Ken Singer, managing director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley, discusses his role in Skydeck, the start-up accelerator, and his own background as an entrepreneur in part two of this two part series on entrpreneurship
TRANSCRIPT
Speaker 1:Method to the madness is next. You're listening to method to the madness of biweekly public affairs show on k a l x Berkeley celebrating bay area innovator. Good afternoon. This is your host, Vanessa ing. Two weeks ago we learned about skydeck and the Berkeley method of entrepreneurship from Equinox. Did you founding director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and technology at UC Berkeley, otherwise known as the CET. [00:00:30] Joining us today is Ken Singer, Managing Director of the CET. Today we'll learn more about how skydeck helps to develop Berkeley's entrepreneurial culture. Thank you for joining us, Ken. So just in case some of our listeners weren't able to tune in two weeks ago. What is skydeck?
Speaker 2:Yes. A skydeck is a joint venture between three big groups on campus. The College of Engineering, which is the, the school that I work for and [00:01:00] the business school, Haas business school, and the vice chancellor of research and few years ago the deans and the vice chancellor got together and realized we had a missed opportunity in entrepreneurship, that we should have a a coordinated effort in facilitating and developing startups that are popping up all over campus. You know, we all have different skillsets and different kinds of strengths that we can contribute to the growth of [00:01:30] small companies. And, um, while we were seeing Stanford and several other universities make inroads by having, um, it seemed to be a more collective effort that it only made sense for us to do the same thing and pulled together a brand that was Berkeley wide, right. Berkeley campus wide rather than just in everyone's different colleges.
Speaker 1:Could you tell us more about your relation to skydeck?
Speaker 2:So I s I started, um, I started working [00:02:00] at, at Berkeley about eight years ago as an instructor for the mobile applications course. It was the first class that they did taught in that and I was running a startup at the time and two years ago the startup was sold and I got, was pretty exhausted. It was five years of just 24, seven working. And I thought, well, what if I go back to the university, maybe teach a little bit more and just kind of take a breather. And, uh, in talking to ECLAC, he said, hey, actually we're looking for someone [00:02:30] who might be people to head up the CET, uh, because I'm moving into developing more programs. And so he brought me in and we became co-directors of the CET two years ago and they had just started skydeck around that. And that was the first, I think, cohort of teams that had gone into skydeck.
Speaker 2:And, um, and so I was there kind of at the beginning to help form some of the programmatic elements of how teams might be selected. We at CET were, were [00:03:00] we're, we're, we're partners with skydeck in many ways, one of which is we share resources, we share mentors. But what we also do is we feed teams up to skydeck. So a lot of our teams from CET, which were part of the engineering school. So most of our teams are our heavy engineering based. So some, uh, some devices, some, uh, research based, uh, algorithm stuff, you know, some applications. But [00:03:30] a lot of it is heavy, heavy research based and the teams that have come up with those concepts or those products need a little bit more help before they are ready for skydeck. Right. So a lot of the business school students, they already know how a terms sheet should look like.
Speaker 2:They already know what negotiations should sound like. The, they've had some of that training. In fact, most business school students have had business experience. They're back at school, right? But most of our engineers that [00:04:00] their undergrads of course have oftentimes never worked before. And if they're graduate students, they've gone through the whole track where they've never really been an industry. So they, they, they themselves have not had much industry experience. So what we do is we put them through a, what we call an incubator, which is venture lab and venture lab is Kinda like Kinda like your, um, what does that first five kind of head start program for [00:04:30] engineering-based startups where we help you learn how to hire and fire people on your team. Cause many of these people haven't even been hired before, right? Because they've never been in an industry. We help them talk to investors, how to find them, how to talk to them.
