matt Parker, CEO of Alokee

A second benefit is that the buyer receives a chunk of the agent’s fee in cash back after a sale. In San Francisco, for example, where the agent commission on a home sale averages $40,000, Alokee takes a set fee of $9,000 and returns $31,000 to the buyer. “We don’t want to chase down the big commissions,” Parker said. He added that the check comes at a perfect time, as buyers typically invest the most in their houses—additions like solar panels, window replacements, energy-efficient appliances, and insulation—at the time of purchase.

An EMBA team

Parker started Alokee with classmate Hamed Adibnatanzi, a legal affairs veteran. Adibnatanzi used his law expertise to make sure that the mass of paperwork required for any real estate deal on the site was simplified for a direct buyer and met federal, state, and local requirements. 

Meanwhile, the team is still sorting out the website’s technical complexities. Noman Shaukat manages the code behind the offers that flow through the site. “It’s a technical challenge, not a legal one for us,” Parker said.

Parker also asked Marcus Rossi, a former commanding officer with the U.S. Marines, to be Alokee’s COO and invited Kroetsch, a chemical engineer by trade, to join as CMO. “I told him I’d love to help,” said Kroetsch, who worked with a branding agency to come up with the name Alokee, which combines the words Aloha and key (meaning the key to a house).

“We are working through the marketing plan right now, and I am happy to be a part of this team,” she said.

Learning to scale

This is Parker’s second startup. He came to Haas after starting national home improvement repair and renovation service ZingFix. At ZingFix, he realized that there are different skills required to manage a company as it scales across state lines. “A quickly-growing startup was a new business challenge for me,” he said. “The more people that joined, the more I realized that I would need an MBA to take care of our stakeholders.”

portrait of Homa Bahrami
Senior Lecturer Homa Bahrami coached the Alokee team.

Deciding on Haas, he said the program has provided priceless support for what he’s trying to achieve, from mentorship to participating in the UC LAUNCH accelerator program and competition, in which Alokee was a finalist. “Once you get to the finals of LAUNCH you get introduced to top-tier mentors and a storytelling coach. These people understand what you are doing, and they pick apart your business model,” he said. Senior Lecturer Homa Bahrami spent time coaching the team, helping them to develop a hiring framework. “Everything she told us was correct,” Parker said. “She’s probably in the top 10 smartest people I’ve met in my life.”

He added that Distinguished Teaching Fellow Maura O’Neill’s New Venture Finance course also helped them navigate as the company works to land a seed round of funding.  

While saving homebuyers money is a goal, Parker said the company will build more gender and racial equity into the home buying process by giving buyers direct bidding power. “Homes are how people stay in power and get in power,” he said. “We want to give all people the power to win in the real estate game.”

New book explores pandemic’s effect on innovation

| by Kim Girard
Jerry Engel
Jerry Engel

When Jerome Engel and colleagues presented a framework to describe innovation communities in 2014, the world was a different place. That book, Global Clusters of Innovation: Entrepreneurial Engines of Economic Growth around the World, explored the explosion and global trendsetting impact of Silicon Valley new venture development business practices. Now Engel has refined and extended that framework with Clusters of Innovation in the Age of Disruption (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), a collection of essays from business leaders and teachers worldwide. Berkeley Haas asked Engel, the founding executive director emeritus of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship (now the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program), about his new findings.

What made you want to revisit your study of clusters of innovation?

In my first book, we outlined and demonstrated how innovative technology companies tend to emerge in clusters in certain regions—and we questioned what drives that process. The world has since entered a period of severe economic, cultural, and environmental disruption due to an ongoing series shocks. We wanted to investigate what was happening in these innovative communities and whether they demonstrate enhanced resilience. We found that the answer was a profound “yes”. Clusters of Innovation demonstrate an entrepreneurial agility that enhances their resilience to external shocks, contributing significant social and economic value to society.

How do they do this? 

