Berkeley-Haas - News from the Haas School

MBA Venture Aimed at Wine Aficionados Wins $100K

Ronna Kelly — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 18:49:40 +0000

Raise a glass to Pristine, a Berkeley MBA startup that uses smartphone technology to enhance the wine-drinking experience—and is now $100,000 stronger thanks to a grant from Founder.org.

Vik Thairani, Srinivas Chervirala, and Pontus Lindberg, all MBA 13 , are the co-founders of Pristine, a maker of wine labels and tags that prevent pulling the cork on bottles that may have suffered heat damage. Since last December Pristine has been based at SkyDeck, a startup accelerator and joint venture between the Haas School’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, and the Vice Chancellor of Research Office. VP of Sales Nedda Bakhshi is also part of the Pristine founding team.

“Berkeley is the single biggest thing that could have happened to us,” says Thairani, the startup's CEO. “It brought the entire team together and gave us the knowledge to take an idea and turn it into a business, as well as the additional opportunities that came through SkyDeck and the UC Berkeley Startup Competition. I couldn’t see Pristine as having happened without Haas.”

All teams that made it to the semifinals in the UC Berkeley Startup Competition werebe eligible for the $100,000 funding grant and mentorship program from Founder.org, the competition's newest sponsor this year.

Another SkyDeck venture, Eko Devices, also won a Founder.org grant. Pristine and Eko emerged from 50 semifinalist teams to be among the 10 grant winners from Founder.org's partner schools, which also include Stanford, Penn State, and Harvard.

Founder.org is a nonprofit foundation established by entrepreneur and venture capitalist Michael Baum, who founded the machine data management company Splunk. Founder.org aims to help students become founders of impactful companies.

Pristine founders Nedda Bakhshi; Vik Thairani, Srinivas Chervirala, and Pontus Lindberg, all MBA 13

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Read Jaffee's Testimony on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Prof. Dwight Jaffee Testifies in Congress on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac

Ronna Kelly — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 23:50:40 +0000

Private markets should take over government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac's role in guaranteeing against mortgage borrower defaults, Professor Dwight Jaffee told members of the House Financial Services Committee in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

"Experience indicates new government mortgage guarantee program would again leave taxpayers at high risk, while creating little or no sustainable increase in American home ownership," said Jaffee during hearings on reforming the U.S. housing finance system.

Jaffee provided details on how Fannie and Freddie have had little impact in expanding U.S. home ownership rates and suggested that their ability to offer a slightly lower interest rate on conforming loans because of their implicit government guarantee was simply "crowding out" the private markets from offering conforming loans.

Jaffee also drew a comparison to Western European countries, which are prohibited by European Union rules to create government sponsored entities like Freddie and Fannie.

"The results show the European countries outperforming the U.S. on virtually every measure of housing and mortgage market performance," Jaffee said. "Perhaps the most stunning result is that the U.S. home ownership rate equals only the average of 15 major Western European countries."

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MBA Students Receive New Hansoo Lee Fellowship to Develop Photo App

Andre T Nghiem — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 05:19:46 +0000

Romi Elan and Charlie Hughes, MBA students developing a photo app that helps friends inspire each other in the pursuit of interests and hobbies, have been awarded $5,000 each as the first recipients of Hansoo Lee Fellowship for Entrepreneurs.

Elan and Hughes, both MBA 14, were selected from 10 applicants for the fellowship, which was created to honor entrepreneur and alumnus Hansoo Lee, MBA 10. Lee died in March after a 15-month battle with lung cancer.

The idea behind the app, currently called “Goalzy,” is to share photographs between a small group of friends with like-minded interests as a way to encourage the pursuit of personal goals. For example, friends could share photos of roasting marshmallows or dining out to inspire those who want to camp more or try new restaurants. “We wanted to help people keep true to their promises to themselves,” Elan says.

The Hansoo Lee fellowship was founded by Lee’s classmates Bhavin Parikh, Pejman Pour-Moezzi, both MBA 10, and fiancée, Wendy Lim, BS 99. It will be awarded annually to support a Berkeley MBA student or team focused on pursuing an entrepreneurial venture for a summer internship.

Friends and family have raised $63,000 for the fellowship. To give to the Hansoo Lee Fellowship for Entrepreneurs, visit givetocal.berkeley.edu/fund/?f=FM8331000.

Romi Elan and Charlie Hughes, both MBA 14

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Read the Washington Post article on E2e.

