Inside Berkeley Haas’s Sparkling New Home For Entrepreneurship & The ‘Entrepre-Curious’

UC-Berkeley students enjoying the newly renovated space of the Julia Morgan-designed Haas Entrepreneurship Hub, which opened late last year. The eHub provides space and programming to boost entrepreneurs and the “entrepre-curious”. Photos by Brittany Hosea-Small

Spaces to grow your business startup idea are plentiful at the University of California Berkeley — so plentiful that “plentiful” doesn’t even begin to describe it. But in the past, that itself may have been a problem: With dozens of possible avenues for pursuing your genius business idea, where do you begin? Which is the right path?

UC-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, one of the top B-schools in the world for entrepreneurship, has an answer — and it’s an answer for everyone on campus, not just MBAs and B-school undergrads. The Berkeley Entrepreneurship Hub that opened late last year is designed to be a campus focal point for startup dreams, a one-stop shop where business ideas can come to life, from conception to reality: a home for the “entrepre-curious” across Berkeley’s campus, whatever their major or field of study.

“Everyone’s welcome,” says Dawn McGee, eHub executive director, “if you commit to practicing entrepreneurship for the semester.”

‘A GATEWAY TO ENTREPRENEURSHIP & INNOVATION ON CAMPUS’

Berkeley Haas’s Dawn McGee: “On a day-to-day basis, the experience of the eHub building is a members-only experience. But anyone can become a member, you just have to make a commitment to practice entrepreneurship for the rest of the semester”

It’s an understatement to call Berkeley a hotbed of startup activity. By Haas leadership’s estimate, there are more than a dozen incubators on campus. There are at least 20 student clubs associated with entrepreneurship registered at Cal-Link, including Entrepreneurs@Berkeley and Berkeley Entrepreneurs Association. The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology has helped tens of thousands of students learn innovation and entrepreneurship skills since its launch in 2005. In 2012, Berkeley saw the launch of both the CITRIS Invention Lab, a tech maker space, and SkyDeck, a partnership between Haas, the College of Engineering, and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research.

SkyDeck is Cal’s prime accelerator, with two yearly cohorts of around 20 startups that get access to not only hundreds of advisers but hundreds of thousands of dollars. However, while any startup can apply, SkyDeck gives priority to Berkeley alumni and faculty and favors more mature ventures.

All this campus incubation and support is paying off, making Berkeley a fixture on the entrepreneurship map. Of the 100 top MBA startups in 2024, the Haas School was fifth of all B-schools with seven businesses on the list. Recent research shows that Berkeley produces 2.8 unicorn founders — that is, founders of companies that achieve billion-dollar valuations — per 1,000 MBA grads, behind only Stanford Graduate School of Business and Harvard Business School.

The new Entrepreneurship Hub, which opened in December in a historic, newly renovated Julia Morgan-designed building near the Haas building, across Piedmont Avenue from the Cal football team’s imposing stadium home, is meant to help sharpen the campus’s entrepreneurial focus. “We view the eHub as a gateway to entrepreneurship and innovation on campus,” says Jennifer Chatman, Haas’s interim dean. “It’s not just our MBA students who are coming with ideas: Our undergraduate students — we have a new four-year undergraduate program, so our students start with Haas as freshmen now — they’re full of ideas, too. I’ve already had five or six of our freshmen come to my office to pitch ideas, and they’re excellent ideas. So we want to provide a kind of beginning-to-end level of support for anyone who’s what we call ‘entrepre-curious’.”

‘WE DIDN’T HAVE A WAY FOR PEOPLE TO EASILY NAVIGATE THIS ECOSYSTEM’

Berkeley Haas’s Saikat Chaudhuri: “There are three pieces to the eHub: One is connect, one is build, and one is be discovered, and the spaces are configured to help you connect and spend time with each other to be discovered as well as to build”

Saikat Chaudhuri, eHub faculty director, came to Berkeley in 2021 after 16 years at The Wharton School, the last seven and a half of which he spent as executive director of the Mack Institute for Innovation Management. The idea when he came on board, he says, was that Haas needed to contribute more to a university where lots of STEM-driven entrepreneurship was taking place.

“Look, we’ve got like 80 to a hundred — depending on how you count them — different units that do innovation and entrepreneurship,” he says. “SkyDeck is one of them. Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship is one of them, CITRIS is one of them. There are hackathons, there are commercialization departments and all that stuff. And so we tried to figure out, ‘Well, what’s missing?'”

Chaudhuri surveyed students and studied the landscape and the entire ecosystem. What he decided was missing was a space where people could build community and find co-founders — where folks could easily meet investors as well as mentors, and where alumni could play those roles. “And we didn’t have a way for people to easily navigate this ecosystem. So even the ones that were making progress, they were probably sub-optimizing in the sense that they were finding things, but based on more of path dependency on how they found them as opposed to a comprehensive look.

“And so we thought to ourselves, ‘Can’t we solve that?’ And that was really what this hub is about. It’s basically about turbocharging that ecosystem that we have for entrepreneurship and making it a lot easier. So that’s what our mission is, to make entrepreneurship easier and more accessible for everyone.

“We want to just be a gateway to make the rest of campus’s life easier. Send people there and if you have an idea, where’s the first place you go? You come to this hub and you get inspired, you meet people. There’s a lot of cross-pollination and new ideas that load serendipity at work, and you can get your guidance on, ‘OK, what do I do first? OK, first go here and take this class that’ll teach you how to get from point A to point B. Then go get a $5,000 Trione grant, for example, and get a little bit of money to work on your startup and then go and do this hackathon and then apply for SkyDeck once you’re ready.’ That was really the goal.”

Next page: Meet two young entrepreneurs who have already made the eHub their second homes on campus.