ESS 420: Certificate for Entrepreneurship and Technology

Laura Vogt:
Hello, I’m Laura Vogt, the Associate Director of Marketing and Communications in the College of Engineering. This week on The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer, we are learning about the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology’s certificate in entrepreneurship and technology, with Ken Singer. Welcome Ken, can you tell us about yourself and your role at UC Berkeley?

Ken Singer:
Sure, so first and foremost, I’m a proud Berkeley alum. So I attended Berkeley many, many years ago and since then I’ve been an entrepreneur, I’ve been an executive in tech companies, and most recently I’ve become the managing director at the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology, as well as the Chief Learning Officer, which means I focus heavily on the pedagogy and our curriculum, because it’s quite unique. We teach what would be viewed as a business topic in an engineering discipline, which requires us to really rethink the ways that we teach and the ways that we reach our students.

Laura Vogt:
Well, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast today. I know many of our students are often exploring outside of their major, and one of the ways that they try to do that is through a certificate program. So can you give us an overview of, maybe not just the certificate program that you have, but also the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology?

Ken Singer:
Yeah, it’s a mouthful, right? The thing about Berkeley, as most students come to realize quickly, is that we are all about acronyms.

Laura Vogt:
Yes.

Ken Singer:
So if you want a quick way to talk about us, we’re SCET, I think some students like to say scet, but I prefer SCET, I think that’s much more dignified. So we’ve been around for about, I think 15, 16 years now. Now we are the largest center for entrepreneurship on campus in terms of the number of students that we reach, which is upwards of 2,100-2,200 students a year. We teach 42 classes, or at least last year we taught 42 classes, in our group alone. We say we cover the whole stack, so everything from new venture creation, to commercialization of technology, to venture finance, to what else? Oh, venture capital, product management, consulting, technology consulting. So we’ve had people from the big three come and help teach those courses.

Ken Singer:
So we’re kind of where technology and innovation come together, and we bring people from industry who are current. It’s like having someone who is currently innovating, currently executing, those are the types of people who are in our classes, working with our students. So it’s not your traditional lab based teaching model where you have a professor who’s been stuck in a lab for 20 years, who might be on something amazing, but it’s still very much hermetically sealed in the university. We try to be this porous boundary between what’s happening in academia and what’s happening in industry, which is probably the most interesting when it comes to being an entrepreneur, and provide students the ability to be a part, not only part of that conversation, but also to take elements out of it and spin companies out.

Ken Singer:
So we’re unique in that way is that we really look at ourselves as an engineering exercise. Our classes really require physical work. You have to build something, you have to build prototypes, you have to build product. And so it’s not something that would fit in a business school, because business schools focus on business models, on how to just make money. So it turns out our program attracts students from all over campus.

Ken Singer:
So if you are an engineer who wants to build something, let’s say you want to do something for the environment. It’s very apropos right now, since we are living under a red sky right now with the fog plus fires. Those students who want to do something, they will meet environmentalist, they will meet natural resource students who will be in these classes to innovate on topics that they know a lot about, and the engineers can bring their know how to create real solutions. And we’ve had amazing companies emerge out of those collisions of students and faculty and industry from all over academia.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, that’s awesome. So where did this idea of trying to form some of those classes into a certificate come from?

Ken Singer:
So we try to help the aspiring entrepreneur, and one of the things that we found was that most programs focus on pure success. So they want to spin companies out, they want to have successful entrepreneurs. But if you look at the statistics, 9 out of 10 are fails. That’s what happens in startup plans. Even I had many failures before I had my first real success, and that’s the case with virtually every entrepreneur I know. Even Mark Zuckerberg, who is famous for Facebook, had a few failures along the way.

Ken Singer:
And so we recognized we needed to provide students who were going to take this risk to aspire, to be an entrepreneur, some risk mitigation, which was that the classes that they took could be leveraged in other places. So if you’ve trained to be an entrepreneur, you have trained to be a problem solver, you have trained to be a leader. Trying to help students become entrepreneurs, there’s always the chance that they’ll be successful, but the large bulk of them will have failed at least in the first couple of tries.

Ken Singer:
So we wanted them to be able to leverage the education that we were providing for other things, because if you look at a trajectory of a typical entrepreneur, they go back and forth between traditional jobs to startups, and whether they start their own, or they enter a small company, they’re bouncing back and forth. And so we wanted to make sure that they were able to really internalize the education so that they can apply it to other places.

