Berkeley Talks: How Berkeley became a powerhouse for innovation and startups

(Music: “No One Is Perfect” by HoliznaCC0)

Anne Brice (intro): This is Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. You can follow Berkeley Talks wherever you listen to your podcasts. We’re also on YouTube @BerkeleyNews. New episodes come out every other Friday. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

(Music fades out)

Mia Rauer: Welcome everyone. Before we begin today’s event, we would like to take a moment to recognize that Berkeley sits on the territory of Huichun, the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo Ohlone, the successors of the historic and sovereign Verona Band of Alameda County. This land was and continues to be of great importance to the Ohlone people.

We recognize that every member of the Berkeley community has benefited from the use and occupation of this land since the institution’s founding in 1868. Consistent with our values of community and diversity, we have a responsibility to acknowledge and make visible the university’s relationship to Native peoples. By offering this land acknowledgement, we affirm Indigenous sovereignty and will work to hold the University of California, Berkeley, more accountable to the needs of American Indian and Indigenous peoples. We know that many of you are spread throughout the world on the land of other peoples, and we would like to take the time to acknowledge that ancestral history as well.

My name is Mia Rauer, and I’m an alum from the class of 2024. I had the privilege of working with Chancellor Lyons in his former role as chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer. He frequently spoke about the importance of catalyzing change through culture, and I saw that reflected in how he conducted himself every day. One of my favorite memories at Cal is when Rich secured a golf cart for my team to decorate, and drove it around with us during Cal Day to promote our program. He’s a fantastic leader and visionary, and I’m thrilled to introduce him to you today.

Rich Lyons is the 12th chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, beginning his tenure as the first undergraduate alum to serve as chancellor in July 2024. Prior to serving as chancellor, he was the associate vice chancellor for innovation and entrepreneurship from 2020 to 2024, leading the development and expansion of innovation and entrepreneurship campuswide. He also served as the dean of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business from 2008 to 2018.

Chancellor Lyons received his bachelor of science degree from UC Berkeley in 1982, and returned to campus in 1993 as a faculty member at the Haas School of Business. This was after receiving his Ph.D. in economics from MIT, and following six years on the teaching faculty at Columbia University. In 1998, he was awarded the Distinguished Teaching Award, Berkeley’s highest teaching honor. Asked at a meeting among colleagues what his six-word memoir is, Chancellor Lyons responded with, “Long-term love affair with ideas, learning.” As an alum and contributor since shortly after leaving Berkeley in the 1980s, he delights in mixing it up with alumni and working together to steward this remarkable university, truly one of society’s most important and distinctive assets. Please welcome Chancellor Lyons.

Rich Lyons: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Mia, for that too. It was such a joy working with you. We appreciate it. So somebody, as I walked in, said, “Have you heard the news?” And I hadn’t heard the news, so I think I’ll just read it to you because you may not have either. I think it just came over the wires. But I’m reading from the New York Times, it’s the featured headline, “Hamas says it agrees to release all hostages in Gaza.” So that is quite an announcement and quite a piece of news.

So what we’re here to talk about today is in many ways, I think it’s fair to say, a seismic shift in Berkeley, and one that serves our mission even more. We’ll get into that, right? But Berkeley has become, as you may know, having read a bit about this, the number one university in the whole country. Our undergraduates produce more funded new businesses than those of any other university in the country, actually in the world. And these are PitchBook data. But how does something like that happen? And I just want to talk a little bit about that or we want to talk about that. I’ve got three of my wonderful colleagues here, and I’ll introduce them in just a second.

And at the mission level, I think you might actually think this remarkable societal asset, as Mia put it, and normally we think about the mission, the deep why as research, teaching and service. But in fact, I think if you think at a next layer, the research, teaching and service are profoundly important hows. And the why is long-term societal benefit. I mean, you can use different words, but at the end of the day, it’s about the impact, the positive impact that Berkeley has on the world. And we do that through research, teaching and service.

Why am I starting here? Because somebody could say we are a public research university. Our mission, the deep why, is research, teaching and service. Why all this innovation, why this entrepreneurship stuff, why go in that direction? Doesn’t that pull us away from our mission? And I think that’s part of the message here, that what’s happening here and what has happened over the last 20-plus years is profoundly mission-advancing, it’s not counter to the mission. But we’ll talk a little bit about that. But I thought that’s about as 10,000 feet as you can get. But I thought I would start there, because I think it helps us understand why might Berkeley have been more wary in the past of going in this direction. We need to do everything we do in a way that is consistent with our values. And that’s part of what we’ll talk about here as well. But I just thought I’d give you a little bit of that 20,000 foot level.

One other quick story from me, and then I get to introduce our remarkable panelists here. Here are a couple stories of how I sort of realized that the world had pivoted a bit, or our world, our Berkeley world, had pivoted a bit. So my field is economics. And when I think about … here’s one example, when we put together the last strategic plan for Berkeley, for those of you that were involved in that, many of you were in one form or another, we had a set of, we called them multidisciplinary themes, but they were sort of grand challenges, moon shots, what are we going to build into the strategic plan? So we’re going back to 2017 and so forth.

And there were four of them that came out of the internal process that was super participative and everybody was involved. And then we presented it to donors and they said, “There’s something missing. Innovation and entrepreneurship.” The funders of this university. So that was sort of driven externally. They saw what we came up with, those four are great, but there’s something missing. And so that was a very strong signal from the external marketplace that Berkeley needs to lean into this more. And it’s like, “Oh, note to self.” I mean, it really was kind of a defining moment.

Here’s another example. And I never did get my hand slapped for this, but I still might, especially now that I’m saying it to all of you. But we created a website, a whole bunch of us worked on this, and it’s called the innovation and entrepreneurship website. It’s actually iande.berkeley.edu. Anyway, so that’s a website, iande.berkeley.edu, so for innovation and entrepreneurship.

