startups

UC Berkeley is #1 in the world for creating venture-funded startups

This week it was announced by Pitchbook 2023 University Rankings that University of California, Berkeley is #1 in the world for creating venture-funded startups.

In PitchBook's overall rankings in 2023, Berkeley is the top public university for producing startup founders for the sixth straight year.

I’ve loved being an entrepreneurship mentor to university students at both these institutions - the European Innovation Academy, the world’s largest extreme accelerator, and UC Berkeley’s School of Engineering Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology - and their entrepreneur programs!

Special shout out to Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship program director Gigi Wang for bringing me to Cal as a mentor and a venture judge.

I’ve been consistently impressed with the problems UCB student entrepreneurs have chosen to address, and the fast work they achieve in these accelerated entrepreneurship environments. You can read about student ventures I worked with here and here and here and here.

Berkeley Method gets students thinking like entrepreneurs, click the image to read a 2018 article about it

Congrats to all!

Unmentionable wins! Actually, it was a tie: Judging the finals at another exciting venture bootcamp at UC Berkeley

And the winner is...hard to describe in front of a bunch of people I just met.

Had a fun morning meeting all the bright-eyed and bushy-tailed brilliant students, program coordinators like Justin Wong and Simran Kaur and Anika R. and other venture judges and Silicon Valley investors like Alexander Walterspeil (head trader at Indaba Capital Management), Brandon Drew (General Partner at SaaS Growth Ventures), and Bob Upham of Tess Ventures to hear the pitches for Gigi Wang’s Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp Final Presentations.

I’ve been mentoring and judging Bootcamps at Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology for about five years since I met Gigi at the European Innovation Academy in France. Every Bootcamp is different but they’re all a whirlwind of inspiration and learning, and a shot in the arm of what my fellow startup mentor Pamela Day calls “Vitamin S”, for Students.

This year in my track we heard four startup ideas developed during the week’s Bootcamp accelerated process. I was joined by two venture capitalists: Bill Reichert, Partner at Pegasus Tech Ventures; and Shuonan Chen, general partner at Innovation Overflow Venture Capital.

We chose two pitches, it was a tie!
One winning team, described as 50% ‘hipster’, proposed a second-hand furniture service for student communities.

The tie was between a second-hand furniture service from a team that self-described as 50% hipster and delivered an all-bases covered pitch including customer validation and operating expenses on their financial projections; and a company that I found intriguing, but not easily mentionable during my one-day appearance at Bootcamp.

Most years when I can, I enjoy mentoring the teams during the week leading up to the final, giving me a chance to get to know the entrepreneurs and advise their team formation and development of their venture pitch.

I didn’t have that chance this year, otherwise I certainly would have had more time to construct how I might present Anvio as winners, live on the Zoom to all participants. Somehow I still did that within minutes of hearing of them (waiting for the video of the event to recall exactly what I said without using the term the team suggested: “sex toy”, this is FAR MORE than a toy). And now I’m struggling to describe it here, on the Internet where nothing ever dies.

I’m not sure I want to rank for these terms in perpetuity….

I don’t want to rank for these terms yet I see the need for this intimate smart device and subscription service …there’s definitely something there with this sexual wellness training tool.

…there’s definitely something there with this sexual wellness training tool.

There’s something there in its not-often-enough-spoken-of problem, its ‘non-gendered’ solution, a knowledge and support community, a data-driven wellness option, an intriguing new smart device, a relationship aid, a subscription service for a monthly box of related products, and still there is so much left unsaid.

You’ll have to look for it in the slides above!

As Shuo Chen suggested during the judging, the Anvio team can always start with a MVP (minimum viable product) of a box subscription and discussion community as they continue to research and develop the intimate electronic device itself, and design and build the mobile app that supports it.

This particular problem space may be hard-to-talk-about (sort of, Teen Vogue famously covered it in 2017, and incited a backlash for erasing women — calling them “non-prostate owners”) yet the problem is a known source of trauma for millions of newcomer practitioners.

Ok, ok. Enough prevarication.
You might call the Berkeley Bootcamp winner I championed...

’A SMART BUTT PLUG’.

