Thanks to all who attended our Startup School Reception on Saturday! The event drew a large crowd of hackers, entrepreneurs, and students from all over. If you missed the reception, check back soon for updated information on upcoming events this semester. Thanks again to law firm Dorsey & Witney for sponsoring the event.

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.

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!

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.

Entrepreneurs Create Their Own Job Market

By CHRISTINE CHEN
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Thursday, May 14, 2009

Jason Stauth wanted to find work after graduate school that would challenge him to think outside the box. He found a source for his creativity when he joined start-up GreenLight Energy, where, besides making solar panels, he says he gets to create something that he truly values.

Stauth, a UC Berkeley alumnus, joined the scores of graduates who, facing stagnant job opportunities, are now considering starting their own companies or joining those of friends, a trend being fostered by a developing entrepreneurial network on campus.

Students have taken their own initiative in forming groups, like Startup @ Berkeley, where budding entrepreneurs meet at the offices of various Berkeley start-ups to throw around innovative ideas and form new partnerships, said UC Berkeley junior Eli Chait. A business major and student representative of venture capital firm Alsop Louie Partners, Chait helps run the biweekly meetings.

Other business and technology programs on campus, which provide students with a taste of what it is like to start a company, have also grown significantly over the past four years.

The Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology, for example, has seen an increase in class enrollment from 80 students at the start of the program to approximately 800 this past year. The center provides a curriculum for both business and engineering majors that introduces the main concepts of entrepreneurship.

The increase in enrollment is due to greater interest among students in finding out what it takes to self-start a company, said the center’s executive director Burghardt Tenderich, who added that the program’s profile has risen thanks to word-of-mouth exposure.

“The goal is for people to get the entrepreneurship idea, in the same way engineering school provides students with skills that they can use now or later,” Tenderich said.

The center’s Venture Lab holds competitions for students to present their business idea to venture capitalists and other business entrepreneurs. The prize is $10,000 dollars for each of the four groups and-starting this past year-office space in the Bechtel Engineering Center-housed Venture Lab. The joint office space has brought about great productivity through brainstorming, said Ikhlaq Sidhu, director of the center.

Sixty-five teams competed in this year’s competition, a considerable increase from 15 teams four years ago. To compete, student teams give five-minute “business spiels.”

One of this year’s winners, Modista, is a Web-based product designed to enhance Internet shopping. Cofounder Arlo Faria said that while Stanford University is at the center of Silicon Valley and is established as a start-up hot spot, UC Berkeley has also been developing its own start-up culture in recent years. Most recently, the engineering school has been developing its own incubator for companies focused specifically on high-tech ventures.

“This is a major effort through the College of Engineering,” Faria said. “While there was a business school incubator, now there’s a sort of engineering incubator.”

David McIntosh, cofounder of start-up Redux, said that after gaining experience from launching his own start-ups, he wanted to help develop a stronger entrepreneurship network within Berkeley.

Redux, an online social network based on University Avenue, actively seeks out UC Berkeley students for summer internships and jobs, giving students a taste of what it is like to work in a start-up. For younger start-ups, the key to success is often how well team members work together.

That is why it is essential for students aspiring to start their own companies to make contacts right now, while they are still in college, said Jerome Engel, executive director of the campus’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

Senior Stephen Liu, a business major and cofounder of 5-week-old Campusmunch.com, said he always threw around ideas with other students who also expressed interest in starting their own businesses, and met his business partners, who include mass communications and economics majors, in this way.

Such diverse partnerships are not unusual in forming a start-up. This year’s Bears Breaking Boundaries competition, which funds student groups with original research ideas, saw increased participation from students in majors outside of science and business, said Annie Yeh, program development officer for Big Ideas @ Berkeley.

Yeh said there were many multidisciplinary teams that participated this year, with backgrounds in majors such as music and ethnic studies.

Starting a business can be especially difficult in the current economic downturn, however. While some entrepreneurs say fewer people are investing in companies right now, they also add that now is the best time to acquire employees for your company.

“If you can find a cofounder, then there are a lot of people to hire,” Chait said. “It can be a good time to start a company-it’s just more difficult to get financing.”

The problem of finding investors for start-ups is a prevalent one for small businesses nationwide. According to the National Federation of Independent Business’ April survey, 63 percent of small businesses nationwide reported falling profits.

This is partially due to most small business owners using credit cards or home equity loans to fund their start-ups, said Bank of America spokesperson James Pierpoint. Such loans are now falling through.

Yet most students involved in start-ups maintain that they intend to stick with their ventures and weather through the tough economy by being cautious with funds.

UC Berkeley alumnus John Graham, chief operating officer of Wolfire Games, said his company will focus on one or two projects before expanding to gain more funding. In the current economic climate, he said, there is much more responsibility involved in maintaining a company.

“It’s both relieving and stressful to have to be your own boss,” Graham said.

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)

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).

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!

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!

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.