But one of the things that we posted on there was a memo, and I believe the memo was 2022, it wasn’t that long ago. And it was a memo from the systemwide 10 campus provost to the chancellors, the 10 chancellors of the UC system. And it says, “From now on, innovation and entrepreneurship activity, on behalf of our faculty, counts positively toward promotion and tenure.” That is a cultural milestone. It really is. I remember sending that memo to some people who care a lot about Berkeley and care a lot about this part of it, that’s like, “Wow.” Kind of knocked their socks off. And I don’t think 10 years ago you would’ve ever predicted a memo like that would get created. It’s still on the website. You can easily find it, iande.berkeley.edu. Anyway, those are a couple of the turning points.

Here’s the last one, and then I do the intros, because we need to talk, you don’t want to just hear from me. But there’s a new book out, it was published about a month ago, it’s called Startup Campus. If anybody has a copy of it, you travel with your copy, I hope. Everybody’s got … Anyway, Startup Campus was published. There it is, there’s a copy. It’s blue cover. And in any event, it is taking the world by storm is going a little far, but it is really getting a lot of attention and it’s basically a playbook. It’s like how did Berkeley get here? I was an undergrad here in the late ’70s and early ’80s. I don’t think we would’ve predicted this, right? Well, obviously we have a geographic location given where we are, really part of the larger Silicon Valley, but this took some cultural change, which we’ll talk about.

So that book is out there. One of our colleagues, Michael Cohen, sort of helped as a managing editor and also one of the principal authors, but there were tens of people who helped write that book. But that’s also a turning point. And the world is reading that. And I’ll just use it as one example. Michael Crow is a terrifically innovative college president. He’s at ASU, Arizona State University. Terrifically innovative. And in many people’s minds kind of the most front foot of the university professors in the US today. And he wrote an endorsement for our book and then he sent me an email afterwards and said, “My people are going to read this book.” Meaning his staff team at ASU. So it’s really setting kind of an example and playbook. I mean, it’s useful. And that’s really important.

I get to introduce our colleagues and then we’ll dive into it. So to my immediate left here, Ana Arias. I’ve had a chance to work with her for years now, especially in my prior job on innovation and entrepreneurship. She’s a professor, full professor, electrical engineering and computer sciences, EECS, as you may remember it.

Ken Goldberg, William Floyd Distinguished Chair in Engineering. Ken is a … Quick Ken story, my wife brought me to the Marin Film Festival and there was a film that was being shown and then it was like, “Oh, one of the directors is going to speak.” And I’m looking up there and it’s Ken, Ken is one of the directors. So anyways, robotics, many other things. He started companies. It’s like, how do you do this, Ken? I don’t understand it. OK. He’s absolutely outstanding, as is Ana, and Marco Lobba, who is the co-founder and CEO of CatenaBio, which is one of the companies that was one of the first companies into our BBH, our Bakar BioIngenuity Hub. And so he’s one of the founders. He knows Berkeley very, very well. And we can fill in a little bit more around that.

But let’s start. If I could kind of pass it to each of you, I’ll start with you, Ana, sort of primary research interests. Ana has started companies and doing fundamental research and the whole stack. So talk to us about your primary research interests.

Ana Claudia Arias: Thank you, Rich. It’s great to be here with you and with you all. My research interests are in flexible electronics. I want to make electronics kind of disappear from our lives or be integrated into our lives, so we don’t notice boxes and we carry things with wires and stuff. Most of the focus of my research has been in applications that involve humans, and health specifically. As Rich said, I work on fundamental research materials, all the way to devices, systems, and then applications, to products that end up as part of companies. I think we’ll talk more about companies or do you want me to …

Rich Lyons: Well, that’s perfect to start, because I definitely want to dig in on your companies and some of the flexible MRI and some of the other things that are just so exciting that you and your colleagues have come up with. And I think part of it … Look, what is the root source of Berkeley’s preeminence? It is fundamental research. That’s why the whole world knows us. Are we good at translational research? We’ve got a whole book on how good we are at translational research. Are we great at education? Are we great … ? OK. We are. But the whole world knows about us because the fundamental stuff, it’s like we need to understand the mechanism deeply.

It’s not like Jennifer Doudna was trying to create companies. It’s like we need to understand the deepest part of biology. Oh, and then CRISPR comes out of it and then a bunch of companies come out of that. But it’s like it’s the fundamentals that distinguish us. And Ana and Ken both, I mean, they’re just as fundamental as it gets and they can see what’s downstream and how they can advance the world. Sorry, go on. Please, Ken, could you?

Ken Goldberg: OK.

Rich Lyons: OK.

Ken Goldberg: Great. I loved your intro by the way. So love your energy and what you say about Berkeley, by the way. And I think this idea what drew me to Berkeley, when I was a little kid growing up in Pennsylvania and I started hearing about Berkeley in the ’60s, I idolized it. And I was so … It was the free speech movement, the anti-war movement, the sort of rebel, rebellious attitude, that I just gravitated toward, and I think actually draws a lot of our faculty and a lot of our students to this place. How many people can relate to that in some way? OK, good. Because I think you brought that back. I know you a had a wonderful speech about the free speech movement anniversary and you’ve really been one to trumpet that, which I really appreciate. Because I think that is really what it’s at core, this idea of questioning authority and being rebellious, but at the same time very rigorous. That’s what I think of as uniquely Berkeley.

And so when I was a kid, I was interested in robots and I watched The Jetsons, and a bunch of TV shows like that, and I just wanted to get involved with robots and rockets too. But I ended up with robots and I studied them in undergrad, in grad school, and just became fascinated by all these geometric questions about how they move in space and what they can do. And actually, I started studying a very simple problem, which is how robots grasp objects. And I think I got started in that because I was an incredibly clumsy kid. I still am actually. And some of my family members are here. They know if you throw a ball to me, I will almost certainly drop it. I just don’t have that skill.

