Berkeley entrepreneurship begins here
The University of California, Berkeley offers entrepreneurs an unparalleled education, top research centers and faculty, and the opportunity to be part of the innovative culture in the San Francisco Bay Area and Silicon Valley. The Berkeley Gateway to Innovation (BEGIN) is the portal to the entrepreneurship community at UC Berkeley- our goal is to help students, faculty, researchers, and other innovators understand the resources available at Berkeley to support educating entrepreneurs, commercializing research, and advancing startups.
BEGIN is funded in part by the State of California Assembly Bill 2664 for entrepreneurship and innovation expansion at the University of California, Berkeley .
Roadmap for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UC Berkeley
Berkeley Campus Life
New Venture Education
Acceleration
Funding
Berkeley-Haas
Entrepreneurship Program
Blum Social Innovator OnRamp
Intellectual Property & Industry Research Alliances (IPIRA)
Jacobs Institute
for Design Innovation
Sutardja Center for
Entrepreneurship & Technology
CITRIS Foundry
NSF I-Corps
LAUNCH
SkyDeck
Startup @ Berkeley Law
Roadmap for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UC Berkeley
Roadmap for Entrepreneurship & Innovation at UC Berkeley
Berkeley Campus Life
New Venture Education
Berkeley-Haas
Entrepreneurship Program
Blum Social Innovator OnRamp
Intellectual Property & Industry Research Alliances (IPIRA)
Jacobs Institute
for Design Innovation
Sutardja Center for
Entrepreneurship & Technology
Acceleration
CITRIS Foundry
I-Corps
LAUNCH
SkyDeck
Startup @ Berkeley Law
Funding
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State grant accelerates UC Berkeley's innovation and entrepreneurship
The University of California, Berkeley has announced promising early results from a $2.2 million grant provided by the State of California. The grant has helped UC Berkeley, already a global hub for innovation, to expand its entrepreneurship activities with new facilities, courses and programs.
Can There Be A National Security and Development Agenda for the U.S.? Michael Nacht at the Blum Center
By Tamara Straus On October 10 at the first Blum Center Faculty Luncheon devoted to “Digital Transformation of Development,” Michael Nacht, the Thomas and Alison Schneider Chair in Public Policy, presented on “The Nexus of National Security, Diplomacy, and Development”—and gave a sober assessment of what that nexus might produce under the Trump administration. Nacht, …
Now Available: Introduction to Mindset and Behavior for Innovation (video)
Which mindsets and behaviors do successful entrepreneurs typically have? How can entrepreneurs learn and practice these mindsets and behaviors to become more innovative? Presented by Ikhlaq Sidhu, director and chief scientist of the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET). This 1 hour lecture is a helpful resource for any instructor, student, innovator, or entrepreneur. …
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Big Ideas Judge Ryan Shaening Pokrasso: A Commitment to Social Impact and the Law
Ryan Shaening Pokrasso (JD ’13), a San Francisco Bay Area attorney who specializes in assisting social entrepreneurs, has been a longtime judge and advisor for the Big Ideas student innovation competition. Ryan entered the legal profession by way of nonprofit policy advocacy. He served as program director for New Energy Economy, a nonprofit organization in …
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GoGoVan creator Steven Lam visits SCET’s Newton Series
Steven Lam, co-founder of GoGoVan and Sutardja Center alumnus, visited SCET’s Newton Series lectures to share his experience as an entrepreneur. GoGoVan, a company that connects van drivers with customers to transport goods, was valued at $1 billion as of August 2017 — the first “unicorn” startup for Hong Kong and SCET. The company recently raised …
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VIDI—Another Way to See Surgery
By Veena Narashiman ’20 Basic surgeries are far from basic. They require approximately 50 tools, which take about 2 minutes each for an experienced technician to clean. Operations in a trauma unit require as many as 400 tools. And in both environments, surgical tools can be easily misplaced, thrown away, or misassembled. In fact in …
Artificial Intelligence and the Rumsfeld Test
“But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” – United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, February 12, 2002 An artificial intelligence strategy is the corporate equivalent of your spleen: everyone has one, but not everyone understands quite what it will accomplish. There are bold plans afoot everywhere in …
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Multidisciplinarity in the Age of Specialization? Some Thoughts on 21st-Century PhDs
By Sophi Martin When you get a PhD, you are the world’s expert in some narrow but incredibly deep scientific realm. You have asked a question never before asked, developed a hypothesis informed by reviewing the previously collected knowledge in the space, spent significant time testing, defending, and retesting your ideas, and arrived at some …
‘The most powerful force in the world’: Coinbase CEO on the rise of cryptocurrency
Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong discusses the future of cryptocurrency at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in September. Digital currency exchange company Coinbase is taking the bitcoin world by storm. CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong took the stage at TechCrunch San Francisco in September to share his experience in building Coinbase. According to Armstrong, about 40,000 people signed …
