Topic: Entrepreneurship

Former Dean Rich Lyons, BS 82, takes the helm of the mothership as chancellor of Berkeley

In the hours following his announcement as UC Berkeley’s 12^th chancellor, Rich Lyons made headlines in major media outlets in California as well as national publications, including The New York Times, Bloomberg, and Sports Illustrated (since he’ll be overseeing Cal’s athletics program). News of his appointment was later splashed onto giant screens at the New York Stock Exchange. If ever there was a time to toot one’s own horn, this was it.

But on Lyons’ X account, to which he posts frequently, the 63-year-old former Haas School dean had just six words: Today was kinda a big day. He then expressed appreciation for all the “lovely messages” he’d been sent. Those who know Lyons know this wasn’t a humble brag. He is, quite simply, humble: an authentic leader who exudes enthusiasm for all things Berkeley, where he’s worked for the past 31 years—not to mention his years as a student. In fact, he’s the first UC Berkeley undergraduate alum to become the campus’s chancellor. 

During his 11 years as the rock-star dean of Haas, Lyons racked up numerous successes: the construction of the nation’s greenest academic building, Chou Hall; a curriculum revamp that emphasized experiential learning and soft leadership skills, like creative problem framing; new dual-degree programs with Berkeley Engineering and the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology; and, perhaps most notably, a strong culture codified in the four Defining Leadership Principles (DLPs): Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always, and Beyond Yourself.

Since his move to the broader campus in 2020, he’s built out the entrepreneurship and innovation efforts at the university with an eye toward increasing opportunities for all members of the community and creating new sources of revenue. His role oversaw Berkeley’s startup accelerator SkyDeck (which he helped found as Haas dean) and its expansion to both Italy and Japan, as well as the technology transfer office, managing IP licenses for breakthroughs like Nobelist Jennifer Doudna’s CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing. And he initiated a data project that led to Berkeley’s #1 ranking for its number of venture-backed companies founded by undergraduate alumni and #2 for its number of founders in PitchBook’s 2023 rankings.

Now his leadership will be tested at an impressive scope as he guides some 70,000 students, faculty, and staff and the world’s top public university into the future.

How will his leadership skills honed at Haas translate to the university level? Will the DLPs go Berkeley-wide? What’s his vision for the university? And will he still play his guitar in public? Read on for the answers.

Culture champion

As chancellor, Lyons will continue to focus on culture. “If I’m obsessive about anything,” he said in a Berkeley News article about his appointment, “I’m obsessive about how leaders work with their people to strengthen culture.”

But that doesn’t mean the DLPs, so pivotal to Haas’ identity, will be adopted by the university. “Berkeley is a wonderfully complex organization,” Lyons says. “If somebody thinks I’m starting by thinking about how am I going to get those four principles to the campus level—no. It’s a much bigger set of opportunities for values leadership.”

For Lyons, “values leadership” means identifying and elevating the qualities that distinguish Berkeley from other great institutions of higher education. One place to start, he believes, are UC Berkeley’s principles of community, which were developed collaboratively by students, faculty, staff, and alumni. The seven principles call for, among other things, civility and respect in personal interactions and participation and leadership in addressing society’s most pressing issues.

“The principles of community are profoundly important to this university,” Lyons says. “But people don’t know how many there are. They can’t even name very many of them.” Partly, he says, this is because the principles of community weren’t designed to be differentiating. “We don’t just codify values in order to be differentiated,” says Lyons. “But I think we have some headroom to be more differentiated at the campus level.”

Values leadership is one of three “domains of opportunity”—along with resource leadership (fresh funding opportunities) and research leadership (life-changing discoveries in all disciplines)—that Lyons says will be key for Berkeley’s future success.

Long-term societal benefit

Though Lyons is still in the listening phase of his tenure and expects his ideas to get shaped and adjusted, he does articulate a vision for Berkeley. “I’ve been here for a long time,” he says, “so I do have some thoughts.”