So I went into studying how do robots … how can they pick things up? And it turns out that’s actually a grand challenge even today. We still haven’t solved it. So getting robots to just reliably pick things up, which you would need if you want robots to do almost anything, like around the house, clean up or in a factory, they’re still not very good at that.

So we’re studying this. I have a lab of students as we speak. They’re actually back in the lab right now working. And over the years we’ve tried to understand the physics of grasping, the statistical models of grasping, and we developed one breakthrough. And I actually give a lot of credit to my Ph.D. student at the time, Jeff Mahler. We developed a way of using deep learning to address grasping and it started working. And we just would watch it in the lab and we’d throw objects into this bin and it would just pull them out one by one. And we were so astounded by this, we got to show it to Jeff Bezos. He invited us to his research lab, and he loved it. And then we decided to start a company. So we’ve been having fun with that ever since.

Rich Lyons: Love it. Thank you for that. Thank you for that. And Marco, over to you. CatenaBio. Thanks.

Marco Lobba: No, absolutely. I think that’s the common thread that really comes through from the Berkeley ethos, which is this curiosity, right? It’s this fundamental drive to understand the world around us and to use that knowledge to benefit society. And for me, I’ve always been driven by this idea of how do we build a better mousetrap? But in my case that mousetrap is therapeutics. I’m obsessed with understanding how we can build molecules that will be able to fix problems in human health.

And so I had the pleasure of doing my Ph.D. with Jennifer and Matt Francis. So Jennifer Doudna and Matt Francis were both PIs of mine during my Ph.D.. And we were trying to find ways of making a better gene editor. And we discovered a brand new technology, using this fundamental research-focused approach, that allows us to build better therapeutics and it can affect CRISPR, it also can affect oncology. And so the company that we started actually ended up focusing mostly on oncology. But this basic research idea turns out to have applications in every field of therapeutics. And that’s just been the amazing focal point of my work and I feel just so lucky to work on it.

Rich Lyons: Oh, I love it. Just a quick follow-up on that. And I’m sure there’s still a lot of hypotheses, genuine scientific hypotheses, you still have to get to the other side of in your company, right? You’re still doing science.

Marco Lobba: Absolutely. We never stop. And that’s the beauty of it, is now that we’ve spun out from academia, it doesn’t mean that that basic research stopped. There’s always the next basic research question that pushes you one step further towards actually getting into a patient.

Rich Lyons: Thanks for that. And I think that’s another element of the … Because we’ve mostly talked about research and we’ve mostly talked about companies, but also how do we include students in this process, right? For a lot of students, I mean, they’re cutting their first kind of research teeth on some of the translational work that’s coming out of the fundamental work. And it’s very exciting for them. Many of them may end up wanting to be scholars, which is a great thing, and getting a Ph.D. and doing the academic, but some of them, it’s just like, “Wow, I just love this translational thing and the companies that are coming out of it.” So they’re seeing that and getting those immersive experiences at a much higher scale.

One other quick example of this, SkyDeck, which is our … we have many accelerators, so-called startup accelerators, on campus. SkyDeck is arguably the biggest and the oldest.

And I was asking Caroline Winnett, that I worked with closely … She might be in the room … this is a couple of years ago, I said, “They have an internship program at SkyDeck, and so how many of our undergrads are getting interns in startups at SkyDeck?” And I asked her that. You’d think I would know given the job I was in. I didn’t know what she was going to say, 30, 50, 80. She said 800 every year. 800. So the scale at which Berkeley operates is magnificent, and it kind of boggles the mind sometimes, but that’s part of the magic of the place.

So, Ana, if we could go to your flexible electronics and thinking about, well, the MRI. And anyways, I remember, talk to us about how you first started thinking about flexible MRI and what it could do for us.

Ana Claudia Arias: It was my first week at Berkeley. I gave a talk to my faculty, to my colleagues, about my research, which was I was coming from industry, I was working at Xerox PARC where I did a lot of printing, printed electronics, and I talked about my vision. My vision was to make medical devices that feel and fit the body like clothes do. And I gave my speech and one of my colleagues, Miki Lustig, came running behind me and said, “Ana, Ana, can you work with coils?”

Turns out when we go and have an MRI, it’s very uncomfortable. I’m sure many of you have been there. Noisy, cold, long. And one of the problems is that the device that needs to go in your body actually doesn’t fit very well, sits quite far from you, and that makes harder to get the image. So you have to stay there in that tube, claustrophobic tube, for longer. So if you bring that closer to the body, you can accelerate the image, you get better image, and it’s more comfortable.

For the kids though, the kids have to go under anesthesia and they stay two hours in the MRI. And of course if they are sick, they have to have MRIs quite often. Or they have CT scans which has radiation, it’s worse for their condition. So we came up with this, it worked really well. I came up with a partnership with Children’s Hospital. Came to a prototype and our partner in the children’s hospital kept asking us for more, more, “Can you give me more? Can you give me a bigger one?” And that’s when I started looking with my students, two of my students, into the business. We signed up for a class in the Haas School, and then eventually, did a customer discovery through a program called I-Corps where Darren was our business mentor. And that’s, I think, when we started talking too, and today, this is an FDA approved device that is for children, for adults, and it’s just makes MRI much quicker and more comfortable.

Rich Lyons: It’s a lovely example.

Ana Claudia Arias: Thank you.

Rich Lyons: It’s a lovely example and I remember long before FDA approval and so forth, when you were showing people or pitching depending upon the setting, but you had a doll, a baby-sized doll.

Ana Claudia Arias: Baby Hope, Baby Hope.

