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Berkeley

Stipple illustration of the UC Berkeley campus: Sather Tower and Doe Library with students crossing the lawn.

It has happened here before.

Berkeley, in the record

  1. Intel

    Gordon Moore, Co-founder & CEO

    B.S. Chemistry, 1950

  2. Apple

    Steve Wozniak, Co-founder & VP of R&D

    B.S. EECS, 1986

  3. OpenAI

    John Schulman, Co-founder & Research Scientist

    Ph.D. Computer Science, 2016

  4. Sun Microsystems

    Bill Joy, Co-founder & Chief Scientist

    M.S. EECS, 1979

  5. SoftBank

    Masayoshi Son, Founder & CEO

    B.A. Economics

  6. VMware

    Diane Greene, Co-founder & CEO

    M.S. EECS

  7. DoorDash

    Tony Xu, Co-founder & CEO

    B.S. IEOR

  8. Growing

    This list gets longer every time someone here builds something that lasts.

    You’re next

A partial list. Verified degree records, not affiliations claimed after the fact.

Berkeley doesn’t have a talent problem. It has an activation problem.

The people who could build the next important companies are already on campus, sitting in the same lecture halls as everyone else. Most of them never start. Build Berkeley exists to change that.

Tell us what you’re buildingRead the thesis
Activation energy diagramTwo reaction curves from latent talent to founders. The solid curve has a tall energy barrier. The dashed curve, labelled with Build Berkeley, has a lower barrier. A dot travels the lower path.EnergyTime →Latent talentFounders · companiesActivation energy, aloneWith Build Berkeley
Fig. 1 — A catalyst doesn’t change the reaction. It lowers the energy required to start it.
01Thesis

The talent is already here.

Berkeley already has an extraordinary concentration of technical talent, ambition and intellectual depth. Much of it never gets used.

We don’t need to manufacture better entrepreneurs from scratch. The people with the raw ability to build important companies are here. What they’re missing is the activation energy to begin.

Berkeley produces world-class engineers, researchers, scientists and operators. But the culture around them doesn’t push its most exceptional students toward starting things the way other ecosystems do. Many who could be remarkable founders take the conventional path instead. Not for lack of ability, but because nobody around them was building, nobody told them they could, and nobody gave them permission.

Talent is not the shortage. Activation is.
02Media

Make building visible.

Our first wedge is media. We document and celebrate Berkeley founders, builders and ambitious projects, relentlessly, until entrepreneurship is visible from every corner of campus.

Founder stories are cultural infrastructure. They show students that the person two seats over in 61A, or down the hall in Unit 2, is already building something consequential. Same lecture halls. Same dorms. Same problem sets.

The effect compounds. Every story lowers the barrier for the next person.

The compounding loopFour steps in a circle: peers seen building, building feels normal, more people start, more examples. Then it repeats.Peers seen buildingBuildingfeels normalMore people startMoreexamplesand again.
Fig. 2 — The loop. Every founder we document becomes someone else’s permission.

What we document

  1. 001Founders

    Students who have started companies, at any stage. Including the ones that didn’t work.

  2. 002Builders

    People shipping things nobody assigned. Tools, hardware, models, communities.

  3. 003Research

    Labs and papers that could become companies, and the students who see it first.

  4. 004Projects

    The ambitious, half-finished, slightly unreasonable ones.

03Who

High agency, found early.

We look for students with unusual agency. The ones already shipping, already running the experiment, already recruiting friends into a side project that got out of hand. Major, year and résumé matter less than evidence of building.

You might be one of them if

  1. 01

    You’ve shipped something people actually use, and nobody assigned it.

  2. 02

    There’s a problem from your lab, your internship or your problem set that you can’t stop thinking about.

  3. 03

    You’ve been told to wait. For the degree, the job, the right time.

  4. 04

    You know you should start. You haven’t yet.

If that sounds like you, we want to hear from you. If it sounds like someone you know, nominate them.

04Roadmap

From media to institution.

Media is the wedge, not the destination. Over time, Build Berkeley becomes the institution that finds high-agency students early, puts them in a dense community of other builders, connects them with founders and investors, helps them find collaborators, and gives promising ideas what they need to become companies.

  1. 01Now

    Document

    Founder stories, published relentlessly, until building is visible from every corner of campus.

  2. 02Next

    Gather

    A dense community of builders. Small rooms, high standards, people who make each other start.

  3. 03Later

    Connect

    Founders, investors and collaborators, introduced early. Cofounders found across departments.

  4. 04Later

    Fund

    Resources for promising ideas to become companies. Capital, space and the first push.

05Start

The more students see their peers building, the more normal building becomes.

The more normal it becomes, the more people start. Those founders become the next examples. If you’re building something at Berkeley, or you know someone who is, this is where it begins.

Tell us what you’re buildingNominate a builder