Yep, went there! 😱

Phew, I said it and I’m still alive. (Now to watch my website ranking skew over time…)

Let’s put it this way. This winning formula is…

Anvio = a not-often-spoken-about problem + a non-gendered solution + a knowledge/support community + a data-driven wellness option + an intriguing new smart device + a relationship aid + a mobile app supporting a subscription service for data + a box subscription service for related products.

Congrats again to all the hard-working BMOE teams for a great Final Presentations Day. I look forward to what you do next!

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Ringing the bell at the New York Stock Exchange with a unicorn company!

I was walking down Wall Street last week. It was 90 degrees and muggy, a moment of after-lunch calm. As I passed the historic, columned stock exchange I over heard a New York Tour Guide talking to a group of tourists.

Pointing to the facade announcing Owlet Baby Care’s IPO, she said: A baby went public today.

A baby went public today.
— Wall Street Tour Guide

Not quite, but funny!! The connected nursery startup Owlet is 7 years old and now it’s a publicly listed newcomer on ‘the granddaddy of stock markets’.

I called out into the quiet street, ‘‘They make smart socks that measure blood oxygen and other vitals to alert you if your baby is in trouble.”

“Good to know,” a man in the tour group called back.

Seriously, this happened.

A spunky JLo could play me in the romantic comedy where a scene like this would be more likely to take place.

It is good to know.

Owlet says they’ve monitored the health of 1 million babies.

When Burc joined them in 2020, we discovered that unlike other startups both of us had worked with in San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and Istanbul, almost everyone we mentioned it to knew this Silicon Slopes Internet-of-Things (IOT) product. They had either used it with their own infants — some were on their third device — or had just gotten one for a coming birth, or had given one to a friend with a budding new family.

I waved and kept on walking. I was going to meet my husband and the president of Owlet around the corner before we were due to gather inside ‘the center of global financial markets’, the NYSE, for the closing bell ceremonies that mark the end of the day’s trading.

Photobombed by a Faberge urn

That urn over Burc’s shoulder — it was always in focus, he was blurry — was “produced by House of Faberge, gifted to the exchange by Czar Nicholas II of Russia in 1904 for listing a $1 billion bond issue”.

After passing stock exchange museum pieces at the entrance but not getting to look at them, like the original Thomas Edison stock ticker machines I noticed just at the elevator, we assembled in the classical revival Board Room that hosts world leaders, celebrities and business icons before heading down to the trading floor. There were cookies.

That big clock

is the original 1867 clock used to mark time behind the president on the original NYSE trading floor

There was a short program about becoming listed on the exchange, a ceremony with a commemorative coin presentation by a stock exchange executive who joined the team on the balcony downstairs, and a speech by the CEO Kurt.

Congrats to my husband Burc Sahinoglu & everyone at Owlet Baby Care for going public as a unicorn (translation: that’s “a company with a $1+ billion valuation”) and for ringing the closing bell at NYSE last week!

It was a stellar New York summer day, finished by a cruise around the island getting to know Owlet founders, executives, family, board members, and investors, enjoying the sunset breezes over enduring landmarks and stunning new developments.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I love New York!

Good time at Jason Calacanis's Founder University

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Got a lot out of this mini accelerator experience from Jason Calacanis, the founder of Silicon Alley Reporter (a fellow dotcom industry pub to the one I was once an editor at!) among other things, like the LAUNCH startup conference, festival, podcast This Week In Startups and LAUNCH Incubator.

I was among the 60 founders chosen from 300 applicants, and I was representing Second Screen, Inc. where I've been COO since January (icymi!). Founder University is a three-day curriculum for founders who have launched their product but haven't raised Series A. 

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SUBMIT YOUR FEATURE FILM: Second Screen is now seeking 50 founding filmmakers

Second Screen, where I am COO & Cofounder, is now accepting film submissions for consideration.

The first founding filmmaker is on board at Second Screen, and he's an award-winning ambassador for the 49 other feature makers this mobile streaming platform is now seeking, for equity! Do you know a filmmaker like Fernando Lebrija who is right for Second Screen? 

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FILM DISTRIBUTION COMPANIES: become a Second Screen content partner

See more by visiting the Second Screen site.

Another life, another networked world!

This came in the mail today. It's from the major faculty of my liberal arts college, an event for my professor of Bronze Age Archaeology, Jim Wright. He was a great teacher, as I recall!