UC Berkeley and MIT Launch Energy-efficiency Research Project

Ronna Kelly — Tue, 18 Jun 2013 16:29:06 +0000

Energy efficiency promises to cut emissions, reduce dependence on foreign fuel, and mitigate climate change. As such, governments around the world are spending tens of billions of dollars to support energy-efficiency regulations, technologies, and policies.

But are these programs realizing their potential? Researchers from Berkeley-Haas and the MIT Energy Initiative (MITEI) have collaborated to find out.

The researchers’ energy-efficiency research project, dubbed “E2e,” is a new interdisciplinary effort that aims to evaluate and improve energy-efficiency policies and technologies. Its goal is to support and conduct rigorous and objective research, communicate the results, and give decision-makers the real-world analysis they need to make smart choices.

The E2e Project is a joint initiative of the Energy Institute at Haas and MIT’s Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research (CEEPR), an affiliate of MITEI—two recognized leaders in energy research.

The project’s name, E2e, captures its mission, the researchers say: to find the best way to go from using a large amount of energy (“E”) to a small amount of energy (“e”), by bringing together a range of experts—from engineers to economists—from MIT and UC Berkeley. This collaboration, the researchers say, uniquely positions the E2e Project to leverage cutting-edge scientific and economic insights on energy efficiency.

“When deciding on the best energy measures to implement, decision-makers should compare model predictions to actual consumer behaviors. That’s where this project comes in,” says Catherine Wolfram, associate professor and co-director of the Energy Institute at Haas. “The E2e Project is focused on singling out the best products and approaches by using real experiments centered on real buying habits. It will provide valuable guidance to government and industry leaders, as well as consumers.”

Wolfram is leading the project with Michael Greenstone, MIT’s 3M Professor of Environmental Economics and a member of MITEI’s Energy Council, and Christopher Knittel, co-director of CEEPR.

“Cutting energy has lots of potential to help us save money and fight climate change,” says Greenstone. “It’s critical to find the local, national and global policies with the biggest bang for the buck to use governments’, industry’s and consumers’ money wisely while slowing climate change.”

The group’s motivations for studying energy efficiency are derived, in part, from the McKinsey Curve—a cost curve that shows that abating emissions actually pays for itself.

“Our goal is to better understand what the costs and benefits of energy-efficient investments are—where the low-hanging fruit is, as well as how high that fruit is up the tree,” says Knittel, MIT's William Barton Rogers Professor of Energy Economics at the MIT Sloan School of Management. “The McKinsey curve would suggest the fruit’s already on the ground. If this is true, we want to figure out why no one is picking it up.”

Former U.S. Secretary of State George P. Shultz, a member of the E2e advisory board, says, “I like the saying ‘A penny saved is a penny earned,’ which rings true from the standpoint of energy. Energy that is used efficiently not only reduces costs, but is also the cleanest energy around. The E2e Project will allow us to better understand which energy-efficiency programs save the most pennies.”

Shultz is a distinguished fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, where he leads the Energy Policy Task Force. The board also includes MIT Institute Professor John Deutch, former undersecretary of the Department of Energy; Cass Sunstein, a professor at Harvard Law School and President Obama’s former director of regulatory affairs; Susan Tierney, managing principal at Analysis Group and a former Department of Energy official; and Dan Yates, CEO and founder of Opower.

The E2e Project seeks to answer questions such as: Are consumers and businesses bypassing profitable opportunities to reduce their energy consumption? What are the most effective ways to encourage individuals and businesses to invest in energy efficiency? Are current energy-efficiency programs providing the most savings?

The project’s first experiments are already underway. For example, the team is tracking consumers’ vehicle purchasing decisions to discover if better information about a car’s fuel economy will influence consumers to buy more fuel-efficient vehicles. If so, emphasizing the calculated fuel savings in the vehicle information presented to consumers may be productive.

Other initial projects include evaluating the Federal Weatherization Assistance Program, and determining why households invest in energy efficiency and the returns to those investments.

The E2e Project was funded with a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Visit the E2e website at e2e.haas.berkeley.edu or e2e.mit.edu.

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Seniors—and Juniors—Set Undergraduate Giving Records

Andre T Nghiem — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:39:40 +0000

The annual Senior Gift Campaign set new records this year in overall participation as well as involvement among juniors, helping to raise a total of $32,194 for Berkeley-Haas.

Led by co-chairs Tyler Wishnoff, BS 13, and Roschelle Lowe, BS 14, the campaign surpassed its goal of 50 percent participation. All in all, 196 students—or 53 percent—contributed to the campaign, bringing the total raised by students to $8,356. A New Alumni Challenge Match and $5,000 each from alumni Brad Howard, BS 79, and Dean Rich Lyons, BS 82, brought the total to $32,194.

