<p>As a prospective computer science student and entrepreneur, one of the biggest draws of Berkeley to me is its proximity to Silicon Valley. I love the startup culture and would much rather found or work/intern in a tech startup than an established company like Apple or Google. It's general consensus that Stanford, being the university that practically created Silicon Valley and by virtue of being located at the heart of it, is the ideal place to be if you want to be a budding entrepreneur or get involved in startups but, confident that I would never get in, I didn't apply there and instead assumed Berkeley would be a more than sufficient springboard for my ambitions. However, reading posts on this forum (by sakky specifically) has been discouraging. From perusing threads, I've gathered that Berkeley does not have good ties with venture capitalists, Berkeley students are too bogged down by the insane workload to even think of starting businesses, a Berkeley education places much less emphasis on entrepreneurial pursuits than Stanford's, etc, etc. I'm wondering whether I made a mistake in passing over the meagre shot I had at Stanford to aim my sights at Berkeley and whether I should bother attending the university at all if it is so hostile to new ventures. </p>
<p>While Berkeley certainly isn’t as entrepreneurial as Stanford, it’s far from “hostile to new ventures”. It’s always what you make out of it. There are many ways entrepreneurs can find support at Berkeley. For example, you can talk to mentors that hold (weekly) office hours, sign up for some of the Entrepreneurship classes or lecture series, participate in the Berkeley business plan competitions, and more. I am sure you will find a good bunch of students that are very interested in entrepreneurship as well. Not only within your major, but also business school.</p>
<p>Seriously, don’t listen to sakky. You’re only thinking he’s general consensus just because he posts so much and they’re so long. He doesn’t even go to this school.</p>
<p>I have an EECS friend who is graduating a year early and has an offer from Apple. He’s turning it down to start a company with 3 others. They already have enough investment money to match the salary Apple was going to pay him.</p>
<p>Kind of true. Berkeley isn’t the best place to be if you’re entrepreneurial. Stanford is. LA is starting to become a startup hotspot nowadays.</p>
<p>There are other schools that are excellent if you’re into entrepreneurship, UIUC being one of them. That’s where the founders of Paypal/Youtube went, where the web browser was invented, where the theory of superconducting was discovered… CS Majors there are courted like no other. There is a living-learning community there called Innovation LLC (get it? get it?) that’s geared towards entrepreneurs. If i end up going there, i’ll be staying there for sure.</p>
<p>I remember you getting a UCLA likely, though. One of the startups i’m in is LA based. There are plenty of accelerators/incubators springing up there.</p>
<p>Though if you choose cal, please forward your UCLA acceptance my way ;)</p>
<p>Source: I own a startup and am a co-founder of another.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t worry about Cal being insufficient for your future plans. Especially because Stanford was a longshot anyway (it doesn’t exactly sound like you “turned down” Stanford). My EECS son is still an undergraduate at Cal and has gotten a couple of very good internships already and is busy collecting S.V. contacts for the day he needs them. If you have the talent, and you network at the job fairs, Cal will get you where you want to go.</p>
<p>To paraphrase a recent Daily Cal article, it’s surprising that Berkeley students are unable to handle free speech. Thomas, flutterfly, if you guys don’t find my posts interesting, then fair enough, don’t read them. But let other people make the same determination about whether they find my posts interesting. I don’t tell anybody not to read your posts. </p>
<p>And besides, not to sound overly arrogant, but I’ll happily compare my knowledge of entrepreneurship and Berkeley to yours anyday. How many startups have you guys been involved with? How much of the startup and entrepreneurship culture have you investigated? </p>
<p>Now that we’ve gotten that ugliness out of the way…</p>
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<p>I believe you’re actually confusing two separate questions, for which my answers to both of them would be that ‘it’s all relative’. One question would be is Berkeley as promising of an entrepreneurial springboard relative to Stanford, and the answer is emphatically, if sadly, ‘No’, for all the reasons that you mentioned: Stanford sits literally only a half-hour jog from the world’s epicenter of venture capital, Stanford is not only the employment backbone but also the progenitor of Silicon Valley which is by far the world’s leading technology dynamo. But those who disagree with me need not rely on my word; simply read the history of Stanford Dean Frederick Terman and the Stanford Industrial Park (now Stanford Research Park). There’s a reason why Terman is widely credited as being the “Father of Silicon Valley”. </p>