Ken Singer:
So many of our students go off to work for Facebook, they go off to work for Pinterest, and work for Google, Apple, [inaudible 00:06:31]. They leverage what they learned in our program to help them get the interviews to, during the interviews, to have interesting things to talk about in the interviews. And what most students don’t recognize is that for every Berkeley student who is applying for a job at Google, there are probably 3,000 or 4,000 other students just as qualified from many different universities who could very well take that job. And what makes the difference is that Berkeley provides you, and they know, Google, Apple, they all know that Berkeley provides these resources for students to be able to create their own things.

Ken Singer:
And if you show up at an interview having none of that in your resume or in your portfolio, you’re not going to be looked at because they know that Berkeley offers that, they know that Berkeley, Stanford, MIT have the best resources for innovators. And that’s who they’re looking to hire, are people who not only do well in class, but they can show definitively that they can take what they’ve learned and apply it into new things. Their own products, their own projects, their own websites, their own experiments, and that can talk about it.

Ken Singer:
So our certificate, the idea behind that was to provide you with a framework so that if you completed that certificate, you’d have the basis of a really good interview. So if you go into Google, you can show, “Hey, I took this course and I learned all of these things. I did this class that had this project requirement, and I really did a great job on the product side. I struggled with the marketing part, I was really good with working with customers.” You can have real things to talk about. And that was our goal, is the certificate would provide you with all of the basic components that a portfolio would need in order for you to be able to get a job if the startup didn’t work out.

Laura Vogt:
And the certificate, and even classes in general through the Sutardja center, they’re open for more than just the engineers, right? On campus.

Ken Singer:
Yeah, actually only a third of our students are engineers.

Laura Vogt:
Okay.

Ken Singer:
Are formal engineers, I’d say a little bit more if you qualify data science and computer science, because many of those students can build things, so we consider them engineers in that way. So I would say up to about 40% of our students are of the engineering ethos. We have maybe 20-25% from Haas who are declared business students, and then the rest come from everywhere else. And I would say some of our most successful students come from cognitive science, psychology, and interestingly enough, rhetoric and poli sci.

Laura Vogt:
That’s great, I really like that it’s so interdisciplinary.

Ken Singer:
Well, it turns out startups are, just in general. I mean, if you think about all the things they have to do from leadership to marketing, which is customer engagement, understanding the customer, which is psychology, to understanding pricing, which is economics. Dealing with the politics of purchase, which if you sell into a large company, you have to understand how decisions are made, which is political science. If you are in, let’s say, a sustainability business, in let’s say plastic, you need to know the science of it, you need to know the politics of it, you need to know the policy.

Ken Singer:
So people from all over campus become relevant because of their unique experiences and their deep knowledge in a particular area. They just don’t always have the opportunity to collide with other people who might be interested in solving the same problems, but have a different skillset, which is what we try to do here. We actually call ourselves an innovation collider. It’s a place that this is the location, it’s the football stadium, but our offices are there, and we consider ourselves a collider where we bring all of these different people with different backgrounds and different levels of knowledge, and the only common thing is a true interest and drive. And have them collide with each other.

Ken Singer:
And we have some of the most amazing products, problems that are solved, they identified real problems that no one has actually identified before, real solutions, and then companies. We recently had several companies emerge out of our alternative meat class, and what that is, we had a bunch of bioengineers, other people who are interested in food, including lots of vegans, it turns out. And many of these students have never been in class together, and in this class they got a chance to really explore an area that’s new, and we’ve had several teams emerge out, and these are undergrads who have been funded for $5, $10 million in their startups.

Ken Singer:
And anywhere from being sophomores all the way to graduating seniors, so there’s no age correlation, there’s no discipline correlation, it’s just really, what we found, is people who are driven, who find other people who are driven, when you throw them together, you have some really cool things that emerged.

Laura Vogt:
And to get the certificate, it looked like there was three different tracks that you can follow.

Ken Singer:
Yeah.

Laura Vogt:
How would a student choose which track is going to be the best one for them? Or do you think it’s more about just taking the courses rather than necessarily following the tracks?