Juniors showed more involvement in the campaign than ever: Six juniors served on the organization committee, including Lowe, and a record 21 juniors donated to the campaign.

To reward the class for reaching its participation goal, Haas hosted its first-ever Senior Gift Party, which was attended by Lyons and Howard, during study week.

Senior Gift Committee members Tyler Wishnoff, BS 13; Alan Cheng, BS 13; Roschelle Lowe, BS 14; Evan Santiago, BS 14; and Edgar Mondragon, BS 13

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Fun Events and Friendly Competition Spur MBA Giving

Andre T Nghiem — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:43:28 +0000

Sparked by a cohort competition and events around the Bay, graduating Full-time and Evening-Weekend Berkeley MBA students have raised more than $100,000 as part of the 2013 graduating gift campaigns.

Students can contribute to the full-time or evening-weekend campaign through June 30 at haas.berkeley.edu/givenow.

Led by Abby Feuer and Andrew Wisnewski, both MBA 13, the full-time MBA campaign reached a 71 percent response, bringing in $77,580.70 for Berkeley-Haas as of mid-June.

As the Full-time Berkeley MBA Program marked the 25th anniversary of its graduating gift campaign, students held events around the Bay Area to tighten their bonds with each other, including hiking Mt. Diablo, watching the horse races at Golden Gate Fields, and paddle boarding in Marin County.

In the Evening & Weekend Berkeley MBA Program, 42 percent of the graduating class gave a total of $24,990 to their graduating gift campaign. Led by Andrew Hattori, Touseef Bhatti, and Julie Miller Everett, all MBA 13, the effort featured a cohort competition and peer-to-peer campaigning. All students who donated received a pair of Haas sunglasses.

The totals raised by full-time and evening-weekend students includes a 2:1 matching gift from a New Alumni Challenge Match campaign.

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Read a profile of Campos in BerkeleyHaas Magazine

Alumnus Tim Campos Receives CIO Lifetime Achievement Award

Andre T Nghiem — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:47:26 +0000

Alumnus and Facebook Chief Information Officer Tim Campos, BCEMBA 11, received a Lifetime Achievement Award Thursday at the Bay Area CIO Awards sponsored by the Silicon Valley Business Journal and San Francisco Business Times.

Campos was one of two CIOs to receive the Lifetime Achievement Award and among 17 top CIOs in the Bay Area recognized at the dinner.

The job of CIO is "a hell of a lot more fun," Campos told the Silicon Valley Business Journal in a June 7 article that noted the dramatic evolution of CIO's responsibilities in recent years.

Campos has been leading IT strategies at Facebook since 2010. He joined the social media giant after becoming the youngest chief information officer of any Fortune 500 company in his mid-30s, at KLA-Tencor, a leading supplier of semiconductor equipment and services. Before that he worked at Sybase and Silicon Graphics.

Read about Campos in the Silicon Valley Business Journal

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Read a profile of Leffler in CalBusiness magazine

Alumna Named An Important Tech Woman Under 30

Andre T Nghiem — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:52:17 +0000

Libby Leffler, BS 06, was recognized by the online publication Business Insider as one of 30 most important women under 30 in technology.

In addition, her tireless volunteer efforts at Cal earned her the UC Berkeley Foundation’s Young Bear award earlier this year, presented to an individual who has demonstrated outstanding achievement in fundraising or community outreach.

Leffler served as chief of staff to Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg for three years before becoming the social network’s strategic partner manager. She currently leads a division of partnerships at Facebook with an emphasis on causes, non-profits, advocacy groups, and public figures. Prior to Facebook, Leffler worked at Google as a strategist in the online sales and operations group.

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Visit the SkyDeck Website

SkyDeck Welcomes Four Haas Startups

Andre T Nghiem — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 05:03:03 +0000

Four Haas startups easing everything from air conditioning to online purchasing have set up shop at the Berkeley SkyDeck accelerator this month.

The ventures—Dreeva EZ Green, tally24,and Wherelab—are among seven new additions to SkyDeck, a startup accelerator in downtown Berkeley created as a joint venture between Haas’ Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering, and the Vice Chancellor of Research Office. SkyDeck startups t receive mentoring, office space, and access to workshops and speakers.