Rich Lyons: And swaddling clothes, and it’s like, that’s like an MRI. Those aren’t swaddling clothes, it’s like …

Ana Claudia Arias: The funny thing, it needed to be waterproof. So I went to Joann’s with my kids and we picked up fabric for bibs. And there were three kinds that my kids approved, dinosaurs, cats and Tweety birds. But people sat on the dinosaurs, and dinosaurs have nothing to do with anything, right? But the company still has very beautiful prints in their product of dinosaurs.

Rich Lyons: Full of dinos.

Ana Claudia Arias: Because of Joann Fabrics.

Rich Lyons: Who knows? The market speaks and we listen. But I think it’s also that you go to Joann … Anyways, you’re like, these are the early stages of these companies. It’s like you’re bootstrapping at that point, right? So maybe, Ken, you could also talk a little bit about how the ecosystem at the university supported some of what you were doing as you got more translational.

Ken Goldberg: Oh, good. Well, I would say it was definitely undergrads. We have a lot of undergrads in my lab, probably 20 at any given time. And I can’t tell you, almost every week I get another email from a student saying, “I would love to work in your lab.” And they’re all always like 3.9 GPA and I’m just like, “Oh my God. I have to.” I can’t say no. So I love these students. Because I did that as an undergrad and I found it really inspiring. And they are often extremely productive. Some of them deliver papers that we send them overseas to give talks, and they’re first author of some of our papers. So they were involved in this whole process. They did a lot of the work on collecting data, which turns out to be very important to train these neural networks. And they were involved in every step of the testing and evaluation that we had to do.

But it was also … I have to say, I want to give credit to Mike Cohen, because at that time it was 2018 and he was really leading this revolution in some sense. Because I had been here a while since ’95, so I’m in my 30th year this year and I’ve loved every minute of it. But one of the things is that it’s changed over time. And I have seen this shift, as you said, the seismic shift, that has led to much more of an openness, an encouragement, a very different attitude that’s very, very cooperative. And so when we went and started talking about this company, we went to Mike and he was very, very encouraging, made it easy. He has this great phrase, he wants to do decisions at the speed of business.

So if you send him an email … I used to remember, I would send emails to this office and you would never hear back, and you send him an email, in contrast, literally within 10 minutes, is where he writes you back. I mean, he’s one of the most responsive people. And he just has this mission and he has been steadfast in that. So it’s been a pleasure. Every time you have an idea, he’ll just really embrace it and be there to support you, so that was a huge part of it.

Then there’s also the Berkeley ecosystem of the other place, The House Fund, and with Jeremy Fiance, and Jagdeep Bachher, his group has been very supportive of the venture groups around. And that has been really terrific because they were also there not only to fund us, but also provide lots and lots of guidance throughout the whole process. We had to hire an external CEO at a certain point, and they helped and it worked out beautifully. So I’m just very, very pleased with that whole process.

Rich Lyons: Well, thanks for that. Michael Cohen, he’s the same Michael Cohen that I mentioned, Startup Campus. He was the managing editor of that, wrote big chunks of it, sort of managed that whole process. And he’s part of our tech transfer office that we call IPIRA, Intellectual Property and Industry Research Alliances. And he’s been part of that group for a long time. And among others, but a very early and important catalyst, right? And somebody like that has an influence on somebody like Ken, and a lot of things start to happen that might not have otherwise happened. And so that’s even more pervasive now than it was. And in 2018, you mentioned 2018. So the role, the first … Berkeley created the chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer, sort of like an associate vice chancellor in 2020. So this was predating even some kind of the institutional evolution.

So Marco, maybe you could talk to us a bit about, so you got your Ph.D. here and maybe you could talk about at what point did you feel like startups was the way to go as opposed to a pure academic life, and how did Berkeley support you in that?

Marco Lobba: Yeah, I have to say, starting a company is not for everyone. And Ph.D. students I think somewhat self-select for not being as outward-facing. We really like to go deep on a single-subject area. And I felt very fortunate that I had the inclination to look outward and see where some of this research might have applications. And I’ve been very fortunate that Berkeley has an amazing network of alumni who work in industry. And so, as we were working on this problem of how do you make CRISPR better, I was able to ask and interface with our alumni and say, “Well, how do you make your therapeutics better? What tools do you use? What are people using in the industry? Because I really believe CRISPR’s going to change the world for a lot of people.” And they said, “Well, we don’t have that many good tools, we’re sticking stuff together. Glue is actually really hard when you get down to the molecular level, it’s very hard to build better glue there.”

And so when we discovered this enzyme that allows us to glue molecules together in a brand new way, people got really excited. It was a very similar thing, where you go out to the real world application space and you say, “Hey, what’s going on here?”

Ken Goldberg: What’s hard? 

Marco Lobba: And what’s hard? Do you have a pain point? And does my fundamental basic research discovery fix that point? And every time we talked to somebody it was, “I need more. I want more. How can we work with you? How soon can we work with you?” And that, fundamentally, is what gave me the impetus to say, “I want to jump out of academia. I want to start a company.”

Now, starting a company is a scary thing. I mean, I was doing research, I was sitting at the bench and I said, “Well, I’ve got an idea, but there’s this giant black box between me and a company.”

Audience 1: Audience member yells: [Inaudible] … of a fit and strict community to say that we will not be sidelined.

Rich Lyons: So our free speech traditions are very, very important to us. And the heckler’s veto is in fact completely contrary to that. I appreciate that he got a chance to be heard. I also appreciate that he left the room. And we are getting firmer and firmer about, look, heckler’s veto is not appropriate. OK? So anyways. But having a Berkeley where difficult ideas get discussed is part of why Berkeley’s Berkeley. So let’s move on.

Ken Goldberg: I will say we didn’t plan that, right?