On a macro level, he wants to continue pursuing what he refers to as the core of the 10-campus, UC-wide mission statement: Long-term societal benefit. “But I want to pivot on that and then start asking questions,” he says. “Like, how does Berkeley, with all the long-term societal benefit that it already provides, go up a level or two on that?”

Within 10 years, Lyons says, “We’re going to make Berkeley the university of choice for faculty, staff, and students. Period.” And that means embracing being a public school. “All the other great research universities that come first to people’s minds in the U.S. are not public,” he says. “We are the only public that’s in the pantheon.” But no Ivy League school, for example, comes close to Berkeley’s operating scale with undergraduates, nor can those schools match Berkeley’s reputation for challenging convention (like birthing the Free Speech Movement). “That doesn’t make everybody want to be at Berkeley, but it makes a lot of people want to be at Berkeley, because there’s so much meaning and purpose here,” Lyons says.

A Berkeley narrative

In his previous role, as Berkeley’s first-ever chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer, Lyons began developing that sense of purpose. Part of his charge was to harness Berkeley’s myriad opportunities and make entrepreneurship and innovation more inclusive campuswide.

One of Lyons’ solutions was the Berkeley Changemaker program, a series of more than 30 undergraduate courses across disciplines that share three through lines: critical thinking, communication, and collaboration. Inspiration for the program came from the course, later a book, called Becoming a Changemaker by Haas professional faculty member Alex Budak, who was the first lead faculty for the Berkeley Changemaker gateway course. To date, some 20% of Berkeley undergrads (a subset that tends to be more diverse than the general undergrad population) have enrolled in Changemaker courses, which involve more than 60 faculty from over 30 academic departments and 11 schools and colleges.

The idea is to encourage entrepreneurial thinking in humanists and scientists alike and to offer a signature Berkeley way of being: questioning the status quo to benefit society. The curriculum helps students articulate their passions, develop a sharper sense of what they want to accomplish, and understand how to make that happen.

“Berkeley Changemaker is emerging as a narrative and an identity,” Lyons says. “There are students who are saying, ‘That’s who I want to be. And I might apply and go to Berkeley because I’m seeing that narrative and a curriculum to back it.’”

Currently, students can earn a certificate, though Lyons and his co-lead in the effort, Haas professional faculty member Laura Hassner, EMBA 18, would love for it to be a minor. And while there are a few Changemaker courses available to graduate students, he’d love to build that out too.

Novel revenue streams

Of course, all the purpose in the world isn’t going to resonate if there isn’t money to support the top faculty, students, and staff. Berkeley simply doesn’t have the coffers to rival top private institutions. To remedy this, Lyons is seeking unconventional funding opportunities, beyond advocating to legislators in Sacramento and courting major donors. He’s galvanized by this question: “How does Berkeley participate more in the economic value that it creates in ways that are consistent with its mission and values?”

It’s not a new question for Lyons. He’s spent the last four years seeking novel revenue streams for the university via Berkeley’s innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystem.

His vision has involved capacity-building platforms to combine the many thriving ecosystems on campus while still keeping them decentralized. One such platform is the Berkeley Research Infrastructure Commons, which makes scientific instruments on campus, say a mass spectrometer or a DNA sequencer, available to industry users for commercial purposes when they’re not in use. These external companies pay fees to Berkeley but retain their intellectual property, a system that significantly lowers the cost of R&D.

“We’re going to make Berkeley the university of choice for faculty, staff, and students. Period.”

Another platform involves shared-carry (or shared-return) venture funds, which pay the university a portion of their profits. The idea is this: In any venture fund, there’s a general partner and a limited partner. Typically, the general partner receives 20% of the return on the whole portfolio. For the seven UC Berkeley shared-return funds, the general partner gives back to Berkeley half of its return, or 10% of the total. The funds, while a separate entity from the university, can use Berkeley branding via an affiliation agreement.

Inflows stemming from Berkeley’s IP portfolio are a small slice of the cash flow that will be needed to secure Berkeley’s future. People have started bringing Lyons transformative ideas, he says. One could potentially generate $300 million in unrestricted dollars in 10 years, which could be used for the core and the harder-to-fund things, like doctoral students, research in the humanities, and deferred maintenance on research facilities. This is the magnitude of the solutions he’s seeking. “If we have nine or 10 ideas that could generate a $100 million cash flow that’s unrestricted and can fund the core over the next 10 years,” Lyons says, “that’s where I see a lot of opportunity.”