Speaker 2:We also help them find first customers or how to even talk to a customer, how to even look at a customer. Cause they'll, they'll use the name, hey we want to sell to apple. They don't realize there are multiple groups at apple, [00:05:00] different people who have different agendas that you need to find the right person who will be an advocate. So they don't even fundamentally understand the, the, the challenges ahead of them in some of the things that they absolutely have to master. So what we do is in venture lab and they stay for anywhere between three to six months. We help them through those elements, get used to those, those activities before the ones that are ready, we graduate them up to Skydeck and they perform much better [00:05:30] when they get get up to skydeck cause they're ready for what Skydeck, which we consider a skydeck and accelerator.
Speaker 2:And what that means is that a team is pretty well formed. So they know who, what everyone is doing on the co in the company, there's no real hole in the company. It's a strong fundable team. They have a product, they know what their product market fit is, they know who the customers are. They have probably a dozen or so customers and [00:06:00] they know how their customers purchased product and they're there really to fundraise and, and grow. And so what you'll see with a lot of teams up there, they've got really strong presentations, really sharp pitches. They know how to sell their product. They also know their market extremely well and now they're trying to find the right mechanism of for growth. And that could be the right partner that can fund their growth or the right venture capital firm that can fund their [00:06:30] expansion. So it's really for more mature teams that have gone through, you know, they've gone through the ropes either through venture lab or through other means, but they, they tend to be well positioned to get funding and, and grow from there.
Speaker 1:Could you tell us how skydeck is different from all the other um, hubs and accelerators in the bay area? If I am an entrepreneur, how would I know which tech space I should use?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's been, there's [00:07:00] been this incredible explosion of incubators and accelerators and programs and, and, and whatnot. And, and I'm actually part of several international ones to bring companies from other countries here to be incubated or to get injected with some of the silicon valley culture as they say. And I think they have a list of several thousand of these programs around the world. And just in Berkeley I heard there's something like six or seven and sometimes they're topical, sometimes [00:07:30] they are just physical space and other times they're really programmatic. And um, I would say the difference between them and that will actually, let me tell you what I think they are. Incubators are really, they provide a few things. One is obviously space. Many of them provide space and either at a discount or free. They also by virtue of giving you space, they give you a community of other startups and entrepreneurs [00:08:00] who you, by virtue of being next to them, you'll find ways to collaborate and share information and be able to really fast track your, your path to success by learning from each other.
Speaker 2:It's a pure driven educational model, right, where you're learning from each other and that actually I would say from being an entrepreneur myself as the way that I learned a lot is that you build a community of, [00:08:30] of likeminded folks who are dealing with same issues and frankly actually what you end up talking about is not much. It's not really the, the technical parts or the vcs. Even you don't. You do share some information about that, but the vast majority of stuff that you share is around, I am dealing with some serious stress right now. I've got a guy who's about to leave or have IP issues or I'm running out of money and it's not really, can you solve this problem for me? It's just can you listen [00:09:00] to me, have a freak out so that I don't freak out in front of my team?
Speaker 2:Right? And maybe you can commiserate with me for a little bit and then I can sound totally with it when I'm talking to, to my team. Because being an entrepreneur, being a founder of a company is by far the loneliest experience you will ever have. Because you cannot share a lot of information with a lot of people, especially the people you're closest to your team. You can't tell them you're running out of money, you can't tell them. You might have some concerns about the IP, [00:09:30] you can't tell them you might be getting sued by apple or by Google or whomever, right? And these things happen, right? And so you end up having to hold back enormous amounts of information because that's the nature of the game. And you have to be careful about what you hold back. But there's certain things that will randomize your team or your effort.
Speaker 2:And what drives a startup is momentum. It's this belief that you're, you're going to be doing something great. And so it becomes a very lonely road for, for that founder. So if you have a community [00:10:00] of people who, who get together because they share space, you have that valve, it's a safety valve that just blows steam, you know, and, and keeps you saying it's a really important element of all of that. And if you talk to people who have successfully exited out of these incubators, you'll hear a very common theme about, you know, it was really important that we are, we were in that environment with all these other entrepreneurs, right? And this is why the good incubator's and accelerators like skydeck are extremely careful about [00:10:30] who they select because you, you don't want to introduce a wrong element in there that can cause people to stop sharing with each other across the different companies.
