Mid-Semester Review: How is StEP doing?

It’s Week 5 and StEP is halfway through our 10-week program, so I’m here to give you the insider scoop on how StEP is going. We’re back from Spring Break and jumping right into four remaining intensive weeks to elevate our startups to market-readiness. This week, we heard from Anand Kulkarni, founder of LeadGenious and Crowdbotics, who shared his entrepreneurial path and talked about how Crowdbotics can be used by early stage startups and large corporations to build better software products faster (https://www.crowdbotics.com/).

🏆 As the program nears the finish line, the StEP team is gearing up for our final showcase. This showcase will include a startup competition, in which teams compete for the winning title in two rounds of 5-minute pitches to a judging panel of top VCs. Before that, event attendees will break out into roundtable discussions on:

1. Proving Product Market Fit

2. How to be a resource magnet — via capital, customers, and talent

3. The competitive landscape & where my team fits in

4. Balancing design and engineering;

5. Growth hacking

6. Culture, team building & diversity

We envision this showcase as a social and professional gathering of anyone in the Berkeley entrepreneurship community at large. Tickets for the general public will be released later this week, so if you know of individuals that would love to attend, invite them! 💌

To give you a sneak peak of startups that might be pitching, take a look at what two Berkeley StEP teams are working on:

New Work

“There have been so many times where I’ve been sitting in a cafe, and I hear a neighboring conversation that I’d love to join,” Amir Akleh, StEP member and co-founder of NewWork told me over the phone on Tuesday. NewWork, one letter away from “network”, is a startup centralizing network opportunities. Its product will be an iOS app that allows users to locate others nearby eager to network in real-time, find upcoming networking events in all fields, and engage in online networking through its inbox messaging function. Amir ideated and began developing this product before StEP, but since joining, has combined forces with his co-founder Malia Latin and performed 30 customer interviews to inform adjustments to NewWork’s MVP.

When I asked him how StEP has propelled his startup building process, Amir emphasized the importance of the 10-week curriculum in setting concrete milestones for him to meet. He described how every aspect of StEP has worked towards creating a supportive “information flow”, from peers and our weekly guest speakers sharing their startup successes and challenges, to the intimacy of StEP’s coaching process.

Voca

I also spoke with Ryuka Ko, founder of Voca, a conversation designer who graduated from UC Berkeley with a B.A. in Linguistics. Conversation designers advance technologies’ compatibility with human conversation, but because it is a nascent industry, designers find themselves without suitable tools. Voca sets out to build the perfect design tool for conversation designers to create their work. “Just as graphic designers have Photoshop for example, conversation designers also need a design tool that works for them,” Ryuka said. She came across this problem herself after working with multiple existing tools, but found nothing that truly addressed all the pain points; “Excel spreadsheets and Word documents just don’t cut it, but the reality is, that’s what the majority of us are using.”

After sharing their MVP with more than 50 conversation designers, Voca validated overwhelming demand for the design tool they are in the process of developing. They also confirmed that more and more companies are pouring their resources into not only Alexa Skills, Google Assistants, chatbots, and other voice/multimodal systems, but also for IVRs, which, despite having been around for a few decades, are still in high-demand as the development of natural language processing advances customer experience. With increasing attention on these conversational systems, Voca will find a ripe market ready for their pioneering tool.

Currently, Voca is looking for a new team member: a full-stack web developer passionate about Voca’s development. If you have the skillset and vision to take on this impactful role, get in touch with Ryuka at ryukako@berkeley.edu.

Showcase: Presenting Batch 0

More information about the final showcase will be coming soon! Beyond top-notch VCs and CEOs, you will be able to meet the diverse growing community of Berkeley entrepreneurs leading the future of Silicon Valley. Follow our socials right now to make sure you are getting the latest updates:

📖 Subscribe to our Medium publication

👍 Like and follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter

🖥 Check out the StEP website

Thanks for reading! I’ll catch you next week.