Rich Lyons: No. So I don’t know that you’d finished, but …

Marco Lobba: To wrap up quickly, we found a cool tool. We talked to people, we went through the Haas School of Business. I got to take classes with Kurt Beyer and who taught me how to start a company. And I got to take the I-Corps course that taught me how to do customer discovery. And the Haas Seed Fund was the first check into our company. It was $5,000, and that led us file our incorporation fees with California and Delaware, and we formed a company and then we had a legal entity to start doing business.

And now, we’ve moved outside of CRISPR, but we’re now attaching chemotherapy to antibodies to make better cancer drugs. And it’s amazing, because throughout our entire process, Berkeley’s been there every step of the way. It was whether it was incorporating through UC Hastings, whether it was the SkyDeck PAD-13 program, whether it was the CITRIS Foundry up with the National Lab, we’ve been able to benefit from the Berkeley resources tremendously, and our company wouldn’t be here today without those resources. And I’m missing, I’m sure, at least five different resources that I haven’t mentioned, but I’m going to take too much time. But that’s the strength of what we’ve got here. That’s the beauty of the ecosystem that is Berkeley.

Rich Lyons: Thanks, Marco, for saying that. I think it’s also, I mean, we sometimes use the word ecosystem and then we move on. But ecosystem is a deep concept, right? Do you remember you talked to Michel and he said, “Hey, have you thought about this?” It’s not like you were looking for it. Right?

Ana Claudia Arias: Yeah.

Rich Lyons: And the things that happened to Ken and the seed grant, I mean, we had a donor that gave us $2 million so that we could give out 10 or 15 seed grants. They were only $5,000, but the donor said, I want to catalyze the very front end of this stuff. And then the alumni that are coming in and helping us do some of this. The alumni now, of course, is a really important part of that. And we haven’t talked very much about capital provision here, right? I mean, you mentioned The House Fund.

We now have a lot of external, legally external, venture capital funds, they have an affiliation agreement with UC Berkeley, so-called shared carry funds, that are investing in our companies and sharing their due diligence with us, helping us understand what companies we have. And no one of these things changes the game, but you put N of these things together, and it’s like we’re not just N-times as good as we were, we’re like N-squared as good as we were, right? And that’s part of what we’re seeing. But you can see it reveal in the stories that are told, right? And it’s hard to kind of plan all of this, but it really has been transformative.

Look, how about on the culture front? Can we just kind of narrowly about why this great public research university that’s known for fundamental research? Why is this kind of how did we get to, OK, why this works? I know that’s a very broad question, but does any story pop into your head about like the one I mentioned? When did it click to me that, “Hey, the game feels like it’s changing here?”

Ana Claudia Arias: For me, when I was considering if I would come to academia or not, being in research, my first job after I finished my Ph.D. was in a startup company. And during my Ph.D., I did a course in the business school in Cambridge University called the three Bs, Basics of Building a Business. So I had that in me, right? So I was at Xerox PARC, very innovative, also working from fundamentals to applications for business. And I was thinking, “Why would I go somewhere where I will lose that part?” And when I came to visit Berkeley, I said, “Wow.” Especially, my department, electrical engineering computer science, I think people were, it was part of the culture to work with industry and to start new businesses. And when I read the book, Startup Campus, all my colleagues are there, and I kept reading their stories. It’s really amazing.

So I think it’s part of a culture, it’s part of Berkeley to really think about how the fundamental research I am doing will affect others, will affect the community and make the community better. And I see that so many of my colleagues take that to heart.

And there was an infrastructure here, there was the Bakar Fellowship that has the goal of supporting ideas that could lead to business. There was the I-Corps, SkyDeck. SkyDeck was some of the first check for my company, and it made a huge difference and just credibility. All of a sudden you have a term sheet that others can model and invest in the company. And there was this wonderful dean of the business school that would talk to engineers. And there’s just a lot of the culture, and the community want to see us succeed not only academically, but also in the translation and the impact.

Rich Lyons: Love that. So what year are we talking about when you came to Berkeley?

Ana Claudia Arias: I came to Berkeley in 2011.

Rich Lyons: 2011, got it.

Ana Claudia Arias: So the history of this, 2011, our first paper, publication, came out after our patents. We first filed patents and we held the publications. So the publication only came in 2015. We started the company 2016, FDA approval 2020.

Rich Lyons: Wow. Love it. Love it. And you’re EECS, electrical engineering and computer science, I think among all of our departments, that’s one that probably … its subculture evolved a little faster than some of the others, that you had some colleagues that were in that space a little sooner than …

Ana Claudia Arias: And I saw the change because I remember that some people would say, “Oh, EECS, you guys are only interested in business.” But now it’s like, “Oh, EECS, you guys are interested in business.” So the tone of description changed.

Rich Lyons: See, that’s a perfect example.

Ana Claudia Arias: Yes.

Rich Lyons: It’s a perfect example. And also, it was in Forbes just like a month ago, but Ion Stoica, there was this article that’s like, this guy’s created all these billion-dollar companies and he wants to stay a faculty member at Berkeley. I mean, it was just kind of a really, really nice story.

And then that idea of long-term societal benefit, commitment to the greater good, it’s like, well, academics at other places are committed to the greater good. It’s like Berkeley’s got more of that than other places, we’re a public … People still select into Berkeley. So that sounds like a throwaway line, it’s not. It’s really a part of the culture that’s highly distinguishing. And if you’re a scientist, these scientists, these people, they have the biggest reputations in fundamental research you can find. And still they want their stuff to have impact, right? And you don’t always find that, not to that degree. I think that’s like a cultural separator. Ken, anything on the culture front that you’d like to add?

Ken Goldberg: Yes, thank you. Because I do think the culture … I can tell you that when I was a kid, I wanted to be an artist. And I talked about this when I was applying to undergrad, and my mother said, “Oh yeah, you can be an artist after you get your engineering degree.” So I actually appreciate that now because it was great advice. I know that how competitive the art world is now, my wife is an artist, and as you mentioned, we work together on art projects.