Speaker 2:The other thing that, that incubators and accelerators do is that they leveraged the extended network of the people involved in the incubator. So you see these independent incubators pop up in San Francisco and throughout the country. And the person who started it usually has a huge Rolodex of people that they know [00:11:00] from investors to partners, to vendors, to all these folks, lawyers, consultants, all these people who can help your business and they become the connector. Right. What's that? The, the huge advantage that skydeck has is its association with UC Berkeley and UC Berkeley has something like 475,000 alumni that who are currently alive and that can be resources for [00:11:30] companies that are starting up and that's where I think Stanford's done a great job. Where we can do a better job here is that they've engaged their alumni network of course are alumni network tends to be very, very technical as well as well because there's so many that stayed in the bay area.
Speaker 2:Um, so that network is what drives the growth of these startups. The more people that you meet who might have relevant connection to your business is equivalent to maybe 15 connections because they can introduce [00:12:00] you to so many more people. So you know skydeck because of its connection with Berkeley is probably these potentially the strongest network that you can have. Because it's not just Jeff Burton who runs Skydeck, who's network you're going to be tapping. And by the way, he's a Stanford Grad, right? And he's such a huge advocate for this program at Berkeley. But you're also tapping the networks of all of the deans, all of the executives, the professors, [00:12:30] all the people who want to give back to Berkeley. And we have tons of people who come back who want to help smart, small companies. Those people become your resource that you can't buy. You just can't buy access like that. That's something that you have to be a part of in order to get access to.
Speaker 1:It does seem like Berkeley has a very strong alumni network, but a lot of the national press seems to focus on Stanford and its ability to produce entrepreneurs [00:13:00] with great commercial innovations. Why do you think this is the case?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you know, I can take you back as I was, I was a history major. So I like looking at this in a chronological and historical way. And actually it's both historical and geographic. So if you look at Berkeley, Berkeley abuts a hill. And so growth potential for Berkeley for companies that might sprout up around the campus are fairly limited. And that happened [00:13:30] actually fairly early because after World War II, the East Bay exploded, you know, um, and during World War Two, so, uh, there wasn't much room for growth, you know, for, for cheap space. And if you look at Stanford, it, there is a reason why they call it the farm is that there's a lot of, there was a lot of space, not so much anymore, but back then it was a strawberry fields. So geography had something to be to play into it over the course of the last 50 years.
Speaker 2:Right. Because companies could find inexpensive places to, to build their businesses. [00:14:00] But also there was a strategic decision that was made back during World War II. Right? Um, during World War II, the government enlisted several universities to help them develop a weaponry, right? So MIT did a lot of work, um, and so did so did Berkeley, you know, with our role in, in discoveries around nuclear technology. And so Berkeley saddled up with government and got a lot of research grants and a lot of research money. And when you start that, it [00:14:30] just becomes easier to get government money. And Stanford went the other direction. They partnered up with the private industry. And so if you look at who set up shop, literally on their campus, you had HP built literally on their campus, you have Xerox Park, you have now SAP. So you have some of the very largest companies literally on their location.
Speaker 2:And that strategy has proven out to be probably the better one. Um, and when you are a [00:15:00] private university, you get to make a lot of decisions faster. And I think you're also allowed to make some more mistakes because you know, you're afforded that luxury of, of changing course and, and try new things. So, um, you know, with those two things, Stanford was able to grow very quickly with these, you know, other companies that were built around their campus with their professors, with their students, and it was [00:15:30] also in the company's best interest to promote themselves. And if you think about government research, it's really not in the government's research agenda to promote, you know, on the scale that small, large companies do. Um, what they've been successful at, especially if some things have military application, they don't really want to let people know. So that, that's kind of what I think has created that disconnect between what Stanford now represents and what Berkeley, the, the, [00:16:00] the lack of a PR engine that Berkeley has had.