Double Dose From The Daily Cal
A two-fer from The Daily Californian! Profiles on National NSF I-Corps team Squishy Robotics led by Professor Alice Agogino AND one of our LAUNCH standouts, senior Jeremey Hammer, founder of Bear Founders. Fun facts: Professor Agogino has been through the National I-Corps program twice (once through the I-Corps-L program and then the regular track with Squishy). …
SCET hosts alums, faculty, and friends for Cal football
This past Saturday, the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at the University of California, Berkeley hosted their first tailgate open house at California Memorial Stadium. Cal alumni, Berkeley faculty, and some of Berkeley’s best students came together to cheer on the Golden Bears. In attendance were Pantas and Ting Sutardja, benefactors of SCET and …
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MarHub: A Technology to Help Refugees Navigate Asylum
In 2016, as Sarrah Nomanbhoy was starting her MBA at the Haas School of Business, the refugee crisis in Europe was in its second peak year and over a million applicants applied for asylum to the EU. Nomanbhoy, a native Californian, had been watching the refugee crisis unfold since her undergraduate days at Stanford, where …
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LAUNCH’s Byte Foods Raises $16.9M
Congrats to Megan Mokri (Berkeley-Haas EWMBA 16) founder of Byte Foods on the company’s latest round, bringing the total to $16.9M. If you work in SF, you’ve most likely enjoyed a healthy meal or treat from their smart fridges. Megan made the most of her time @ Haas with a Hansoo Lee Fellowship, Turner Fellowship and …
UC Berkeley & UCSF Team Named As Finalist for Collegiate Inventors Award
Team Vidi, a National NSF I-Corps team from Summer 18 has been named a finalist in this annual competition sponsored by the US Patent and Trade Office. Federico is a recent Berkeley Haas MBA, John and Robert are both med students at UCSF and Hector is in UCB-UCSF’s joint bioengineering PhD program. Vidi’s solution for …
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The Lemelson Foundation and the Blum Center Partner to Equip Students to Deliver on Big Ideas with a Small Environmental Footprint
The Lemelson Foundation, the world’s leading funder of invention in service of social and economic change, and the Blum Center for Developing Economies are embarking on a yearlong collaboration to enable students participating in the University of California Big Ideas Contest to increase their expertise in developing environmentally responsible inventions and innovations. The initiative exposes …
Thirty One UC Berkeley Students Headed to Clinton Global Initiative University
Clinton Global Initiative University (CGI U) is President Clinton’s initiative to engage the next generation of leaders on college campuses around the world. Each year, CGI U hosts a conference where students, youth organizations, and topic experts come together to discuss and develop innovative solutions to pressing global challenges with policy makers, topic experts, philanthropic, …
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Big Ideas Winner Ricult Advancing Machine Learning for Improved Smallholder Farming
By Lisa Bauer Globally, 1.5 billion people depend on small farms, which produce roughly 80 percent of the developing world’s food. Yet smallholder farmers remain some of the world’s most impoverished and food insecure people. Aukrit Unahalekhaka, a co-founder of Ricult, a 2017 Big Ideas winner, knew this implicitly. He had grown up in a …
Whither 21st-Century Development? A Q&A with Brad DeLong
Brad DeLong, the chief economist of the Blum Center, has spent the past four decades researching, writing about, and influencing public policy in the areas of business cycle dynamics, economic growth, behavioral finance, political economy, economic history, international finance, and the history of economic thought. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1982, and earned …
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Leslie Lang Tsai on Effective Philanthropy and the Chandler Foundation
By Veena Narashiman ‘2020 How do we create enduring prosperity rather than address just the symptoms of poverty? This is a question that the Chandler Foundation (formerly known as the Cassia Foundation) has been grappling with over the years. On September 5, Leslie Lang Tsai, who serves as the assistant vice president and general counsel …
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Your AI is ready to talk: voice tech is getting conversational
Those voices aren’t in your head: voice technology is taking Silicon Valley by storm. As one of the hottest topics at TechCrunch Disrupt 2018 in San Francisco (where for the first time each keynote presentation was transcribed automatically in real-time), voice technology dominated two panels. Executives from top tech companies, including Google and Amazon, discussed …
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Berkeley Blockchain Lab featured in Wired
The University of California, Berkeley’s Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET) is one of the first institutions to offer university courses on blockchain technology. Specifically, SCET’s Blockchain Lab facilitates collaboration between new ventures, industry scholars, and academics to evaluate, validate, and execute innovative blockchain projects. “Academics feel a lot of pressure to maintain their …
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