Also, it's a reminder of the solidity of liberal arts education. This classically-based education was meant to turn out a person who was "virtuous and ethical, knowledgeable in many fields and highly articulate." It doesn't matter what you do with it, you're equipped as a well-rounded individual.

Today's email and its particular Bronze Age lens on power and place is so far from where I am right this minute, and yet I am back in class in an instant, to when civilizations around the Aegean first established a far-ranging trade network and all together moved out of the Stone Age.

Then I'm back again, to today, back to looking at the future of stories for millennial audiences as a business, tech, and entertainment issue. That's a focus of mine right now and based here in California's own power centers of Los Angeles and San Francisco.

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Hope all my Bryn Mawr archaeology peers have a fun symposium! 

Coaching at Startup Grind Global Program 2018 Pitch Bootcamp

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I'm excited to serve as a Pitch Coach later this month for the Startup Grind Global Program 2018 Pitch Bootcamp hosted/mc'd by TD Lowe and her team at 42Phi Ventures. The event at Fox Forum in Redwood City is sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank.

TD Lowe is the founder and CEO of EnovationNation and 42Phi Partners are a diverse set of individuals devoted to fixing Venture's opportunity pipeline, inclusivity, and mentorship deficit.

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The day precedes the launch of Startup Grind's Global Conference, where TD is the team member in charge of StartupGrind startup program which filters the best performing startups coming to the conference for the investor community.

When the problem is taboo, the investment is taboo?

Congratulations to advertising veteran and entrepreneur Cindy Gallop for successfully raising $2M for her social-sex site Make Love Not Porn. Read the news at TechCrunch.

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A year ago I told Cindy this story.

When I was an editor at Internet World magazine in dotcom NYC, I recall I was assigned a porn business story for the day's email newsletter. I was one of the very few women at this trade publication for Internet technology and e-business, and a newer hire. Clearly this wasn't a plum assignment.

It was hard to get any business and industry analysts to even discuss this foundational part of the internet. In the end I had to beg former Internet World staffers-turned-analysts to go on record so I could file the story.

I told Cindy that I often think about that when I see her posts about the struggles of raising funds to solve such a critical, obvious social problem with her service that was already generating $500k/year. 

Judging the all-star Collider Cup at UC Berkeley

Excited to be a pitch judge for this all-star event at UC Berkeley next week!!

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The Collider Cup is Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology's all-star showcase of the best student teams from Fall 2017.

Teams pitch to panels of professors, investors and industry experts as they vie to win the grand prize, the Collider Cup!

Thanks to Gigi Wang for the invite.

#startups #venture #ColliderCup #UCBerkeley 

Judging at the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Summer 2017

It was so much fun to mentor & judge the tech startups at Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship (BMOE) at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology. 120 global participants gathered at UC Berkeley for a one week immersive experience into entrepreneurship, team-building, mentorship, and more.

Here's the team I & my fellow judge chose as the winner of our 40-person cohort: BrainyT, an AI-for-manufacturing going to market in Brazil.

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I also ran into familiar faces from last month's extreme accelerator in Europe, the European Innovation Academy #eia2017italy: participant & UCB student Bailey Farren, and fellow EIA chief mentors UCB faculty Stephen Torres and Pamela Day, who also was a judge at BMOE!

Looking forward to Harika Kalluri's upcoming interview with me and Pamela for the Berkeley Point Of View. We yakked Harika's ear off about tech investing, product building, and the empowering spirit of entrepreneurship.

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A few snaps from some of the seven venture pitches my fellow judge Kal Deutsch (managing partner and founding investor of The Batchery, a Bay Area-based global incubator for seed stage startups) and I judged.

Good job to these teams from Berkeley, Denmark, Brazil & Hong Kong:

  • BrainyT, the AI for small manufacturers
  • SoWa the wireless professional speakers
  • A Slice of Reality interactive media system
  • the ed-tech play for lesson plans Athena
  • CoffeeX, a connected coffee kiosk
  • Candle Sense electric candle for memory boosting
  • LedoAds, the marketplace for space ads

Thanks to UCBerkeley's entrepreneurship faculty Gigi Wang, the director of BMOE, for including me in her awesome program!