Ken Singer:
So my recommendation is, before pursuing any certificate, take at least one class in the department that’s sponsoring the certificate. That’s not just [inaudible 00:12:17], I think that’s just a general recommendation. I was telling you earlier, I think a lot of students look at Berkeley, or their years in college, as a game of Pokemon, where they’re trying to collect them all. As many majors that they can fit in, minors, it’s somewhere between Pokemon and Tetris, you’re trying to map your schedule to be able to get the most. But by doing that, you’re not actually paying attention to the quality or the meaning of the content, you’re just trying to get the certificate or the ribbon.

Ken Singer:
It’s counterintuitive in some ways, but a certificate doesn’t always are indicate that you are excellent at it, it just indicates that you are excellent at pursuing it.

Laura Vogt:
Okay.

Ken Singer:
And those are two different things, as students recognize, and employers recognize this as well. If you really want to be an entrepreneur, take the courses that will broaden the way that you see the world. Because an entrepreneur, by their core essence, they are looking for problems that other people have not been able to solve. They’re looking for problems that may not have been solvable before, but they’re always on the lookout for things that no one else has seen. So that broader you scope out your lens, so that you can see more things, the more likely you’re going to see something that someone else hasn’t seen.

Ken Singer:
So my recommendation is if you’re going to major in industrial engineering, which I’m a big advocate for, we’re a part of the industrial engineering department. But the reason I’m an advocate is because the core essence of industrial engineering is problem solving, and that could be anywhere from the post office, one of my favorite students works at the post office. Seems like a really interesting decision now, she didn’t choose that today, she chose it two years ago, and now she’s in the middle of all this, because part of her job is to help reroute, that’s what an industrial… yeah, that’s her job, right?

Laura Vogt:
Right.

Ken Singer:
So she gets an internal view of that, all the way to understanding efficiencies of financial markets. So an industrial engineer can end up in Wall Street, and tinker with really exotic financial instruments. So I really liked that major, but what I would recommend for that student in that major is to take a psych course, to take a natural resources course, take a diversity course. You will see things that you don’t typically see, and you’ll have to somehow connect the dots.

Ken Singer:
And that process of connecting the dots between what is your core and something new that’s broad that you’re experiencing for the first time, allows for new connections to be made, and those new connections can result in a new idea, a new company, a new product, new something. And that’s what we’re hoping that our students do is they make a connection to what else people had done before, and that we can help them turn that into a business, or turn that into what it’s supposed to become. And that’s how we do our role.

Ken Singer:
And yes, we have classes, because those are more traditional formats to help you do that, but we also have programs and we have boot camps and other kinds of resources that help anyone who has dared to take the step towards building something new. And class might not even be the right format. So for the students who are listening to this, even alums, who want to embark on this journey, I highly suggest you ping us, whether it’s through the front door, our website is SCET.berkeley.edu, or my email address is very easy, it’s my name, Ken.singer@berkeley.edu. I’m happy to direct you to the right places, or help you get into the classes that you want to take.

Ken Singer:
But our role really is to meet the student, or the aspiring entrepreneur, where they are, and help them get to where they want to go. But like we describe to most people, our job is to be a Sherpa as you climb the mountain. We don’t carry your backpack and we will not climb the mountain for you, our goal is to make sure you just don’t fall off the side of the mountain and die. It’s a low bar, I understand that, but the goal is to help you walk your own journey. And it could be within the context of a class, our programs for the certificate, but again, test before you jump in. Put your toe in the water and see if our boot camp or our Newton Series appeals to you. If what you’re learning in there appeals to you, and then we can help you take the next step.

Ken Singer:
And if the certificate is the right journey, and there are three, because we have found if we give one option, there’s always a student saying, “Can I do this other thing?” So that’s how we have three options. But those who don’t have that much time, but really are dedicated, want to learn this, our best program for that is our summer program because it is in Portugal. It’s a four week program literally on the beaches of Portugal, I know this because it’s [crosstalk 00:17:43].

Laura Vogt:
Sounds really hard.

Ken Singer:
Well, it is, because there’s so much, there are so many amazing famous people who are at this thing that you get to learn from, that we find a lot of students choosing to spend time with them rather than sitting at a beach. So previously we had the founders of Angry Birds who were mentors. That’s the level that we’re looking at, are people who really did this journey famously, we bring them in for the students to aspire to because it turns out they don’t look that much different than the rest of us. In fact, they’re pretty young. So the students are like, “Wait, I look that age.”