Authentic leadership

Lyons says he’s going all-in as Chancellor—which includes breaking out his guitar for a song now and again. “I don’t want to overdo it,” he says, but he will, “when the time is right.” He and his wife, Jen, are moving into University House on campus. “We’re going to be totally present,” he says. “For example, I’m going to pop in sometimes when I walk by a tour with prospective students and their families and just say, ‘Hey, welcome to Berkeley! I’m the Chancellor. Thanks for being here.’”

Those personal touches—the kind he was known for at Haas—should serve him well. In one of outgoing-Chancellor Carol Christ’s final campus interviews, she was asked what it takes to lead UC Berkeley. In addition to having good listening skills and tolerance for different opinions and protests, she said, “It takes liking students, understanding the time in life it is for them.”

For Lyons, interacting with students is one of the joys of his work at Berkeley. “I love to teach, and I love staying connected to students,” he says. “And students can sense authentic connection or the lack thereof from a mile away.”

Professional faculty member Thomas Fitzpatrick, MBA 11, witnessed this authentic connection firsthand at Caffe Strada the month before Lyons was named chancellor. Lyons had been deep in conversation with a colleague at the cafe, and when he was leaving, a student caught his attention.

Lyons didn’t appear to know the young man, but they spoke for a few minutes, then Lyons took off a pin he was wearing on his lapel and gave it to him. “They were both beaming,” Fitzpatrick says. Even more than the kind gesture, Fitzpatrick, who specializes in leadership development and communications, was struck by Lyons’ demeanor throughout the interaction.

“He wasn’t so busy that he couldn’t pause what looked like an important conversation to connect with a student,” Fitzpatrick says. “He didn’t rush it. He was really enjoying the encounter.”

The student turned out to be Owen Knapper Jr., a then-sophomore majoring in political science. Knapper didn’t know Lyons, but he wondered where he got the pin he was wearing, a 3D gold bear in mid-stride. Knapper explained that he often wears suits to student-government meetings, and he’d been looking for one just like it.

Three weeks later, when Lyons was announced as chancellor, Knapper told his fellow members of student government his crazy story about meeting him. “It looked like he was in a hurry, but he did stop to engage with me,” says Knapper, who’s been wearing his pin at his summer internship in Washington, D.C., with Congress member Barbara Lee. “And I think that’s what’s important, because he stopped and listened and had a conversation.”

Knapper, who’s currently a student senator, is one student among some 45,000, but it was a good first impression. “Having that interaction with him was impactful, and I can’t wait to see the amazing work he does,” Knapper says. “I would love to learn some of his plans for communities of color on campus, transfer students, formerly incarcerated students. Just seeing how he will listen to students and try to create tangible solutions. I only can vouch for him so much, but I hope that he will be off to doing great things.”

Challenges and optimism

For all his enthusiasm, Lyons acknowledges that he’s becoming chancellor during a fraught time for college campuses nationwide, including Berkeley. Demonstrations, sometimes volatile, have fractured campus communities, leaving some feeling angry, scared, and alienated.

“Every moment in history is complicated, but this is an especially complicated time in higher education by a lot of objective measures,” Lyons says. “People are feeling the pressure societally, these tectonic shifts.”

Which is why the values leadership he espouses is so important for Berkeley’s future. Getting it right will be a true test of his skill as chancellor.

“My goal as a leader then and now is to facilitate and sustain a culture that supports diversity of perspective, provides every student with a true sense of belonging, and encourages educational innovation,” Lyons told Berkeley News.

That’s not going to be easy for any college or university leader, but Lyons has a quiet confidence that, years from now when his term is over, Berkeley will be in an even better place. “I see 10 years out that we could really make some remarkable advances and deliver even more into that mission of long-term societal benefit,” he says. “So I go in with eyes open and lots of optimism.