Speaker 2:And you know, with, with the way that these communities work, you can't just be the only one talking about how great you are. You need to have other people talk about you. And when you have thousands of companies down, you know, Google and Yahoo have that all and Cisco and, and sun that spun out of, of the Stanford campus. And of course Berkeley has a role in Sun as well, but you know, when it came out of, out of Stanford, they talk about [00:16:30] that and they end up promoting a, that campus by virtue of, of, of them promoting themselves.
Speaker 1:You're listening to method to the madness, a biweekly public affairs show on KALX Berkeley. Joining us today is Ken Singer, Managing Director of the Center for Entrepreneurship and technology at UC Berkeley. You mentioned earlier that Stanford's strategy of partnering with Industry ultimately proved to be the better method. What do you mean by that? [00:17:00] Are The CET and skydeck part of an effort to emulate Stanford's entrepreneurial direction?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I, I would, I would correct my previous statement. I do, I wouldn't say that it's better. I think it was more effective in achieving some of the goals that, that I'm sure Stanford had, which was to become the nexus of, of startups and innovation. And, and Berkeley, I would say is on par. If you were to look at just the kinds of innovation that comes off of the Berkeley, uh, Lawrence Berkeley [00:17:30] labs and within our own campus here, but we don't have the same kind of marketing machine or the, or the kind of, um, push towards promoting it. So it's, um, it's, it's different. And this is, if you look at the reputations, and in fact I just have recently talked to some students are trying to figure out whether they should go to Berkeley or to Stanford. And the pitch that they get from Stanford is very much around, hey, we have an entrepreneurial community here.
Speaker 2:Everyone's [00:18:00] doing a startup. And you know, you'll, you'll love that cause this is what, uh, what real researchers do. And, and you know, Berkeley is great academically, it's great, but that they produce professors and researchers. And I heard, I've heard that a couple of times now from students who have gotten that, that pitch and to some degree they're, they're right, right? They're right. That Berkeley does produce professors and researchers, but they are world-class that turn around and create companies like Marvell and cadence and, and [00:18:30] companies that you might not be familiar with, but there are multibillion dollar businesses that power every, virtually every machine that you use, right. If you use up in the bay area. Okay. Yeah. Right. So if you use anything with a chip in it, um, other than a potato chip, you're, you're dealing with something that was designed by Kate on Caden software.
Speaker 2:Right. We don't know that because many people don't know that because Berkeley oftentimes does the kind of research and the kind of of applications [00:19:00] that aren't necessarily sexy, but they're foundational and so everyone touches them. You just don't necessarily know. You do. So earlier you mentioned that you, uh, had been a history major. I was wondering if you could speak a little about that and then tell us more about your background and how you got here. Yeah. So I, uh, so I grew up in, in the Seattle area and um, had always wanted to be a, a microbiologist. I always wanted to do some research where I could some somehow have an impact. And [00:19:30] My mother was an English teacher, so I ended up coming to Berkeley as a dual major between English and microbiology. And I quickly lost the love of microbiology cause in my classes it was mostly premed students who didn't necessarily like the material, but they're there to, to get good grades.
Speaker 2:And I wanted to be around people who I could have interesting conversations with. Right. And where I could find that was in my history courses that I took and I, I took a few too many actually, [00:20:00] and realized in order for me to graduate on time, I would end up having to be a history major. And um, yeah, that's, that's poor planning. But, uh, it was felicitous because I learned an enormous amount. Yeah. And every, it's funny because I always get the first day of class, I teach several classes every year in the engineering school and, and it's a multidisciplinary course. So I have students from, from Haas, I have students from the humanities, but half of them are engineers of some flavor. And I [00:20:30] always get that question from someone who has pulled up their iPad or their their computer and Google searched my bio and there's one hand that goes up and says, um, so I noticed that you were a history major at, at Berkeley.