<p>{Indeed, I think this is a point that nobody - not even the most zealous of Berkeley fanatics - is disputing. Is anybody seriously arguing that Berkeley is actually more entrepreneurial relative to Stanford? If so, I would very much like to hear those arguments. Flutterfly, Thomas, want to take a shot at it?} </p>
<p>For this reason, I would say that if you are a budding entrepreneur with the opportunity to choose Stanford over Berkeley, I would choose the former. Happily, you can still choose to go there as a transfer student or, more likely, as a graduate student. The bulk of the Stanford-born startup superstars: Cisco, Sun, Google, the forerunners of IDEO - were founded not by Stanford undergrads but by graduate students. Or of course you can just move there after graduation, or perhaps even before graduation. It’s clearly easier to make a 1-hour move than a move across an entire continent, yet that’s what Zuckerburg did. </p>
<p>On the other hand, your second implicit question is whether Berkeley is a better entrepreneurial school relative to most others, and, happily, the answer to that question is undoubtedly yes. On a ranking of the most promising tech entrepreneurial schools in the country, Berkeley surely ranks in the 99th percentile, if not even higher. That is no exaggeration: out of the ~2500 schools in the country, there surely cannot be more than 25 that provide a better tech entrepreneurship culture than Berkeley. Heck, I’m not sure there are even 5 more. {Unfortunately, Stanford happens to be one of those 5.} I would go so far as to say that Berkeley is a better entrepreneurship springboard than every Ivy with the possible exception of Harvard, and only because Harvard has an excellent location {Boston/Cambridge bring ‘Silicon Valley East’), enjoys deep ties to MIT, and perhaps most importantly, has the deepest social access to venture capital of any school, even the mighty Stanford, through the business school. {For example, even within the venture capital community of Silicon Valley itself, you will find more Harvard MBA’s than Stanford MBA’s). </p>
<p>But certainly, Berkeley beats the other 7 Ivies, many of which are crippled by unpromising locations - Hanover, Providence, New Haven, and even Philadelphia are not exactly hotbeds of tech entrepreneurship. Columbia enjoys a premier location, but lacks its own elite engineering school and no compensatory deep ties to a neighboring engineering school comparable to Harvard’s ‘friends with benefits’ relationship with MIT. Ithaca does have an entrepreneurial culture but is badly hampered by its remoteness from VC and a major business center, compounded with the fact that there is really nothing available outside of Ithaca (and hence, the vast majority of Cornell graduates will flee the area immediately upon graduation). Princeton might be a close competitor, but suffers from a lack of a business school.</p>
<p>I will also say that Berkeley beats all of the UC’s. UCLA was mentioned in this thread, and while Los Angeles is obviously a major business center and does have a tech entrepreneurial/VC cluster, the latter clearly does not compare to SV. {Los Angeles’s entrepreneurial spirits are unsurprisingly primarily devoted to entertainment and media, but that’s not the type of entrepreneurship we’re talking about here.} UCSD has access to a world-class biotechnology and telecom cluster, but UCSD lacks an elite business school and with the exception of BioE, cannot match Berkeley’s engineering prowess. The other UC’s similarly lack either a top-flight B-school, eng-school, or both, along with unpromising locations (i.e. UCD or UCM). </p>
<p>Berkeley also beats Caltech, which likewise suffers from the lack of a B-school, combined with, frankly, a somewhat anti-entrepreneurial student culture. It’s actually somewhat surprising just how few successful tech startups were founded by Caltech graduates, and the ones that were founded (i.e. Hotmail, Mathworks), were started long after the founders had already graduated from Caltech and left Pasadena. Caltech’s greatest entrepreneurship success is clearly Intel, but Intel was founded not near Pasadena but in SV (in Mountain View) and was founded after Gordon Moore had worked for more than a decade in SV for Shockley and Fairchild. </p>
<p>UIUC was also mentioned, but relative to which Berkeley holds a clear edge. True, UIUC does have an impressive engineering pedigree and did indeed develop the NCSA web browser which became the basis for both Netscape/Mozilla and Internet Explorer, and does have a surrounding tech cluster. Yet the area lacks a major VC presence, almost surely because, frankly, rich venture capitalists do not really want to live in Urbana-Champaign. And similar to the Caltech story, most UIUC entrepreneurs find that they have to leave the area, usually for SV. Marc Andreesen did his initial browser work at NCSA at UIUC, but nevertheless Netscape was founded in Mountain View. Paypal was founded in Palo Alto as a merger of two other companies that were themselves also founded in Palo Alto (indeed, within walking distance of Stanford on University Ave). The Youtube founders were early employees at Paypal and founded Youtube above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Bruno. </p>