Through innovation, which I define as the positive response to change. Trends are obvious, especially technology trends which tend to be of relatively long duration. While a tech trend is not in itself innovation, its adoption into a valuable good or service is. Commercialization of such tech trends is often pursued by venture-capital backed entrepreneurial firms. Their initial market entry strategy is often to approach niche markets that provide a beachhead opportunity because incumbent firms are not serving their needs exactly. So smaller firms gain traction by providing these niche markets with products and services that provide a tight product market fit. Many entrepreneurial firms that blossomed in the midst of the pandemic were prepared for years before the pandemic. Their work in refining their technology and products put them in a position to provide solutions of huge impact quickly when the pandemic hit. This agility enhanced the resiliency, as they were already in the market with a limited but proven track record—so their businesses were positioned to explode into an “overnight success” when the shock occurred.

Can you provide examples of this?

Two clear, and very different, examples are Zoom in telecommunications and mRNA vaccine development in health care. Zoom had an innovative business model and mRNA developers embraced deep technology innovation. Zoom displaced slower- moving Cisco (WebEx), Microsoft (Skype/Teams), and other incumbents in revolutionizing business, personal, and education communication. Zoom became a verb, a place, a way of conducting much of our daily life. Zoom’s quick mass adoption revolved around a subtle business model innovation: Product-Led-Growth [PLG]. PLG is an evolution of the freemium model, where ease of user adoption is emphasized (just click the link, no log-ins, no hassle) and is often free. Traditional marketing is initially de-emphasized and that investment pored back into product development and viral marketing. Revenue evolves eventually from upselling to universities and larger businesses with value-added full-featured SaaS subscriptions. This ease of adoption drove the rapid behavior change that enabled a greater collective agility and a greater resilience.

A different type of innovation-driven agility is demonstrated in mRNA technology, which enabled the creation of vaccines in months rather than many years. Startups commercialized the novel mRNA vaccine technology, based on university research, before the pandemic. While the fundamental technology was revolutionary, its impact on the health of the general population was minimal. But during the pandemic, the benefits of this novel approach and the urgent need for a vaccine made its advantages clear, gaining the full attention major pharmaceutical firms. The rapid development and deployment of the various Covid-19 vaccines often depended on partnerships with major pharmaceutical companies, providing a perfect combination of speed and scale. The smaller firms’ product development speed combined with the larger firms’ capacity to scale trials, manufacture, and distribute.

What’s the takeaway from the book?

Economic regions such as Silicon Valley and other Clusters of Innovation around the world have proven to have enhanced resiliency to economic and environmental shocks. At the heart of such Clusters of Innovation are entrepreneurs, collaborating with venture investors and major corporations. Their constructive interactions build the resiliency required to quickly adapt and rebound from shocks. The process is helped by supportive government, universities, service firms, and other supporting actors in the community.

Startup Spotlight: HOPO Therapeutics imagines a future without heavy metal poisoning

| by Nathan Allen
Hannah Weber on campus
Hannah Weber

Startup Spotlight profiles startups founded by current Berkeley Haas students or recent alumni.

HOPO Therapeutics is a Berkeley-based biotech startup working to develop treatments for people exposed to toxic heavy metals in their homes, environments, and during medical procedures and treatments.

Hannah Weber, MBA/MPH 23, met HOPO co-founders Julian Rees and Rebecca Abergel—both scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and leading experts in heavy metal poisoning–last year at a meet and greet hosted by the Berkeley Life Sciences Entrepreneurship Center. 

The meeting was fortuitous. Weber came to Haas with a mission to work on developing a product or drug that could improve global health and to create a new model for access to medicine. Rees and Abergel told her that they’d been working on a drug to address lead poisoning and radiological hazards and were ready to find a partner to help raise funds and bring the drug to market. The meeting led Weber to join their team as vice president of strategy and business development.

A leap forward

More than 800 million children—about one third of the world’s young population—are currently living with lead poisoning, according to a UNICEF report. Other reports suggest half the current American population was exposed to harmful levels of lead in early childhood. 