Ken Singer:
So our goal really is to expose you not only to the entrepreneurial content, but also the psychic pain that comes along with it of having to choose fun or work. This [inaudible 00:18:42], right? And also we want to give you the experience of what most… actually most technology entrepreneurs are immigrants, turns out.

Laura Vogt:
Okay.

Ken Singer:
And I don’t just mean in the US, but you go anywhere else, you go to Israel, you go to France, you go to the UK, and many of the entrepreneurs that are successful did not come from the local ecosystem.

Laura Vogt:
Okay.

Ken Singer:
And in fact, if you go around the world, the merchant class in most parts of the world are run by a minority group. So you go to Latin America, a lot of it is run by immigrants from Lebanon.

Laura Vogt:
Okay.

Ken Singer:
I think the wealthiest guy in Mexico, Carlos Slim, I think is Lebanese. You go to the Caribbean, it’s typically Indian or Chinese. And there’s this experience of being an immigrant that seems to be an important one for an entrepreneur to understand, to be an outsider, and I think it’s something that for Berkeley students, it’s useful to have some experience being from the outside. Because if you’re studying in the Silicon Valley, which is Berkeley, you’re by definition in the inside. So this summer program really gives you that experience of having to be from the outside looking in, and that helps really frame your view, and helps build up resilience. And if not, then there’s always the beach.

Laura Vogt:
And for The Richard Newton lecture series, do you have to sign up for one of the classes or is it something that you can see the list of lectures that are coming up and stop in?

Ken Singer:
So all of the lectures from the past, they’re all on YouTube.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, okay.

Ken Singer:
So you can just go watch some of them, and really some of those are famous. So there’ve been some people we got to speak before they became famous, and so now if you look them up, you’re like, “Wow, they spoke here.” But at the time no one knew who they were. And so it ranges from that to Marissa Mayer who, she’s famous for being the CEO of Yahoo. And so we’ve had credible speakers, and the goal of that is to dig deeper than your typical taught by someone who’s been successful. Not everyone’s gets here, but we try to push them to talk about the real experience, the difficult things, the difficult decisions, the ones they wish they could take back.

Ken Singer:
The alternative reality, we know that they took this certain career path, but what was the other option, what could have happened? And that, I think, gives students a view that it’s not easy, but it’s certainly not impossible. And so that’s the goal, is to make students understand that a lot of this is mindset, it comes down to belief. If you believe you can’t do this, then you’re right, you can’t. But if you believe you can, there is a possibility that you can, because you allow yourself the space to try it. So we look at this lecture series as a way of like the future is speaking to you. We want you to view these speakers as if it’s you 20 years from now talking to you about what is possible, and getting you inspired to take the next step.

Laura Vogt:
You know, one of the things that we’ve been talking a lot about with students this past six months is this idea of resilience and what that means and being able to come back. So do you talk about resilience in any of your courses, or do you offer support for students in the terms of what you do when something completely fails?

Ken Singer:
Yeah, so I keep looking for the citation for this story, but I can’t find it, so I’m going to eventually find it. But I was told this story a while ago about resilience, and I think it’s connected with Berkeley, because I think that early researchers on this were from Berkeley. But they’re trying to figure out why there were these clusters of kids with childhood leukemia.

Ken Singer:
And so in the UK, they were finding there would be clusters of children who weren’t. And when they did a survey of certain populations, they discovered some link, that’s just an odd link, where children who… and by the way, it was not poor kids who were getting it, it was actually middle class kids who are getting it, and what they had linked it to is exposure to germs. So kids who are put into daycare early, don’t get childhood leukemia at the same rate as kids who stay home with their parents, because they’re not exposed to germs, their immune system doesn’t get kicked in. And so it’s these middle class kids whose parents could keep them at home, they’re the ones who are indicating this disease.

Ken Singer:
So there’s something from biology I think we can learn from here, which is if we’re not exposed to difficulty, then we don’t build the immune system, we don’t build a muscle memory to be able to take on the fight when it comes. So this adversity that we’re all facing with the pandemic, the difficulty we’re facing with the fires, a lot of these other kinds of, I call them mini crises, I think may prepare this generation for the bigger fight, which I think we can all agree, it could be climate change, it could be huge population movements because of displacement, and all of the things that come with that, that impending crisis.