Speaker 2:Uh, can you tell us more about that? Or the braver ones will say, hey, can you tell us how that applies to entrepreneurship? Which would they really mean is how are you qualified to teach me today? Right? Which is a classic Berkeley, you know, it's a classic [00:21:00] Berkeley thing for students to do that. I, I'm used to it. And so what I tell my students is that history is not what you might think it is, which most students, because of AP tests and because of the way we teach thinks, think that it's a string of, of facts and string of dates and people to memorize and wars and all of these things that are just something that you have to, to memorize and get tested for. And what I tell them is if [00:21:30] you take a really good history course, you find out very quickly that history is not about these things.
Speaker 2:History is about decisions. History doesn't exist in a vacuum. It actually can only exist when there's human beings involved. That is actually the definition of history. Every day as an entrepreneur, you do maybe 50 to 60 decisions of which three or four are so consequential. If you make the wrong one, your company might die. Right? And so if you've spent years [00:22:00] studying what goes into a decision, what are the consequences, what are the unintended consequences? What are the things that you might not even know might be exogenous things that affect a decision. If you spent years analyzing that stuff, you become very comfortable making calculated decisions that hopefully will be good ones and you're comfortable with that. And so I tell my students, if they haven't studied history, they haven't studied decision making and they're going to [00:22:30] be pretty far behind when they need to make a couple of really key ones in their startup that usually shuts them up.
Speaker 2:Could you tell us a little bit about your background in entrepreneurship? So I came to Berkeley as, as I mentioned before, completely planning to do something different. And in 1999, the Internet bubble was still quite, quite huge. It Ha it was still expanding. And I sat down with a couple of friends [00:23:00] and we just started kicking around some ideas and it just kind of rolled down the hill and we started a company, raised a bunch of money. And before I knew it, I turned around and realized I was doing a startup and I'd quit school and, and, and headed down this career path that, that I look back now and go, that's insane. I was 1920. I couldn't even run a car in Germany as I was, as I found out, as I was trying to go to a meeting that was not possible. So, uh, [00:23:30] you know, it just kind of happened I think by the luck of the draw of being the right in the right place at the right time.
Speaker 2:You know, you're in the bay area, you're around other people who are innovative and, and, and interested in starting something. And also my father was an entrepreneur. He had started his own company, his of consulting business for, for, for banks. But uh, so it wasn't really foreign in my, in my family to do something like this. And actually they are fairly supportive of me doing that. They were one of the investors in [00:24:00] that first company, which, uh, didn't make money. We ended up selling the remnants of that company to, to a company in Singapore, but learned an enormous amount during that process. And once you've gone through it, it's really difficult to do something else. You know, I'm one of those people who is curious about everything and if you're curious about everything, there's kind of two paths for you. Either you become a museum curator or a professor, which I didn't have the, uh, the patients for that path.
Speaker 2:[00:24:30] But, uh, the other thing is to be a consummate tinker and be an entrepreneur because as an entrepreneur, you don't just do technology stuff. If you're tech entrepreneur, it's not just building product. But it's also working with customers. It's also working with finance, it's working with legal, it's working with patents and and conferences and marketing and all the elements that go into making a company fire up all the different [00:25:00] parts of your brain. And it's all interesting. It's all interesting to see how they're all connected. And if you're a systems thinker like I am I, it's just really fascinating how, you know, you pull a string over here and marketing and suddenly product changes, right? You change a little bit on the product and suddenly customers change the type of customers who come to you. And it's just kind of this game of, I was just trying to describe this to someone.