But one of the things that I’ve always been aware of is this essay called The Two Cultures, that C.P. Snow wrote in 1959. And he was at Cambridge, and he said that … He was a physicist, but he also had a lot of friends in literature and the arts and the humanities, and he said when he goes and hangs out with them, they speak a different language, they talk about different things and they don’t understand any of the physics and vice versa. And so he could cross over those two. And he wrote this wonderful book that still I think is very relevant today. Because I have friends in different parts of campus and there’s a real difference of cultures there. But I really value those other cultures. I think that the culture to be a philosopher or an art historian, demands just as much scholarship and dedication and effort as to be an engineer or a biologist. It’s just as important.

And so, at Berkeley, I feel that that’s another thing that really characterizes it, is Berkeley has excellence across so many disciplines. We have the world’s best departments of architecture, art history, philosophy, history, English, and those are also so valued and also very engaged with the governance every step of the way.

And so it’s great because the more that those two cultures are communicating and talking with each other. Another thing I saw here over the years when I came, I was doing art, but I was told … Actually at my previous university, I won’t tell you where that was … but they said, “Stop doing the art. No one will take you seriously.” And I went underground. I actually had two resumes and it was very weird for a while. But when I came to Berkeley, I was coming up for tenure and the head of the department said to me, “You can come out of the closet. It’s safe here.” And I did. And ever since then I put both of those things on my promotion cases. It is been really positive. So I’ve been very lucky. And is again, I think, one of the great things about this campus.

Rich Lyons: A lovely story. Berkeley, by many measures, if you look at the number of departments, and we have many that are in the top 10, we rank either number one or number two in the country consistently. And so it’s in the numbers. But I think the next level that Ken was pointing at is we respect one another. The scientists respect the humanists and vice versa. That’s part of why it’s hard to keep comprehensively excellent when people don’t respect each other across boundaries. I think that’s part of the culture that allows Berkeley to sustain such a remarkable portfolio, right? And those aren’t as obvious.

Another cultural feature, sort of imagine I’m the president of a great Ivy League institution, all eight of them are great as we know. And I stand up in front of you and I say, “This institution, we’re all about questioning the status quo.” For a lot of those institutions that would feel contraindicated. It would sort of feel like you’re kind of the establishment, aren’t you? Whereas you hear that about Berkeley, it’s like, “Yeah, what else you got?” And part of it could be you say, “Yeah, oh, question the status quo,” but it’s sort of like, “Yeah, that mindset, there’s got to be a better way to do this.” Boom. That’s what creates companies. That’s what makes Berkeley number one, right?

So those two phrases, question the status quo, and there’s got to be a better way to do this, they’re half an inch apart. And those are cultural features that literally, it’s like, “Oh, we’ve got another unobjectionable value that everybody’s talking about.” It’s sort of like, “No, this is actually quite separating.” So these are sometimes less tangible, but very important ingredients to why Berkeley is doing what it’s doing.

Any thoughts on culture from you, Marco?

Marco Lobba: I think the thing that’s really interesting is if you look at the various departments within Berkeley, as you said, we had certain departments that might have got on that bandwagon a little bit sooner. And the thing that’s been really interesting to me, I’ve now been in and around the Berkeley ecosystem for a decade, which is crazy, and I’ve seen a change even in that decade, and particularly, because I live in the bio and chemistry side of the campus there. I think it took a little bit longer to take root there.

But I think that that same culture from the top down where the faculty were seeing their peers in other departments succeeding and bringing their research out into the world, that inspired even the deep, deep science. I mean, there’s no scale of relative good here, but the ones that are traditionally furthest removed from a direct line to the public. I think we’ve seen more and more acceptance of that. And now, when I started my Ph.D., there were a couple labs where students were discouraged from pursuing even just going into industry, let alone starting companies. And now, there’s so many students that have left and started companies and become part of companies, and now it’s very accepted. And that change comes from that seed of rebellion, the culture of rebellion and more-breaking that Berkeley, I think, is such a key component of the culture here on campus.

Ken Goldberg: One thing, Marco, I just want to note is that we also try to keep them long enough for them to graduate. I mean, there’s some schools that have the reputation of dropping out, right? And that’s a real plus. But I don’t think that’s actually a plus in the longterm, honestly. And so I don’t advise that for my students. I say, “Stick it out. There’s still going to be opportunities in a few more years, but get your degree.”

Marco Lobba: I love that point.

Rich Lyons: So we’re a very big …

Ana Claudia Arias: You have to get the fundamentals right. Right? The fundamentals have to be there.

Marco Lobba: It’s not an either or. That’s the thing is like now I was encouraged, I got to talk to Jennifer about the other companies she started, I got to talk to Matt and he said, “Yes, I’d love to start a company with you.” Where do you get that? That level of encouragement and support is completely hurt. They drop out because they’re not supported. But when you support your students, it doesn’t have to become an either or situation.

Rich Lyons: Good, lovely. Good. Lovely point. Straight across. We’re a very big room and we don’t have microphones we can pass around, but if somebody has a question, we have about 15 minutes left. We do have a microphone. So why don’t we take a few questions from you if you’re courageous enough? There’s one up front here, there’s a microphone.

Audience 2: [Inaudible]

Rich Lyons: Thank you. So I’ll repeat the question. The federal funding for research and other things that is being diminished in several categories. How do we make sure that we can continue to keep this enterprise going, the research enterprise, but really the whole enterprise of Berkeley? And that’s a really important question.

I think it’s quite so-called indirect costs, our indirect cost recovery rates are going to go down. We just don’t know how much, right? And so we need to be planning for that. We are, I promise you. NSF and NIH budgets are going down and getting remixed. We still don’t know exactly how much, but those are likely, if not for sure, outcomes.

