Startup @ Berkeley

There are some great talks at Y Combinator Startup School here in Wheeler Auditorium at Cal. The last couple talks are coming up with  Tony Hsieh (Zappos) and Mark Pincus (Zynga). If you missed the event, it can be watched on justin.tv after the event is over.

Be sure to make the ST@B after party at Haas (5-7:30). We are going to be broadcasting the after party with the original Justin.tv hat cam, so tune in if you can’t make it.

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On October 24th, Y Combinator will be holding their annual Startup School event at Berkeley. The event will feature talks from entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Evan Williams and Biz Stone (Twitter), Tony Hsieh (Zappos), Paul Bucheit (G-mail, Friendfeed), Mark Pincus (Zynga), and others.

The registration for the event has closed, but ST@B is hosting an after-mixer at the Bank of America Forum in the Haas School. That is open to all ST@Bers who can register here.We hope you can make it for food, beer, and fun! Thank you to Dorsey & Witney for sponsoring the event!

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Now that finals have come and passed, we’d like to share some of the projects presented in IEOR 190A. The class focuses on providing students teams with the resources and training to begin an entrepreneurial venture, from idea to inception. This semester, five teams were selected to showcase their companies to a panel of venture capitalists, lawyers, and entrepreneurs. We profiled each startup below:

Mobile Match
The team created a mobile application that connect conference goers. Users that download the application take a quick survey about their interests, career, and reasons for attending the conference. Based on these results, users are given recommendations of other conference attendees that they are most likely to “connect” with and alerted of their location.

Prize Parking
The team seeks to solve the recurring pain (especially in Berkeley) of finding parking spots in busy urban areas. Prize Parking aims to be an “EBay for parking” by connecting individuals with unused spots with drivers in need of a place to park. The team has built a mobile app for finding spots based on a user’s current location and a website for long-term parking needs.

OddJobbr
The team seeks to create a mobile platform for outsourcing small, repeatable tasks such as completing surveys or proofreading essays. The concept is similar to Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, but is designed primarily for smart phones.

IHouse
Connects students in the US seeking to learn Mandarin with teachers in China, via Skype. The team cited a lack of affordable language education and an underutilization of internet-based learning as their primary motivation in pursuing this venture.

OmeTest
Provides mail-in STD testing services. Seeks to provide a level of privacy and convenience not provided by current STD testing options, which include free clinics, health centers, and personal physicians. STD testing kits are mailed home, require a urine sample, and are 99.7 percent accurate.

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The Daily Cal wrote an article on entrepreneurship at Berkeley. ST@B was mentioned in the article, which you can find here.

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Every semester there are a few class presentations that turn into companies (or at least continue on beyond the semester). Here is a short list of class presentations coming up. Please note, you should probably get permission from the professor before showing up to class. You can find that information by searching for the class here.

IEOR 190A- Engineering Entrepreneurship- 5/6 and 5/11, 3:30-5PM (150 GSPP)

CS 169- Software engineering- May 15, 2-5PM (306 Soda)

CS 160-User Interface Design and Development- Games with a purpose- May 6, 10-12 (306 Soda)

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Bootstrapathon Part 2 today was a great success! Thanks all for coming!

For the first hour, Eric Snell from IndieGoGo, Christina Pearson from Pillsbury Winthrop, and Olga Grigoryeva from Plug and Play talkeded about how to bootstrap and reveal available services for entrepreneurs, followed by elevator pitches from student groups and startups (at different stages). Dave Charron of the Lester Center was kind enough to moderate this event. Check out the video of the first hour.  The second hour (or more) was followed by networking.

Bootstrapathon was co-hosted by the Berkeley Business Plan Competition, Computer Science Undergraduate Association, Eta Kappa Nu (Electrical Engineering Honor Society), Global Social Venture Competition, Haas Entrepreneurship Association, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Plug and Play Technology Center, and Startups at Berkeley (ST@B).

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Vivek, Co-Founder of Rapleaf talks about his experiences as an entrepreneur. Check it out!

Powerpoint slides: http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dfsvsrv7_72fx4k72w5

Video (warning: several expletives): http://qik.com/video/1564639, http://qik.com/video/1564668

Join us tomorrow, Tuesday April 28th @ HP Auditorium, 306 Soda – for Bootstrapathon Part 2!

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Do you want to work on a new venture this summer, either part-time or full-time? If so, Bootstrapathon is for you! This event is geared towards folks who have an idea and are looking for support or who are interested in working on someone else’s idea. 

Monday – Bootstrapathon Precrusor

On Monday, April 27th at 6:00pm-7:00pm in 380 Soda Hall we will have Vivek Sodera, Co-founder of Rapleaf talk about his experiences of bootstrapping a startup from college – as a precursor to Bootstrapathon on Tuesday. 

Tuesday – Bootstrapathon

The event will take place on Tuesday, April 28th at 6:30pm-8:30pm in HP Auditorium. This event is being co-hosted by the Berkeley Business Plan Competition, Computer Science Undergraduate Association, Eta Kappa Nu (Electrical Engineering Honor Society), Global Social Venture Competition, Haas Entrepreneurship Association, Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Plug and Play Technology Center and Startups at Berkeley (ST@B). Space is limited, please sign up here: http://www.zoomerang.com/Survey/?p=WEB2293XQ4P2ZY

If you are interested in pitching your idea to the audience on Tuesday, please email Dave Bend (dave_bend@mba.berkeley.edu).

The Agenda for Tuesday

6:30-6:45 — Pizza!

6:45-7:00 — Five minute blurbs from Plug and Play as well as Pillsbury Winthrop (Introductions by Dave Charron)

7:00-7:15 — Danae Ringelmann discusses her experience launching IndieGoGo (Introduction by Dave Charron)

7:15-7:30 — Pitches by entrepreneurs to the audience (timekeeping by Dave Bend)

7:30-8:30 — Networking

See you there!

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Entrepreneurs feast off ideas, and Berkeley has a thriving community of student entrepreneurs. A simple discussion type of venue is perfect for the exchange off these ideas, perspectives, and experiences. While this often happens informally, oddly we’re not aware of any such organized discussions about entrepreneurship in Berkeley (Startup2Startup organized by Dave McClure is something similar with meetups every month in the South Bay). 

So, last Thursday, April 2nd, along with Berkeley’s IEEE we got a group of 17 people with varied entrepreneurial experiences (some who had successfully started and sold several startups and others who are considering starting one, with many in between), closed the door, and had them just talk for two hours about ‘Entrepreneurship in Consumer Web Technology’. Some brief descriptions of what we talked about – you’ll have to check out the full video to get the complete scoop (Note: if you do watch the video, please skip the first 20 minutes as we’re just chatting and munching on delicious West Coast Pizza):

• Ad models – Are they substainable? Finding the right demographic and hypertargeting. Gaining critical mass.
• Other Business models on the web – Other Business/Revenue models on the web. Building “products not business models”.
• Picking a team - Choosing team-members you can trust and respect. What’s the right combination of engineers and business people? When should you hire the MBAs; are they even necessary?
• Financing – When do you bootstrap? When do you go to VC’s? 
• Launching web apps- When should you launch – earlier or later?
• Competitive Advantage – How do you take on a large player in the market (the Google’s and Microsoft’s of the world)? How do you reach a global audience?

It was a lot of fun seeing people’s views on these topics, and we thought it went well enough to do it again! We’re planning similar discussion events on renewable energy, biotechnology, cloud computing, and other fields. Tell us if you interested in a particular one, or would like to see another discussion event. We’re going to have more people involved next time, and we also want to get more grad students and people from academia.

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