Photo: Gigi Wang

Photo: Gigi Wang

Congrats to BrainyT for making it into the top 3 startups at BMOE Summer 2017!

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Thanks to Harika Kalluri for the interview! You can read it at the Sutardja Center site here.

Considering the Arab Innovation Academy in Doha, Qatar

I'm considering joining the Arab Innovation Academy (AIA). It's patterned on the European Innovation Academy, this new extreme accelerator for the Arab world is run by Maher Hakim, the managing director of the Qatar Science & Technology Park. I had the pleasure of working directly with Maher when he was the Chief of Chief Mentors at the European Innovation Academy in Nice in 2016! The AIA program will be delivered for the first time in Doha, Qatar in January 2018 

In the Winner's Circle: 50% of my teams won the 2017 European Innovation Academy, Italy

(To my teams: you are all stars!!)

Giving my Day 7 keynote in Turin, on how to build revenue-producing and meaningful community. "Find why your first users are invested and then deliver on their motivations," was among my recommendations to the participants of Europe's largest extreme accelerator

It was my pleasure to be the chief mentor to six start up teams in the Gaming, Media & Entertainment sector at the European Innovation Academy last month in Turin, Italy.

For ten foundational days, I guided 30 participants through team and business building before additional specialist mentors joined us to take them to pitch their startups to Silicon Valley and global investors. 

Out of 95 total teams, 4 of my teams progressed to the Pitching Carousel of 40 teams which presented to venture capitalists

  • Sympha, a creative exchange for the indie music community
  • aLive, a realtime nightlife promotion platform
  • ARCatalogs, an augmented reality play for restaurants
  • Kumpa, a gamification app that turns exercise into social workouts

3 of my teams then made it into the Top 10 winner's circle. You can read the Italian press on the winners.

So, 5 of my 6 teams made it to the final rounds of the program. That means 83% of our cohort 'showed' in the final rounds of the program.  This is a stupendous achievement, congratulations to all of you!

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This is Kumpa, a sports gamification start-up that transforms your favorite games into fun and social workouts.

Shout out to these international mentors who also worked with my cohort on: marketing (Americans Jesse Leimgruber, PJ Leimgruber, and Italian Francesco Fiume), IT (Polish Bartek Jazwinski), and design (Estonian Tanel Eero), and, team dynamics (Italian Claudia Chiavarino). Also, thanks to Federico Mammano, my fellow chief mentor in the other Gaming, Media, and Entertainment cohort, for his pitching challenges and AR expertise! 

This is ARCatalogs which makes augmented reality menus for restaurants.

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This is aLive, a nightlife platform where users can see and share what's happening around them in real time, leveraging the power of influencers. aLive made it to the Pitching Carousel round.

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Here's BidCar, my sixth team, which was building a blind auction for car sales. Chief Business Officer Miguel Valdez delivered a 1 minute story-based pitch on Day 6 in front of another gaming, media, entertainment cohort and our design and IT mentors watching, on the right:

For your accomplishments in team building and business building, congrats to the winners, the carousel pitchers, all the teams of the Gaming, Media, and Entertainment cohorts, and all the teams of EIA Turin 2017. It was fun mentoring you and I look forward to seeing what you do next!

 

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Joining Silicon Valley Jumpstart Program As A Mentor

Excited to join JUMPSTART PROGRAM as a mentor in this startup event produced by the Silicon Valley Forum and Wasabi Ventures Global.

You may recall I've already had the pleasure of working with Wasabi principal Jeff Abbott as a chief mentor for two summers at the European Innovation Academy. I'm looking forward to contributing to his new intensive program.

Launching in fall of 2017, this 6-day hands-on experience is designed for international startups and scaleups seeking to enter the US market. It will address technology, organization, cultural differences, marketing & sales, financing, and more.

It's for you if:

  • You want to develop and refine your scaling strategy
  • You believe you’re ready to enter the US market
  • You want to broaden your network of potential customers, mentors, partners and investors in the US
  • You want to jumpstart your efforts and make 6 months of progress in one week
  • You want to have a clear plan before investing time and precious resources in developing a US presence via unfocused experimentation
  • You’re ready to have an intense, action-packed week in Silicon Valley and make friends for life with other founders facing similar challenges 

September 5th is the last day to apply!

 

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