HOPO Therapeutics’ first product— HOPO-101—is a novel oral treatment that works by selectively binding to toxic metals so they can be removed from the body, a leap forward from older-generation treatments that also remove essential minerals in the process, Weber said.

The company expects the Phase 1 clinical trial to begin later this year, testing for the treatment’s safety in humans. “This innovative product has a broad application for hundreds of millions of people around the world suffering from heavy metal poisoning, and needs to be launched in a way that maximizes its application for public health,” said Weber.

“This innovative product has a broad application for hundreds of millions of people around the world suffering from heavy metal poisoning.”

HOPO-101 has received government funding to date, but one of Weber’s first goals for the company is to secure venture backing, starting with the company’s first seed round. Over the next five years, the company plans to develop relationships with physicians, governments, impact investors, and global health nonprofits to establish distribution channels. 

“This is a lesson in sticking true to our values and finding partners that share our global health mission, and are eager to help us make it happen,” she said.

Weber pointed out that the pandemic has increased awareness of the importance of private and public partnerships in global health—her original mission for coming to Berkeley Haas.

“It’s made us all aware of the need for quick development and quick distribution of affordable life-saving drugs,” she said. “It’s also made the world appreciate the importance of public and private partnerships and the importance of collaboration across the table.” 

Working on the company while at Haas also has its benefits, she said. “There are so many classes that allow you to explore your own venture within the classroom,” Weber said, noting that Health Management professional faculty members Kim MacPherson and Jeffrey Ford have been particularly helpful mentors. Weber has also found many opportunities to tap into the Bay Area startup ecosystem to advance the company, participating in the National Science Foundation’s I-Corps program for entrepreneurs, as well as the San Francisco B-School Disrupt showcase.

A passion for improving access

Weber, whose father was a physician, has been around healthcare her entire life and said she’s always had a passion for treating patients who had little access to care. Though she entered the undergraduate program at Georgetown University on a pre-med track, she quickly pivoted to global health and, more specifically, sought to focus her career on addressing how the pharmaceutical sector could be a partner in improved access.

An internship in Tanzania during college working on introducing digital innovations into government hospitals also led her to consider the impact a private company could have on global health. That led her to L.E.K. Consulting after graduating, where she worked in the Life Sciences Practice for nearly four years. Learning about strategy and market access from the point of view of pharmaceutical companies, made her look forward to being involved in making some of those company-forming decisions.

“I was excited at the prospect of working with a team developing novel medicines and asking big questions about how we could get them to people that needed them most,” Weber said. “I was looking to get involved with a small company launching a new technology, one that had that mission in mind.”

That mission led her to pursue an MBA/MPH at Haas, and has been the foundation for growing HOPO Therapeutics.

“I had a strong conviction that it was possible to do well and to do good. Business school has been an eye-opening chance to see how it’s possible,” she said.  “Luckily, I’ve found a community at Haas and at HOPO that really resonates with that idea.” 

Startup Spotlight: Bird plans to make banking easier for African immigrants

| by Kim Girard

Startup Spotlight profiles startups founded by current Berkeley Haas students or recent alumni.

Photo of Joe Obeto
Joe Obeto, MBA 21, co-founded Bird to make opening bank accounts and sending money easier for African immigrants.

Joe Obeto, MBA 21, co-founded startup Bird to help solve a vexing roadblock he and other African immigrants face when they arrive in the U.S.: trying to open a bank account. We recently interviewed Obeto about what led him to become an entrepreneur and his big plans for Bird.

Describe your startup in 30 words or less.

We’re building a platform to enable non-US residents to open a bank account, a checking account, and do easy and frictionless cross-border transfers. 

What was your background before coming to Haas?