<p>So to reiterate: is Berkeley a better tech entrepreneurial springboard relative to Stanford? I wish it was, but unfortunately it is not. On the other hand, is Berkeley a better tech entrepreneurial springboard relative to the overwhelming majority of other schools in the country? I would argue that the answer is clearly yes.</p>
<p>Great response sakky. i agree that UIUC doesn’t have many VCs in the area – its more of a recruitment hotspot than anything. i don’t think you can start a company there easily, but you’ll likely meet the people you want to start one with and move to palo alto or somewhere more friendly. Urbana-Champaign is first and foremost, a college town in the middle of nowhere.</p>
<p>It comes down to this: entrepreneurs beat the odds. OP, you sure as hell can start one at Berkeley. If you don’t think so, you have bigger problems than finding the “right” school to be at.</p>
<p>It’s similarly surprising that one of the most prolific and long-winded posters on the forum for one of the best Universities in the world conflates a recommendation against taking someone’s advice with the belief that that person should not be permitted to offer it.</p>
<p>Look, to be clear, I’m not trying to say that Los Angeles is a bad place to be an tech entrepreneur; indeed I would agree that UCLA likewise beats 98-99% of all of the colleges in the country in terms of foisting tech entrepreneurship. I would also agree that UCLA holds an advantage over Caltech, notably due to Caltech’s surprisingly weak entrepreneurial culture (relative to its strong sci/tech ranking) and lack of close business/VC ties. </p>
<p>But comparing Berkeley vs. UCLA, I would nevertheless give the edge to the former. I agree that Los Angeles does indeed have a strong tech cluster, but surely not comparable to SV (for nothing in the world is comparable to SV). Berkeley Haas is more oriented towards entrepreneurship, whereas UCLA Anderson is geared more towards media and finance. It is my sense that the student culture at Berkeley is more amenable towards tech entrepreneurship - foisted by a ‘geek’ culture - than is UCLA. </p>
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<p>While I obviously agree that ultimately the personal drive and market savvy of the entrepreneur are the most determinant factors, I would nevertheless not denigrate the importance of location. Indeed, the choice of location is itself intertwined with the first two factors, for a highly savvy entrepreneur ought to locate his firm where it enjoys the highest chances of success. That is precisely why so many savvy entrepreneurs - most notably Zuckerberg - chose to relocate their firms to SV (and specifically to Palo Alto). I concur with Y-Combinator’s Paul Graham that startups are such fragile entities that you should nurture them with every possible advantage to help them flourish.</p>
<p>Or really? To say that somebody’s posts should not be read is tantamount to censorship. After all, what exactly is the difference between not being allowed to post at all, and being allowed to post, but with the audience being specifically told not to read it? Is there something wrong with letting the audience make its own determination? Are my detractors scared that the audience might actually like my posts? </p>
<p>Look, I never tell anybody not to read somebody else’s postings, regardless of how vehemently I may disagree with them. If you disagree with my opinions, fair enough, then by all means present opinions of your own. But to say that people should ignore somebody’s opinions just because you happen to dislike them is out of bounds. After all, this is supposed to be a forum for the free exchange of opinions. Or, at least, I thought it was.</p>
<p>I think the fact is that you’re unlikely to start your company AT school. You’re more likely to meet the people you want to start it with there.</p>
<p>True enough, but at the end of the day, the fact is, he didn’t stay in Boston. He moved to Palo Alto. </p>
<p>And not entirely by choice, for the fact is, the main reason that he moved to Palo Alto is that he couldn’t gain funding from the Boston investment community. Yet within a month of moving to Palo Alto, Zuck landed a half-million dollar investment infusion from Peter Thiel, one of the founders of Palo-Alto-headquartered Paypal. Less than a year later, they received a $13 million investment from Accel and a year after that another $27.5 million from Greylock. I suppose we’ll never know what would have happened to Facebook had they never secured that early chain of snowballing funding (which may well have happened had they stayed in Boston), but my suspicion is that it would be a far slower growing firm, and perhaps might never have defeated MySpace. </p>
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<p>True indeed, but that again makes it all the more important to choose a school that fosters a spirited entrepreneurial student culture. Berkeley is indeed one such school.</p>
