Business
The Ballad of John and Helen: Berkeley-Based Meyer Sound Are Global Audio Pioneers
Drop out. It’s such a leaden term. Yes, yes, Helen Brodsky dropped out of UC Berkeley in 1968, dashing the hopes and dreams of her Cal alumni-laden family. Before even declaring a major (she was leaning toward Russian Lit), she and her new boyfriend, John Meyer, an autodidact with a gift for tinkering and engineering, […]
Fear Factor: In Business and Life, It May Separate Smart Luck from Dumb Luck
Taking big risks might actually keep you from succeeding. John Morgan is haunted by the prospect of failure. However, he tells his classroom of aspiring entrepreneurs, this fear might not be as unhealthy as your “clinical psychologist will tell you.” We may like to peg successful entrepreneurs as overconfident thrill seekers, but such thrill seekers […]
Silicon Valley’s Disruptive Influence: Researching Effect on Workers, Community
Silicon Valley companies have long been under fire for lacking diversity in their workforce—the stereotype being the nerdy white or Asian programmer. But there was little data to back up that contention, until recently. This summer, Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo, and Twitter released the ethnic and gender breakdowns of their U.S. workforce. All five companies […]
Selling Sustainability: Delivering Cookstoves Is Easier than Convincing People to Use Them
David I. Levine is an unusual kind of salesman. The UC Berkeley Haas School of Business professor’s products are good: cost-effective, ecofriendly water filters and cookstoves. But Levine found that where his products were most needed—in Uganda, Bangladesh, and Kenya—people weren’t buying. “The biggest mystery is cookstoves,” says Levine. Traditional biomass cookstoves kill more than […]
Old-School Networking: Blues in Business Come Together to Give Each Other a Hand
At Wells Fargo headquarters in San Francisco, four recent Cal grads—Angus Hsu ’07, who works in portable housing finance; Fred Fannon ’08, an analytics consultant; Richard Zhu ’09 in the Securities division; and Dana Zhang ’13 from the Global Financial Institutions group—are hard at work creating an alumni network of Golden Bears at the bank. […]
Food, Glorious Food: Why Do So Many Cal Alums Take a Career Detour Into the Kitchen?
Paul Oprescu majored in modern American history at UC Berkeley and planned to become an academic. But he had a dream—not the kind you hold in your heart, the kind you have in your sleep. He dreamt he was making fresh pasta and selling it to students. That, he says, was the impetus that prompted […]
Kabam? Ka-Ching: Naming Rights Bring Cash to Campus
Even on a football field it sometimes helps to tread lightly. That’s why as Berkeley administrators were deciding how to pay down the $445 million price tag associated with the retrofit and expansion project at California Memorial Stadium, the idea of selling naming rights to the structure itself was never on the table. “We have […]
In on the Ground Floor: Would My Investment in a Friend’s Scheme Really Seal My Fortune?
Graduation was near and other seniors were scrambling for work. I knew I was set. I had met a brilliant entrepreneur and was investing my time and savings in his sure-fire venture that guaranteed me both a job and untold millions. His plan was literally airtight: Create a device that would improve upon the highest […]
Elements of Branding
Brands comprise a package of sensorial elements meant to promise unique value and to maximize awareness and recognition of the product, service, or entity they stand for. Ideally the brand bundle should evoke an emotional response, a resonance in the eye and mind that helps to bond the viewer to the product or service. One […]
Whatcha Gonna Do With a Degree in That? Consider the Pixar Possibility
Winter Break is coming, along with relatives who will almost certainly ask questions just like that. Well, we went nosing around Pixar Studios and talked to three Berkeley alums whose answers may surprise you. Sociology isn’t the easiest major to explain to practical-minded grandparents, and Gillian Libbert says she picked it because, “It sounds corny, […]
Upward Mobilty, Or Is It ‘Upward Futility’?
While a new Associated Press report claims 80 percent of Americans are teetering at the brink of poverty, a recent study from UC Berkeley and Harvard indicates that a child’s chances of rising out of poverty might may be linked to zip code. The Quality of Opportunity Project examines the likelihood of upward mobility, from a […]
Flight Plans
UC Berkeley, of course, is one of the top engineering schools in the nation, an institution that needn’t take a backseat to any peer—including a certain private university nestled in the San Francisco Peninsula. But there’s one area where Cal’s engineers and entrepreneurs have admittedly played catch-up to private, heavily endowed universities: ramping up for […]