My undergrad degree was in computer information science. When I graduated, I had several options: to pursue the traditional technology route as a software developer or maybe go into finance. What really shifted for me was during a summer that I went to Wall Street to intern for Credit Suisse. My experience that year was very incredible, and that really pushed me toward finance. I came to realize that not only do I like finance, I really wanted to become an entrepreneur.

What was the problem that you are solving with Bird?

When I first came to the U.S., I learned that I had to be a resident of the country for about six months minimum before I could open a bank account. With most major banks, this is the policy. In addition, sending money back to Nigeria is very expensive or it takes several days for the money to get to the final destination because there are so many intermediaries. It also costs 10 times more to send $100 to Nigeria than what it would cost you to send to a place like the U.K. or Poland because they have stable currencies.

So you decided to address these challenges as an entrepreneur?

I thought we could build a solution to solve this. So we decided to build a platform to do two things: enable non-U.S. residents to open a checking account and also enable a frictionless, low-cost way for you to be able to transfer money cross-border. There are some regulatory processes that we need to complete before we can actually go live with the banking solution, but the cross-border solution is going to be ready soon.

How does a Bird service work?

We don’t have a banking charter, so we cannot actually hold your funds. What we’ll do is partner with a local bank so when you open an account on the Bird platform and deposit money, it will be held at the bank, so it’s FDIC insured, meaning your money is going to be safe. You can do a wire transfer and have a debit card from the Visa network or the Mastercard network. You can use the card globally, anywhere that Visa or Mastercard is accepted. In addition to that, you can also transfer money.

How will transferring money work?

Right now, we’re establishing a payment corridor between Nigeria and the U.S. We want to test this corridor out. Eventually, we’re going to expand to other corridors in Africa. We’re looking into Ghana, South Africa, and Kenya, as well as Rwanda.

Right now, we’re establishing a payment corridor between Nigeria and the U.S. We want to test this corridor out.

Will transferring money using Bird be cheaper than other methods?

Yes, it is cheaper because rather than having multiple intermediaries moving money from one end to the other, we will use a stablecoin on the blockchain to move money cross-border. Essentially, we convert dollars to USDC stablecoins (a cryptocurrency). When it gets to Nigeria, that USDC stablecoin is on-ramped to Nigerian currency. The same thing will happen when somebody’s trying to send money to the US. We’re able to cut out a lot of middlemen and drastically reduce the cost of sending money internationally, especially to Africa.

Have any Haas courses helped you build the company?

New Venture Finance with Professor Maura O’Neill.  She’s incredible. I learned a lot from that course, and even today when I’m talking to investors or negotiating a term sheet, the learnings from that course have been helpful; the entrepreneurship course taught by Kurt Beyer was helpful as well, and an operations course taught by Professor Terry Taylor showed me how to run operations of any firm. We went through lots of cases, analyzing different companies and what led to their successes, what led to their failures. As somebody building a company, you need to be able to learn from failures so you don’t repeat the same mistakes.

You also placed second last spring at UC Berkeley LAUNCH after going through the accelerator program. How did that help? 

LAUNCH gives you a framework for you to validate your idea. It uses the lean startup methodology to develop a very strong value proposition. You go out to talk to customers to challenge your initial hypothesis, test it, validate it. Ultimately, when you come out of LAUNCH, you realize that you have a stronger position for your customers and that you are building something that people actually want and need.

Did you always plan to get an MBA?

That has always been part of my strategy. An MBA is not going to necessarily make you a successful person or a successful entrepreneur. But it does reduce your chance of failure and increases the odds of your success. Building on that knowledge of having a structured approach to entrepreneurship, to starting a business, is what the MBA equips you with. Besides that, I think the network that I’ve been able to build here in the Bay Area has afforded me the opportunity to build something that I think will be a success.

There’s a spider robot in the attic! MBA students help win national E-ROBOT competition

| by Kim Girard

 

(L-R) Alexander Sergian, Joseph Aharon, John Aquino, all MBA/MEng 22, worked on a business plan for the U.S. Department of Energy's American-Made E-ROBOT competition as a capstone project in their program.
(L-R) Alexander Sergian, Joseph Aharon, John Aquino, all MBA/MEng 22, worked on a business plan for the U.S. Department of Energy’s American-Made E-ROBOT competition as a capstone project in their program.

