The University of California at Berkeley welcomed dozens of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists last week as part of the inaugural Berkeley Entrepreneurship Week. Organized by Startup@Berkeley, an interdisciplinary campus club, the event was designed to help inspire students from throughout the university to pursue entrepreneurial careers.
“We noticed there weren’t any campus groups at Berkeley that unified all the campus initiatives centered on entrepreneurship,” Startup@Berkeley Co-president Rachel Tsao, BA 15, said in a statement. “We wanted to create this event to bring everyone together,” she continued.
Students from Startup@Berkeley worked together with Alsop Louie Partners, Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and Y-Combinator to organizer the week’s lineup, which included speaker panels for each evening. “We chose panels whose topics were broad enough that a computer science major or a business student will be inspired by these stories,” Tsao said.
Two Haas School of Business alumni took part in the speaker series, Danae Ringelmann, MBA 08, co-founder of Indiegogo, and Nikita Bier, BS 12, CEO of Outline. And the week culminated in a demo date on Friday featuring an array of Berkeley-affiliated startups.