So then part of it, I think, and I appreciate the question, we do have to keep this research enterprise going. If any of you have a comment on this, but here’s one example. If somebody said, how does Berkeley participate more in ways that are consistent with our values, with the economic and societal value that we’re creating? And the old answer to that question was, “Well royalties, intellectual property.” Right? But the new answer to that question is, “OK, we’ll license you this technology, CRISPR or otherwise, and we would like to own 2 or 3 or 4% of your company.”

So we now have equity upside in a bunch of the companies that are coming, but in a voluntary way. It’s not like a coercive outcome. And I literally have a spreadsheet that has 15 different rows in it, and a lot of people have helped work on this. And only one of those rows … Each row is a different channel through which we, as Berkeley … This is not the pension endowment portfolio, this is like Berkeley’s central ledger … we are getting exposure to equity in the companies that are coming out of Berkeley. One of those rows is licensing acquired equity.

We’ve acquired over 150 positions in startups just through that channel, just through that row. But there are 14 other rows and we don’t have time to go through it. But that’s part of, I think, the answer to your question. It’s sort of do it in a values-consistent way, but we need more cylinders in our research engine on the financial side. And all of a sudden it’s sort like, “Yeah, any university can do that.” Actually, Berkeley has a much bigger opportunity to do this than any other university, so I’m pretty hopeful on this front.

Ken Goldberg: I’ll just add to that, if I could. Another factor is, I think a lot of people really appreciate their time at Berkeley, and as alumni, donate back. And Berkeley, for a long time was I think just because as a public university, didn’t think about that too much following up with its alumni. But now in the last few years, the last challenge fund had gotten this amazing amount of donations. And I see it also for, let’s say, the new building, the Gateway building that’s going up right now, which we’re super excited about. You can see it down on Hearst Avenue rising up, and it’s just spectacular. By the way, I want to say I’m so excited about that building. It is the second-largest building on campus, and it is … We’ve had a lot of buildings that are pretty functional, this building is like an architectural jewel. It’s magnificent. It has this big atrium in the center, and it’s all about openness and innovation and creativity. It’s spectacular. I’m so excited. It’s going to open in the spring. And some of that money came from donations from our alums.

Rich Lyons: From alums and from faculty. So here’s some of the … This is just kind of the lens I look at the world through. But we put together a list of what are the top 10 founder gifts the university has ever received. And by founder gift, it’s sort of like within a year of when you had an IPO or what they call a liquidity event, you sold your company or what have you. What are the 10 biggest founder gifts? And three of the top five are Berkeley faculty. It’s really quite stunning, right? So I think this is also part of the answer to your question. There’s a philanthropic loop that’s coming through and the faculty are very, very thankful.

Ken Goldberg: No pressure, Ana.

Rich Lyons: Yeah, I think it’s completely unfair.

Ana Claudia Arias: There is one more loop that you can make regarding the federal funding. The federal funding is actually our own funding. It’s our taxes. We pay taxes, and the federal funding comes from our taxes. So when I’m not happy where my taxes are going, I make sure that I donate, because then I take out of my taxes and know exactly where my money is going. So donate.

Rich Lyons: Thanks for that. So I think we have time for maybe just two or three more questions. I don’t know if there’s another one, and it is hard to get a microphone to you quickly, but if you’re willing to speak up. Why don’t we take this one in the middle and you could speak up and I’ll repeat the question?

Audience 3: [Inaudible] … the mentorship support? Like you talked about funding, but how about mentorship support to the students who are currently [inaudible]?

Rich Lyons: Yeah, there’s some people in the room that could probably speak to that even better than I could, but I’ll do my best. I think mentorship on a lot of fronts, we have something called Berkeley Connect, which is graduate students that are connecting with undergraduates, and that’s framed a little bit more like an academic mentor. And these are mostly Ph.D. students, the graduate side of that. That’s a program that I should know exactly, it started like 5, 6, 7 years ago. It’s a very important program. But I think some of the undergraduates are, how do you … ? If you start getting interested in entrepreneurship, you’ve got a graduate student to help you think about that. So that’s one pocket of it. And it’s a well-known program, it’s called Berkeley Connect.

There’s another program called Berkeley Discovery, which is also another portal. Berkeley Discovery is a portal for immersive experiences like internship. Like the internship programs at SkyDeck that I mentioned, right? It’s like I could become an intern in a startup. It’s like, how much fun is that? I mean, you’re 18, 19. Now, we need to get as many of these as paid internships as possible. But the idea of being inside a startup that is fighting to survive, and that’s what it feels like in most startups, it’s like that’s a great demystifying experience for a young person, right? Because this ain’t easy, right? Marco made that point. This is not easy. So there’s a pocketful of this Berkeley Discovery platform that does that.

And then there are many other, the business school just opened a campuswide asset called the eHub, the Entrepreneurship Hub. And there is a navigator who’s working there during the day. And an undergrad or a grad student or a faculty or staff member can go up there and talk to the navigator. And the navigator is basically telling you, “Here are a bunch of resources. What problem are you trying to solve? What part of entrepreneurship are you interested in? Here’s how I can curate a connection between you and the resources available at the campus.”

Marco Lobba: Well, and Rich, I mean, it’s really amazing. The undergrads have at Berkeley, I think, an outsize advantage compared to many other universities because they have so many of these opportunities. So we’ve taken advantage of the interns we had. Berkeley actually helped fund, through the Bakar Lab program … we live in Bakar Labs, which is right down the street here … and we got interns paid, so the company didn’t have to take that burden. But they were actually students from Berkeley who were getting paid to work in our company. It was amazing. And then we also brought in students from the LSBE Capstone course who then came in and did a semesterlong in-house residency at Cetana. And so there’s so many opportunities here on campus for students to get experiences that they just can’t get anywhere else because no other university has a [inaudible] system.

