Yesterday, I’ve organized my last event with the Berkeley Postdoc Entrepreneurial Program (bpep.berkeley.edu), an association dedicated to helping young researchers turning their science into companies that can benefit the economy directly. I served for about two years as the liaison for Berkeley Lab, and helped organize over a dozen events, directly responsible for four of them (on government funding, intellectual property, the art of pitch, and lastly a job fair.)
BPEP team with UC Berkeley vice-chancellor for research, Paul Alivisatos
During these years, we managed to help a few companies to join the main incubators of the region (CITRIS Foundry, Skydeck, QB3, LAUNCH@Haas), find guidance (like TechFuturesGroup) and skilled employees.The importance of BPEP as a essential agent of the start-up ecosystem, bridging the gap between the many entities (here’s my piece in the Science Review: Cyclotron Valley) is duly recognized; we are part of the Berkeley Innovation Council, and now have the support of the vice-chancellor for Research, Paul Alivisatos.I was particularly impressed during the job fair by the quality of the start-ups of Berkeley, with great, non-bullshittal products and a truly stunning vision!
Full house at the job fair!
Among the companies were:
- Zymergen
- Ignite Immunotherapy
- Synvivia
- 10x Genomics
- Koniku Inc.
- Girihlet Inc.
- Vocasso
- Catalog
- Notable Labs
- X-Therma
- TheraBiol Inc.
- PillButler
- SmileyGo
- P.I.N.G. Inc.
- Datavia
No doubt you will see many of them making the headlines some time soon:)
Many thanks to all the people who I had the pleasure to work with along these years: Naresh, Mark, Arvin, Nieves, Tyler, Michaela, Lance, Taghreed, Ioana, Aislan, Johannes, Robert, Luiz, Dusan, Kaiyang, Josh, Balthazar, Alireza and Benson.
BPEP team circa 2015
Now it’s time to leave room to the new generation. But I’ll forever be with BPEP!