A group of Berkeley Haas MBA students helped build the business plan for an attic-retrofit system based around heat sensing drones and foam-spraying spider robots that took the top prize in the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) 2022 American-Made E-ROBOT competition.

Alexander Sergian, Joseph Aharon, John Aquino, all MBA/MEng 22, built the business plan for team RoboAttic/Thermadrone, along with Zixuan Chen, EWMBA 23, and Vincent Chang, MBA 22. The robotics project was led by Dr. Avideh Zakhor. 

Dr. Zakhor led the team of about 35 people, including UC Berkeley students, professionals, and consultants, who developed the RoboAttic/Thermadrone technology.  The three top winners in the multi-stage competition were announced April 7 by the DOE’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE).  (Watch the robot in action in the video below)

Homes lose up to 20% of their heat and air conditioning due to poorly insulated roofs. Yet just 1% of building floorspace in the U.S. undergoes a meaningful retrofit each year due to the high cost and invasive nature of construction and renovation, according to Ram Narayanamurthy, a Program Manager in the Department of Energy’s Building Technologies Office.

Thermadrone’s software uses thermal drone camera images to diagnose and identify opportunities for attic insulation retrofits. Once attics in need of insulation are identified, Roboattic robots clean, air seal, and apply spray foam insulation to the building envelope. This enables construction workers to retrofit previously inaccessible attics with a PS4 controller. Finally, Thermadrone software provides quality assurance by measuring and verifying the retrofit was done properly.

An earlier round of the E-ROBOT Competition challenged participants to design and build robot prototypes that could be used to retrofit buildings to improve energy efficiency. For the second and final phase of the competition, 10 finalists were tasked with building viable business models for their respective startups.

Sergian, Aharon, and Aquino worked on the business plan for RoboAttic/Thermadrone for both the competition and as their capstone project, a required component of the MBA/MEng Program. 

Their work included estimating the total market size, sales, marketing, channel partners, and go-to-market strategy. “As MBA/MEng students, we were brought on as folks who were not only technical enough to understand the technology, but also strategic enough to put together a compelling business vision,” Aharon said. “It’s an example of the sort of cross-disciplinary collaboration that we constantly see around UC Berkeley.”

To be successful, the team had to prove the energy consumption and cost reduction benefits as well as worker safety potential. 

To be successful, the team had to prove the energy consumption and cost reduction benefits as well as worker safety potential.

“We were presented with an exciting technology,” said Sergian. “It was our challenge to figure out how to commercialize the product and make it a market success.”

Photo of Zixuan Chen, EWMBA 23
Zixuan Chen, EWMBA 23, worked on the business plan with UC Berkeley Professor Avideh Zakhor.

The students said they applied lessons from their MBA coursework in research and development and finance to the project. They calculated a total market size for building envelope retrofits in the US at about $1.25 billion, estimating that contractors would be willing to invest about $10,000 per robot. The value of the robot is that it can access places in attics that are hazardous and foul for construction workers to crawl through, Aharon said. 

Chen, who also worked on the project while in the evening & weekend MBA program, helped with marketing research, identifying potential user groups and conducting interviews with facility managers, utility companies, and government agencies.

“In the business plan stage, I worked with Avideh to identify critical cost components and revenue sources,” she said. She also developed profit and loss statements, cost performance models, and a manufacturing and scalability analysis.

The other  competition winners included a semi-autonomous flying quadcopter air duct inspection drone and a robotic retrofit tool used for caulking, aerosol sealing, and foam insulating buildings.

Berkeley undergrad student team wins global venture capital final; EWMBAs take 3rd

| by Kim Girard
Undergrads holding check at VCIC finals.
The UC Berkeley Undergraduate student team took first place at Global VCIC: Victor Li, David Wang. Carol Xie, Allen Wang, and Blair Wu.