Ken Singer:
So I look at this as practice. This is manmade, in some ways, because we could have seen this coming, in fact, we did, really because it comes every 100 years, something like this. But the students today, if they have the right mindset and again, it comes down to how you view it. If you see yourself as a victim, there’s going to be no learning from anything. But if you can get past the first part, which is this sucks and I didn’t deserve this, if you can get through that part quickly and say, “Okay, what am I going to do with this situation that I can really benefit from” What learnings, what kind of new muscles can I exercise in this difficult time that will prepare me for the next big thing?”

Ken Singer:
So it’s all about how you do it. And circling back to our program, a huge chunk of our program is about mindset, it’s about getting you in the right frame to be able to take on these big challenges. Starting a company, if you look back, like I did in my last journey, and I look at, how did we even do this? It was so hard to view how we could have even executed the way we did, and the magic, the dark energy in all of it, was just the belief that we could. And I think that’s what carried us forward. So you got to be able to build the mindset to make it all kind of work.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, I just want to say, if there’s anything else that you want to add to wrap everything up and convince people, yes, come check us out, find out what we have for you. What would you be your final thoughts on that?

Ken Singer:
Yeah, so we designed our classes to be as relevant and timely and interesting and provocative as possible. So actually I think we’re the only program that has taught a sports tech course. So we have brought athletes together with engineers to create solutions for problems within sport, everything from football with football players who drop the ball, we’ve had a team that created a glove that shows you why. It actually models out, as you’re trying to grab the ball, what’s happening with your hands. We have another team that came up with a clever way of allowing for online betting. I’m not here to moralize, but they’ve found a way to do that, they make money, and they’re doing really well. We have another team in this program that’s figured out how to help people learn how to dance using technology.

Laura Vogt:
Oh, that’s cool.

Ken Singer:
So all of these things came out of that challenge lab, and another course we taught is alternative meat. We were one of the first to teach Blockchain as an applied course, and where we’re moving to… oh, what’s the other one? Deplastify the Planet, that’s, I think, my favorite right now, and that is helping companies. So company sponsored projects, they want to deplastify their business, and student teams come up with ways to do that with them. And we’ve had students find jobs, we’ve had students find new career paths.

Ken Singer:
So really if you think you’re a problem solver, you’re someone who really enjoys solving problems, whether you are an engineer or you’re a different department, it doesn’t matter. If you’re someone who likes to solve a problem, this is the place to explore that because there are real world impacts that can occur if you take one of these courses.

Ken Singer:
So my recommendation is to take a look at our course catalog. We’re going to do better. By next year we’re going to have all of our courses really well mapped out with information, kind of like a Yelp type of screen. We want to be the first to do that, to just show what kind of students will benefit from it, how serious the instructor is about grading, so you don’t have to go to Berkeleytime, this can just tell you. Like, this instructor really is hard, it’s a harder course to take.

Ken Singer:
And so we just want to give you that information so that we have the right students in class, the students that are prepared for what’s going to happen in that class. So look out for that, and we want to make as many of these classes open as possible, and trying to increase as many seats as we can. But nearly all of our classes are sponsored by alums, industry, or other means. We have very few classes that are funded by the university. So most everything is from your alums.

Laura Vogt:
That is so awesome, and thank you so much for joining us again today. So if students want to learn about this, it’s SCET.berkeley.edu.

Ken Singer:
Yep.

Laura Vogt:
And I’ll make sure that I have links on our websites, and just thank you so much for coming and being part of this. I’m sorry I didn’t have you on sooner, because it’s such an interesting program and I didn’t know that much about it.

Ken Singer:
Yeah, I’m glad, and happy to come back later, in fact, we can bring students who have been successful through our journey, can talk about what they learned through it, if that helps you out, and I’m starting to sell for it right now. But any students who have listened to this who truly wants access to the resources, email me, I promise you I will respond back, and you will be rewarded with a live person, no robot yet. So [crosstalk 00:30:23] connected to all other resources.

Laura Vogt:
And thank you to all the students for listening into The (Not So) Secret Guide to Being a Berkeley Engineer today, I look forward to podcasting with you next week. Thank you.