Speaker 2:It's like a game of Kerplunk, right? You've got a bunch of marbles on top of this things and you pull different things and suddenly for whatever reason, that last thing that you pulled out and made [00:25:30] everything collapsed. But why was it just that last one? Right? So it's really fascinating to me to seal all those kinds of things. And so I was driven to entrepreneurship and startups. Part of it was because of time and place, but I think I'm well suited for it because of this natural curiosity that I had. Could you tell us about some notable startups that skydeck has helped accelerate? Yeah, so we've had a few that have recently got funded, uh, you know, small, small amounts that pre series a, [00:26:00] we have one company called Lilly and they were two guys who are in my mobile class a few years ago were actually my big data class.
Speaker 2:They created a, an indicis outside of of the course. They created a drone company, so that's a bit scary. But what they did was they put a camera on it and a sensor so that it follows you while you're doing extreme sports. So you know you've got the, the GoPro, but it's your, it's very solid cystic, right? It's from your [00:26:30] standpoint, it's where you're jumping off of something. This thing is actually watching you as if you're having an out of body experience. So you can watch yourself do this stuff as if you're an observer. And a, they recently got some and they didn't know each other until my class. One was a business student and the other one was an engineer. And in our, in our class they, they met and now they're best friends and they've created a company together. And I would say that if there was ever a legacy that I would like to leave behind [00:27:00] is that I created an environment in which people who wouldn't have typically met or collaborated found a venue to do that and some really cool, amazing things happen there that, uh, had an impact.
Speaker 2:Right. That that would be for me, what I would love to leave behind at Berkeley, we've got a couple others that are earlier stage that we're really proud of. If they're successful, it will be a huge deal. We have one in cancer research and [00:27:30] these guys are, one is a researcher, the other one is a business major. They're called XL bio. And what they discovered was that metastasizing cancer cells are very difficult to replicate out of the lab. Other cells you can replicate outside the outside of the body, right? And um, and metastasizing cancer cells, if you're familiar with it, spread very quickly. And you might have a few attempts at chemo before you know, it ravages your body. [00:28:00] So you gotta get that Chemo right? But you know, chemo is very individual, right? It's, it might work for one person and it might not work for another.
Speaker 2:And so what doctors typically do is they find that the chemo that they think would work on you, and that's just based on the population, it works on the highest percentage of people, they'll try that on you. That's the logic they gave go through to figure out what chemo to use. So what these guys have found was they could get metastasizing cancer to replicate outside [00:28:30] the body. They discovered a way to do that and now you can test chemo, all the different types of chemo on the cells outside the body to figure out which one will work for you to tailor the chemo to your body, which is amazing because you know, this has an, this has the potential of saving lives. But it also has the potential of making life a little more pleasant for those who don't have a chemo that will work for them.
Speaker 2:They don't have to spend their last year destroying their body and feeling [00:29:00] horrible. They just can have, you know, enjoy the last, last year. So if you think about the human impact of some of this research that's going on, it only happens if someone finds a way to commercialize it. And that's the role that we play is to take these amazing things that are happening up on the hill that's happening on campus and helping those researchers and those innovators turn that discovery into something that can impact all of us. That doesn't just [00:29:30] reside in a paper, but that can have a human impact on us. So that's how I think, you know, if I were to look at what we do as a center, I can't tell people that I'm, I'm curing cancer, but I can certainly say that I'm helping people who are trying to cure cancer. Right. And that that's, it's an [inaudible].
Speaker 2:It's good to say it's, it's a good thing to be able to look at your job and say, hey, we're, we're doing something that has that kind of impact. Thanks so much for joining us today. [00:30:00] If people want to get in touch with you, how can they do so? Yes, so there's a couple of ways you can email me. I have an open door policy. It's at 10 dot singer@berkeley.edu so k e n Dot s, I n g e r@berkeley.edu. You can also go to our website, [inaudible] dot berkeley.edu and you can get more information about our programs. Thanks again for joining us today, Ken. It's been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. It was great.
Speaker 1:[00:30:30] If you have questions or comments about this show, go to the k a l x website and find method to the madness. Drop us an email. Tune in again, two weeks from now at this same time. Have a wonderful weekend.
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