A group of UC Berkeley undergraduate students’ stellar startup-vetting skills netted them first place against a field of 120 teams at the Global Venture Capital Investment Competition (VCIC) finals.

Members of the winning team that competed at University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School on April 8-9 included Berkeley Haas student David Wang, BS 22, (Business & Chemical Engineering); Victor Li, BS 22, (Electrical Engineering & Computer Science), Carol Xie,  BA 22, (Computer Science & Statistics); Allen Wang, BA 23, (Economics & Data Science);  and Blair Wu, BA 24, (Economics & Biology).

A team of Berkeley Haas evening & weekend MBA students took third place, including Andrew Celin, John Eastman, Shenshen Hu, Terrence Tse, and Georgia Wright-Simmons, all EWMBA 22.  

Photo of EWMBA team
The Berkeley Haas EWMBA team, left to right: Georgia Wright-Simmons, John Eastman, Terrence Tse, Andrew Celin, and Shenshen Hu, all EWMBA 22.

“I’m blown away by these wins,” said Rhonda Shrader, executive director of the Berkeley Haas Entrepreneurship Program (BHEP). Shrader, who accompanied the students, said she was pleased that VCIC returned as an in-person event this year. 

More than 120 university and graduate school teams compete at VCIC. The competition has a two-fold mission: to make students VCs for the day and allow startups to jumpstart their fundraising. Since the competition’s inception in 1998, more than 800 founders have received 1,500 practice term sheets from student investment teams.

At the finals, the Berkeley undergraduates performed due diligence on three startups. After writing up term sheets, the team recommended a $5.25 million investment in agriculture technology startup Atira. Atira is developing an indoor system that promises to grow vegetables 40 percent faster without energy waste or pesticides. 

“The business has a lot of potential,” said Wu, who took a gap semester off to work at a venture capital firm last year and met her teammates through Berkeley’s Association of Chinese Entrepreneurs (ACE). “They’d already acquired patents and had a strong team. Their product was solid and there’s strong market demand.”

Photo of the undergrad team at worka
The UC Berkeley undergraduate team at work during the competition.

David Wang, BS 22, said he believes that two key factors helped with the win: team dynamics and mentorship. “We purposely looked for folks with diverse functional and industry experience ranging from energy consulting to healthcare investment banking to tech entrepreneurship,” he said. 

“We purposely looked for folks with diverse functional and industry experience ranging from energy consulting to healthcare investment banking to tech entrepreneurship.” —David Wang.

Wang also credited Haas MBA alumnus Elan Tye, a principal at JAZZ Venture Partners, and Matt Kirmayer, a partner at law firm Perkins Coie, for spending “countless hours preparing us for the competition…We could not have done it without them,” he said.

Shrader said the team “crushed” its partner meeting round, nailing both the startup valuation and the Q&A session.

“Everybody had a role and everybody spoke at the finals and you could see that their emphasis was on team work,” she said.”This team definitely had confidence without attitude.”

Boba dreams: Undergrad student to open Aura Tea in downtown San Francisco

| by Kim Girard
Photo of Kashish Juneja, BS 22
Kashish Juneja, BS 22, is opening Aura Tea shop in downtown San Francisco at the end of March.

Kashish Juneja, BS 22, is learning about running a business in real-time as she prepares to open startup Aura Tea’s first shop in downtown San Francisco on March 27. In between juggling a mid-term and going to class she’s taking calls from her contractor and interviewing for counter help at the shop that will serve boba tea with a twist: It’s sugar free, made with plant-based milks, and under 100 calories. 

“It’s insane from the operational side,” said Juneja, whose first shop is strategically located on Spear Street across from Google and Databricks offices, where employees are starting to trickle back. “We need to make sure there’s a demand and that we’re making sure the product is good enough so that people will continue showing up.”

