Berkeley SkyDeck

“Well, and most, because I worked after I graduated, I worked for Berkeley Skydeck, and most of the, like, startups that fail, fail due to, like, founder breakups.”

“Every founder without fail said the reason I joined is because I want access to the Berkeley network.”

“When we first started the accelerator batches, and this was before the fund got going. So this was, you know, batch one back in 2000 and 15. We had 55 applications, and we thought that was pretty good. Applications for batch 21, 3800.”

“When I joined, Skydeck was open to students or faculty or alums of Berkeley, UCSF, The Lawrence Berkeley Lab, it was fairly limited, and over time we expanded it to now the accelerator is open to anybody. You can be a graduate of anything.”

“We take about 20 startups every six months. We do two batches a year”

“So we have about 900 people Mostly Berkeley alums, but not all who have signed an agreement to be advisors for our startups pro bono, no charge. We don't pay them and they don't charge the startups anything when the startups are in the program.”

“It's at least half of the founders raise good follow-on, you know, institutional professional follow-on capital of the accelerator program.”

“Our main source of revenue to support the program is partnerships with mainly international governments. So our biggest partner is JETRO, the Japanese External Trade Association.”