Berkeley SkyDeck (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Global Founders.)

A Sunset in Berkeley.

Silicon Valley is known around the world as the place for innovation. Yet for decades venture capital firms have been unable to break the patterns of founders they invest in. They invest in:

1. Former senior engineers out of Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc.
2. Founders out of schools like Stanford, Harvard, MIT, Berkeley, etc.

Without a dramatic change to this model, how can anybody be surprised seed stage firms are having a serious deal flow problem?

Me (on the right) with fellow Berkeley Alum Jesse Manek, at 22 building something.

When I (here’s me) was first approached to help with the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund, I never thought I’d be solving this problem. I thought I would be building the same university fund that every school from Harvard to Stanford to MIT has. The model made sense (and even held a place in my heart as a former Cal founder.) But I knew one day it would hit a limit — there are only so many startups that one university can produce, even if that university is as prestigious and large as UC Berkeley.

However, after working closer with Chon Tang (the fund’s founding partner), I quickly realized that SkyDeck is building a program that can change the world.

There are 500K+ Berkeley Alumni— the university graduates more engineers than MIT, Stanford, and Harvard combined. There isn’t a company in the world that Berkeley doesn’t touch — no person that SkyDeck could not get in front of. Berkeley as a platform is the perfect place for innovation, business development, and recruiting — the trifecta that defines unicorns.

How can this platform be used to launch hundreds of new startups every year?

There is a new class of founders in the world, and they don’t come out of Google or Harvard. Entrepreneurship is a global phenomenon — but still innovative founders know that to build a global business they have to come to Silicon Valley.

SkyDeck is no longer just the place for Berkeley founders. We’re welcoming founders from around the world to mix in with the school’s talent: professors, alumni, graduate students, and undergrads.

We are the Global Accelerator.

Our Demo Day: https://skydeck.typeform.com/to/L8nY9Y