SkyDeck staff and Berkeley-Haas SkyDeck Fellows narrowed an initial applicant pool of 40 candidates to 13 teams to select the latest class of entrepreneurs.Finalist teams ultimately pitched to a select group of venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and angel investors.

Dreeya includes Sushma Bhatia, Anaida Cholakyan, and Rajendra Gundluru, all MBA 14; and Jennifer King, MBA 13. Dreeya’s online and mobile community platform connects new moms in the market for everything from strollers to car seats to make purchasing decisions easier. These new mothers can share recommendations on children’s products and find the right product based on the reviews of mothers they know and trust.

EZ Green, which includes alumna Gayathhri Raghvendra, MBA 08, has developed a virtual energy manager that enables small commercial buildings to automatically control HVAC, lighting, and plug loads to reduce energy costs and increase comfort and convenience.

Tally24 includes Arup Banerjee, Eric Palm, and Dominik Sanya, all MBA 13. Tally24’s cloud-based software service provides a suite of enterprise support services to small sports and wellness businesses to help them schedule online bookings, quickly accept payments, and track customers.

Wherelab, which includes Bharat Sampath, MBA 15, provides precise indoor maps and positioning services to retailers, brands, venue marketers, and government.

For more details on the entire new class of SkyDeck teams, visit skydeck.berkeley.edu/2013/05/23/skydeck-welcomes-its-newest-teams.

Read about SkyDeck in BerkeleyHaas Magazine

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Haaski Open Links Golf Community

Andre T Nghiem — Sat, 15 Jun 2013 10:55:20 +0000

Alumni, students, faculty, and staff swung their clubs for Haas May 13 at the 11th annual Haaski Golf Open at the Claremont Country Club in Oakland, helping to raise nearly $50,000 for the Haas Fund.

The Ed and Mollie Arnold Award was presented to Jeff Rhode, BA 95 (Hist.), MA 00 (Ed.), former director of corporate and foundation relations at Haas. A founder of the tournament, Rhode has worked in development roles at several UC Berkeley units, including Berkeley-Haas, the College of Engineering, and University Relations. He currently is the assistant dean of development at the University of Pacific Dental School.

The award was renamed from the Haas Leadership Award to honor Ed Arnold, BS 40, a loyal and generous volunteer, and his wife, Mollie, who recently passed away.

The tournament's winning foursome was composed of Ken Rosen, chairman of the Haas School's Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics; Adjunct Professor Bill Falik; Grant Inman, MBA 69, and Nick Shannahan, MBA 13.

Special thanks to the sponsors and contributors at the 11th annual Haaski Open:

Sponsors Ed and Mollie Arnold
Joffa and Ellen Dale
Mark French, Robin Lane Capital LLC
Dean Emeritus Raymond Miles
Tom Broderick, Wealth and Tax Advisory Services
Marc Singer, McKinsey & Company
Paul Cortese, Cortese Management LLC
Grant Inman, Inman Investment Management
Michael Allard, Scharf Investments, LLC
Mercedes-Benz of Oakland

Contributors John Rhode, CPA & Tax Advisor
Margaret Lip, Wealth and Tax Advisory Services
Stephen Scales, Power Factors LLC
Deborah Baldini, Baldini Family
Lucas Abbott, Young Entrepreneurs at Haas (YEAH) Program

Jeff Rhode (left), BA 95 (Hist.), MA 00 (Educ.), was honored with the Ed and Mollie Arnold Award. He is pictured here with Mark French, MBA 98.

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Events

New California Management Review Serves up Entrepreneurship Case on Amici's Pizzeria

Andre T Nghiem — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 05:11:25 +0000

To understand a successful restaurant startup’s recipe for success, check out the new issue of the Haas School’s California Management Review’s case study on Amici’s East Coast Pizzeria.

The latest installment of the Berkeley-Haas Case Series, which is regularly featured in California Management Review, takes an in-depth look at opportunity identification, scaling up, and growth strategy in the context of an entrepreneurial startup. The Amici’s case was co-authored by Haas lecturer and self-described “serial entrepreneur” Naeem Zafar, entrepreneurship lecturer Jack Fuchs, and business writer and editor Victoria Chang.

Started by an East Coast transplant craving the thin-crust pies made in his hometown of Boston, Amici’s opened in 1982 in San Mateo, California, with a traditional Italian wood-burning oven. It became one of the Bay Area’s most successful low-tech businesses in the last several decades, with 12 restaurants and revenue reaching $32 million by 2011.