In many ways, Aura Tea has been a team effort from the start. Juneja recruited 22 interns from the UC Berkeley community who help with marketing, TikTok, and Instagram, where she’s drawn support from NFL players to local musicians. Students and Cal athlete ambassadors helped her host on-campus events that offer “boba for de-stressing”—and she recently held a pop-up on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, giving away Cal-themed boba tea drinks.

Aura Tea space on Spear
Aura’s new shop will open March 27 on Spear Street in San Francisco. Photo: Kashish Juneja.

Kaitlin Dang, BS 24, an intern who serves as business growth lead at Aura Tea, said her favorite Aura flavor is mango pineapple.

“Before I started working here I was an avid milk tea connoisseur, trying new places,” said Dang, who is in  her second year of the Berkeley Haas Global Management Program. “My taste has changed from sweeter teas and now I drink a lot of fruit teas. Most fruit teas are very sweet and not refreshing. Aura tea has a refreshing taste.”

Solving her own problem

Juneja, who grew up in Cupertino, has always loved boba. “Our high school was boba central, with a boba shop across the street that was open during lunch every day,” she said. “I played tennis every day so it balanced out.”

Photo of Kaitlin Dang drinking boba
Kaitlin Dang, a sophomore in the undergraduate Global Management Program at Haas, is Aura’s business growth lead.

Her boba addiction continued at Berkeley, but drinking those 500 extra boba calories without her usual tennis playing led to an unwanted 30-pound weight gain. Aura Tea, she said, was founded in part to solve her own problem.

The idea to start making healthier boba tea emerged during a Plant Futures course that she took with Will Rosenzweig, the faculty chair of the Center for Responsible Business at Haas who co-founded the Republic of Tea.

She’d already taken an entrepreneurship bootcamp and was interested in starting a company. Plant Futures, a collaboration between Berkeley Haas, Public Health, Engineering, Public Policy, and the Berkeley Food Institute, pushed her idea forward.

Throughout the pandemic, Juneja could be found crafting tea in her apartment, testing different oat, almond, and pea milks, which make her tea drinks vegan, and sweeteners, using fresh loose leaf green and black teas from the grocery store. (Boba pearls are naturally vegan, as they’re made of tapioca starch, which comes from cassava root.)

Juneja tested her teas on friends and classmates. In the early recipe days, she conducted a blind taste test: her milk tea against the Boba Guys’ tea and others. (Boba Guys was co-founded by Andrew Chau, MBA 11.)  “We didn’t win but it was a good start,” she said. “Our taste was nowhere that it is now.” 

It took time to get Berkeley-based impact investor David Jiang to take a chance on her venture, she said. Jiang’s wife’s father was a tea farmer in China, and they all shared an interest in tea. “There was a lot of making it and taking it back to them,” Juneja said. “I was taking what I learned in class and bringing them my tea and my pitch deck.” 

I was taking what I learned in class and bringing them my tea and my pitch deck.

Valuable startup experience

The shop, which will take to-go orders online, will offer a combination of grab-and-go and fresh-brewed drinks with boba tea in flavors including strawberry, matcha, pineapple, and mango. Aura will offer coffee drinks, too, and a masala chai with infused with spices and CBD for relaxation. (Aura’s boba pearls are made by US Boba Company in nearby Hayward, Calif. Her tea is sweetened with Purecane, which she says she chose for its lack of an aftertaste.) 

Students drinking boba at an Aura Tea rooftop party.
Students sample the tea on a campus rooftop last week during Aura Tea’s launch party.

Dang said she’s getting valuable experience working for Aura. “There’s a lot of creativity involved,” she said. “I have the space to try the things I want to try. We’re appealing to a certain wide demographic: corporate employees, health influencers, healthcare professionals, and foodies. I like to try things I’ve seen work in other industries, casting a wide net.”

Juneja, who will work in the shop part-time until graduation, said she’s grateful to her entire community of classmates, professors, and advisors for all of their help with Aura’s creation.