Rich Lyons: I love this example. So LSBE is a dual degree program, life sciences, business and entrepreneurship. You go through the program, you get a BS in typically biology or MCB, molecular and cell biology, and business. You get both. OK? And this idea, one of the things that … Look, access to this portfolio of opportunities for all is really important, right? There are a lot of young people that are, “Yeah, I’d love to be an intern, an unpaid intern in a [inaudible], but I can’t afford that.” So we have programs and philanthropy and others where people are saying, I want to help fund an undergrad who couldn’t otherwise do this and plug them into an internship. And it’s a win-win-win, it’s just a really interesting category of philanthropy.

Ken Goldberg: No, and another thing is that I think I want to note that we also have this incredible breed of undergrad who tends to be extremely hardworking. I mean, I’m looking over at my niece here, Daphne, who is one of these students who’s here now, and I’m so proud of her, and they’re working really hard. It’s not easy place. You’re not spoon-fed here. So our students, part of it is a little bit of sink or swim to some degree. There’s a lot of advising, don’t get me wrong, but there is a challenge. And what happens is those students get tougher as a result. There’s a kind of grit or tenacity that comes out.

And so, what I love about it is these programs where you have to take on something else on top of all your classwork, the students just they dive in and they dig into that. So what happens is that the student who comes out is really determined, and I see that over and over again. Nothing will stop them. They have this real just energy.

Rich Lyons: Well, I love that. I was at an event on the East Coast not long ago and somebody, an alum, was saying, “You know what? Berkeley, you just figure out how to figure things out.” And it’s sort of like that kind of meta message. It’s like, “Well, I think that’s true.” Right? And tenacity, right? Tenacity, there are a lot of traits in a human being that one might choose. Tenacity is like, that’s a pretty good trait. That’s an important trait. I think people with tenacity self-select into Berkeley because it can be quite daunting, right? So I think we get more than our share of people who come in with that DNA. So these are all things that I think are feeding this.

I think another one, if I may, because I’m kind of a nut for culture. You probably bought that by now. Almost everything I’ve said is on that topic. But there’s also this feature about this great public university and this kind of humility, or I’ll call it confidence without attitude. It’s sort of like, “Look, the confidence is a good thing. We need you to be tenacious, drive is not a bad thing, but it doesn’t have to come with arrogance.” In fact, true confidence, I think, comes without arrogance. And I think we get a lot of self-selection into Berkeley, and selection on our side as well, for traits like confidence without attitude. And what that maps into, that’s relevant to here, is coachability. Coachability is a really valuable trait.

And I think a lot of people self-select into Berkeley because they have that feature. In other words, it’s not like I kind of know what I need to know. I’ve learned all I need to learn. It’s really hard to find somebody who thinks that way around here, and not anybody … Anyways, I’ll stop. You get my point. What do we have? Oh, I think we’re right at time. Was there one question here? Real fast. If you ask, we’ll answer it fast.

Audience 4: I’m with the DC Alumni Club and we’re talking about federal funding and the ways in which innovators can support moving the needle to make sure we’re maintaining federal funding levels, whether it’s the UC advocacy network or the government relations offices of Google and whatever, or just voting. And I mean, maybe this is plugging to the audience. But learning the lessons that we learn from Berkeley, and making sure that we’re moving the needle to ensure federal funding and ensure that we’re able to support the work that goes on here.

Ana Claudia Arias: Thank you.

Rich Lyons: Yeah. Well, thank you very much. That is fundamental. Thank you. Because we are part of a larger system, obviously, right? And higher ed in many ways is obviously under stress and quite vulnerable, including the research part of who we are, right? So it’s sort of like, “Well, we need to tell our story better and better,” and so forth. And I think we’re getting better, but thank you for that. Two final … Go ahead, Marco.

Marco Lobba: Just real quick, I want to make a plug for the importance of what you mentioned earlier, which is the fact that Berkeley is actually now going to get a real chunk of the success of my own company and many of the other startups that are coming out of here. That’s how we protect funding for basic research in the long run, is we are building our own moat of revenue for the university in a way that’s never really been engaged on at the scale that we’re able to now. And I think that that’s how we build that insulation here, is we become self-sustaining. And I think that those steps that we’re taking here at Berkeley are going to continue to pay off and going to accelerate this virtuous cycle that we’ve built here.

And I don’t think that gets stressed enough just how important these steps we’re taking today, the equity that we’re taking in early-stage biotech and other startup companies, that’s what if we had owned 2% of Genentech? What if … These are big questions that make a huge, huge impact and help us avoid being as subject to changes in federal policy as we are today and historically.

Rich Lyons: Look, that’s part of our resilience. Thank you. That’s a fundamental point. It’s not a sideshow, this is a flywheel, right? This is really going to drive us. Last comment. I was in Washington DC not long ago. I got to have a one-on-one meet and greet with Representative Virginia Foxx, a conservative Republican. I appreciated that she took the meeting with me. And I do this, people see me do this. This is always in my pocket, by the way. What is this? This is the PitchBook League Table, which universities produce the most funded startups in the country, and Berkeley’s right at the top of this.

And I handed it to her and she said, “This surprises me.” And she asked me, “What’s the source?” And the source is written on the bottom, it’s PitchBook. But the important thing is, and I think this is consistent with this comment, we do still or can still suffer from what I’ll call the caricature problem, that some people don’t realize what we just talked about is true at Berkeley. A lot of people don’t realize it. And Berkeley is still a lot of the things that we love. It’s free speech, it’s activism, it’s a lot of things. And it’s this. And that’s a good thing. Thanks for coming out today. Have a good homecoming. Thank you.

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Anne Brice (outro): You’ve been listening to Berkeley Talks, a UC Berkeley News podcast from the Office of Communications and Public Affairs that features lectures and conversations at Berkeley. Follow us wherever you listen to your podcasts. You can find all of our podcast episodes, with transcripts and photos, on UC Berkeley News at news.berkeley.edu/podcasts.

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