But in 2011, Amici’s founders had reached a fork in the road as they debated whether to continue growing their business, and if so how. Options for Amici's to be weighed by readers included expanding within the Bay Area or into different regions such as Southern California and even China; selling the company; franchising; and opening in new venues such as airports and sports arenas.

Published quarterly, California Management Review is a top-ranked management journal that serves as bridge of communication between those who study management and those who practice it.

To subscribe to California Management Review, visit cmr.berkeley.edu.

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Two Finance Scholars Join Haas Faculty

Ronna Kelly — Thu, 23 May 2013 18:06:48 +0000

Two professors, both recognized by the Journal of Finance for their insightful research, have joined the Haas Finance Group as permanent faculty members.

Professor Annette Vissing-Jørgensen, formerly a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and Assistant Professor Adair Morse, formerly an associate professor at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business, have both been visiting faculty members at Haas since July 2012.

“We are just delighted to have such a terrific pair of new faculty members coming to Haas. Both Annette and Adair are superlative scholars and great teachers; we couldn't be happier to have them joining us at Cal,” says Andrew Rose, associate dean for academic affairs and chair of the faculty.

Vissing-Jørgensen is the Arno A. Rayner Chair in Finance and Management. Her research focuses on empirical asset pricing and household finance (particularly stock market participation and more recently, the special role played by Treasuries), private equity and entrepreneurship, and disclosure regulation. Her work has been published in leading finance and economics journals such as the Journal of Finance, Journal of Political Economy, American Economic Review, and Quarterly Journal of Economics. She won the Journal of Finance Brattle Prize (Distinguished Paper) in 2005 for the paper, "Testing Agency Theory With Entrepreneur Effort and Wealth."

In addition, Vissing-Jørgensen has won several teaching awards at Kellogg, is an associate editor of the Journal of Finance, and is a director for both the American Finance Association and the European Finance Association. She taught the Haas School’s Introduction to Finance class in fall 2012. She earned her PhD from the economics department at MIT.

"I'm very excited to be joining Haas and hope to contribute to making the MBA experience here even better, both in terms of new teaching initiatives and by bringing recent research into the classroom," Vissing-Jørgensen says. "We have to make sure that we don’t just talk a lot about the importance of innovation but exemplify this in our own teaching."

Morse’s research focuses on a wide range of topics from entrepreneurship and household finance to asset management and corporate governance. "I try to use my research energy to put information in the public realm that levels the playing field," says Morse. "For example, my work on tax evasion in Greece has had a material impact on the debates in Greek Parliament and how the people see solutions to the terrible recession they are going through."

Morse’s paper on how disclosing information about fees on payday loans affects borrowing decisions earned her the prestigious first place Brattle Prize from the Journal of Finance. Implications from her work on corporate fraud appear in the Dodd Frank Act. The Haas Executive Committee honored Morse with a Schwabacher Fellowship, the highest honor that the Haas School bestows upon assistant professors. Morse received her PhD in finance from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

Annette Vissing-Jørgensen and Adair Morse

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San Francisco Business Times Honors Four Haas Women

Ronna Kelly — Thu, 23 May 2013 17:21:38 +0000

Four members of the Haas community were recently recognized by the San Francisco Business Times as the most influential women in Bay Area business.

The newspaper recognized Joy Chen, BS 87, CEO of Yes To Inc.; Carrie Dolan, BS 87, MBA 97, CFO of the Lending Club; Mary Francis, MBA 06, chief corporate counsel, Chevron; and Maria Nondorf, executive director of the Haas School's Center for Financial Reporting and Management. They are among 140 women who the Business Times will honor at a dinner in San Francisco June 6.

Chen (left) told the Business Times her proudest accomplishment was supporting Second Wind, an urban ministry concept led by two talented ministers who took on the challenge to fulfill a need within San Francisco. Chen spoke earlier this year at the student-organized Women in Leadership Conference at Haas.

Dolan (right) gave this advice to women seeking to advance in their careers: "I encourage woman to work on knowing themselves, being clear about what they want and understanding how others perceive them. It is important to be confident about your strengths and proactively work to make those strengths visible."

Francis (left) said her female role model was former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "She didn't let early views of women as lawyers hold her back," Francis told the Business Times. "She was expert at mediating consensus, taking a long view, and choosing only battles that mattered to her."

Nondorf (right) said her female role model is Julia Child. Asked how she uses her influence, Nondorf replied, "I preach the importance of financial literacy." Her personal social media strategy: "Don't be afraid to say what no one else will."

Nondorf also was recently highlighted in a list of the "Top 20 Women Professors in California," compiled by Online Schools California.

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