 “When I wrote my essay to get into Haas I said I wanted to solve a problem,” she said. “My dream came true.”

How burnout built a startup

| by Kim Girard

Yannell Selman, MBA 21, arrived at Berkeley Haas suffering from what she called “late-stage clinical burnout” from work. 

Within months, Selman was working to solve the root causes of her own problem.

Yannell Selman
Yannell Selman, MBA 21, turned her experience of suffering burnout into a startup.

That work turned into a startup, Cultiveit, which is building an online wellness platform that human resources departments use to recommend “high-quality time-off” experiences to treat worker burnout.

“Our goal is to shift workplace culture so people have boundaries between working and not working,” said Selman, who co-founded the company with classmate Dunja Panic, MBA 21. The pair met during the UC Berkeley Student Entrepreneurship Program (StEP), which helps students find other entrepreneurs and explore the viability of their startup ideas. 

Photo of Dunja Panic
Dunja Panic, MBA 21, met co-founder Yannell Selman at Haas.

First, Selman and Panic considered a startup focused on kids, screen time, and parental burnout. Then they pivoted to exploring burnout as an adult issue. Last fall, while conducting research, they noticed a pandemic “paradigm shift” as the lack of separation between home and work increasingly impacted workers.

While working on the startup at UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck incubator, they began viewing burnout as not an individual’s problem, but as a systematic issue, connected to how work is structured. 

They began viewing burnout as not an individual’s problem, but as a systematic issue, connected to how work is structured. 

It starts with “a grind of nonstop work that blends from day to night,” progressing to cynicism that leads to negative attitudes toward clients and your team, Selman said. Finally, there’s helplessness. “You lose hope that anything will change,” Selman said. “You try to make a change but realize nothing works so you quit or get a new job. You take two weeks off, but then the cycle starts again.”

Selman’s leadership on the issue has attracted attention. TaskRabbit CEO Ania Smith wrote a recent Forbes article that cited the benefit of  “what burnout consultant Yannell Selman calls “high-quality time off” (HQTO).”

“To qualify as HQTO, employees should engage in activities that are active and support cognitive distance (like rock climbing versus a massage), intrinsically satisfying and reconnect employees to their non-work identities (salsa dancing versus laundry), disconnected (hiking versus watching TV), sensory-stimulating (surfing versus video games) and encourage meaningful growth (woodworking versus social media),” Smith wrote.

Kelli Schultz, a senior people development specialist at TaskRabbit, recently worked with Cultiveit to help employees figure out what HQTO means to them—and urged them to make the most of a paid week off after a busy seasonal period.  

After the vacation week, TaskRabbit employees shared photos, emphasizing how they’d challenged themselves. Schultz said she headed to Tennessee where she went went ziplining, left her computer at home, and hit the hot tub when she thought about checking emails. 

Results of the company’s twice-annual engagement survey showed the program’s success: a jump of 12 points in employee satisfaction, which Schultz called “amazing, especially during Covid.” 

Selman also worked with leaders at content management company Box last July. She held a one-hour info session about burnout, attended by 60 people; 24 people signed up to try a new HQTO experience, said Andrew Chang, corporate finance and strategy manager at Box.

Each participating employee received $50 to spend on experiences ranging from cheesemaking to a botanical garden trip. The feedback from participants was enthusiastic, and planted a seed that company leaders are responding to, Chang said. “Anyone can talk about burnout and what they think it is,” he said. “Yannell tells it to people in a way that’s meaningful. That was the “wow” moment for me.”

Selman is now planning to expand Cultiveit, working on a seed funding round and continuing work with their corporate partners. The company makes money by receiving a percentage of the cost of classes or experiences it promotes to its clients.  

“The main thing is that we want to engage with the community,” she said. “We want to meet with more managers and HR leaders who see this as critical and want to participate. Nutrition and meditation aren’t enough to cure burnout. You have to change your work habits.”