<p>I was just taking a jab at you when I said “don’t listen to sakky”. Don’t take it seriously I think your posts are interesting and you always have well thought out arguments. However, I am simply tired of arguing with you. Not because one can’t argue with you, but simply because it takes me a long time to write up an equally well thought out reply to your posts. Unfortunately I don’t have that much time. I can help many more people on this forum by posting quick replies to “simple” questions than I would by posting page-long replies to your posts and argue with you why and how things are the way they are.</p>
<p>As for your second questions, I’ve made use of all the resources I mentioned in my first post. Am I founder of 2 startups, co-founder of 1, and was a CTO for 2 others. So I do think I do have quite a bit experience in the entrepreneurial field. When it come to entrepreneurship, I would choose Berkeley over any other school except Stanford, especially over UCLA. It’s true that lately LA is getting quite some publicity with it’s many new accelerators/incubators but it still can’t compare to Berkeley, San Francisco and Silicon Valley. I used to live in LA for 2 years, so I do know the entrepreneurship scene there a bit, it seriously does not compare. While it may not be the best place in the world, Berkeley is a GREAT place to be for entrepreneurs. I would chose it in a heartbeat over any of the other UCs and most of the ivies.</p>
<p>“Are my detractors scared that the audience might actually like my posts?”</p>
<p>No we’re concerned that they will see your posts and opinions more than anyone else’s just because YOU POST SO MUCH! I copied your first reply to a word document and it is literally equivalent to a 5 page essay. How are any of us who are still in school or have jobs possibly supposed to compete with that?</p>
<p>I posted my response to this thread in the morning and between then and now I’ve gone to a meeting with my thesis advisor, ran some mass specs in my lab at LBNL, done some reading for class, and gone to a 2 hour discussion. You’ve spent that time on this forum writing a 5 page essay plus 3 additional replies and that’s on this thread alone. </p>
<p>Sure, I don’t have to read your posts if I don’t want to. I know who you are and so do Thomas_ and jonnosferatu. All of us joined this forum before 2008, four whole years ago! Unfortunately, there are a lot of prospective students and freshmen on this forum who have no idea who you or anyone else is. They’ll click on anything, not realizing that it’s only one person behind almost all of the links posted and threads started. They’ll be impressed by well formatted text and the seemingly tons of “evidence” you always provide. And do you ever let any threads go without being the last person to post on them?</p>
<p>And why do I care about all the prospectives and freshmen reading this forum? Because I was one of them 5 years ago. Because my sister is one of them right now. Because I’m actually a student at this school and you are not!</p>
<p>@ascaris - I think you should appreciate all the different viewpoints from current Berkeley students. Honestly it is refreshing to see the positives than the usual Berkeley rant.
College, like anything, is what you make of it. Berkeley is not for everyone but for someone who is upto the challenge, willing to work hard, open minded, for them there is no limit.</p>
<p>Yeah, so what? Is that bad? Shouldn’t people who invest more time and thought into their posts - as you yourself admit that I do - deserve to have their posts more widely read than those people who choose not to invest comparable time and thought? </p>
<p>Put another way, if you had a question about something, and you received a number of responses, whose response would you weight more heavily - somebody who just gave you a quick blurb or somebody who has clearly thought deeply about the issues and has chosen to spend the time to provide you with a carefully crafted argument? Be honest with yourself. </p>
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<p>Again, so what? I wasn’t aware that this discussion forum was a popularity contest. I actually thought it was supposed to be a forum for a free exchange of opinions, some of which we will inevitably dislike. After all, what exactly is the point of a discussion forum where people are never allowed to disagree?</p>
<p>But more importantly, not once on this thread or in any other recent ones have you actually chosen to engage me factually on the issues at hand. Not once. So the real question then is: do you actually disagree with anything I said? (For example, do you actually dispute the notion that Stanford is indeed a better entrepreneurial springboard than Berkeley, which is the reason why you advised the OP not to listen to me in the first place?) If so, then by all means, let’s hear why. Or do you just dislike the fact that I am saying it?</p>
I think your posts are interesting and you always have well thought out arguments. However, I am simply tired of arguing with you. Not because one can’t argue with you, but simply because it takes me a long time to write up an equally well thought out reply to your posts. Unfortunately I don’t have that much time. I can help many more people on this forum by posting quick replies to “simple” questions than I would by posting page-long replies to your posts and argue with you why and how things are the way they are.</p>