Course

Course Description

How do you build a startup when every feature is free, AI power needs are unprecedented, and work is automated away?

We are living in a world of contradictions. AI tools now let small teams build products in days that once took whole firms months or years. Yet the very forces that make AI so powerful also threaten the survival of the companies that use it: commoditized features, collapsing margins, surging compute costs, fragile power grids, and entire categories of work vanishing.

This Challenge Lab invites you to confront those contradictions by creating sustainable entrepreneurial ventures that prove lasting; companies designed not just to scale fast, but to survive the turbulence of the AI era. We’ll evaluate sustainability using the following three dimensions:

  • Financial Sustainability: Will your business model still work when AI makes your core feature free?
  • Power Sustainability: With new AI datacenters consuming unprecedented amounts of energy, where in the world will you build, partner, or source power to sustain your venture’s growth?
  • Employment Sustainability: How can you build a company that creates meaningful roles and skills pathways instead of hollowing them out?

Startups have always been engines of economic growth and wealth creation. But in the age of AI, they must also be engines of resilience. Sitting at the intersection of technological disruption and systemic fragility, we have a unique opportunity to create ventures that are profitable, responsible, and durable.

In this lab, you’ll act as both founder and investor. As founders, you’ll use the latest AI tools to build ventures at unprecedented speed; while reflecting on the firms and roles these tools displace. As investors, you’ll step into the role of VC to pressure-test which startups can endure and which collapse under financial, power, or workforce constraints. Along the way, guest speakers will share their journeys of building ventures centered on sustainability in energy, human capital, and financial models.

This journey will draw on skills and insights from a wide range of academic backgrounds and life experiences. Students from engineering, STEM, business, humanities, and other fields are welcome. Interdisciplinary teams will play a central role, since diverse perspectives can strengthen how we approach resilience in the AI age.

You’ll form interdisciplinary teams and take your startup from idea to final pitch across several high-potential challenge areas:

  • Moats Beyond Models: What kinds of business models endure when foundation models make most features cheap or free?
  • The Future of Work: How can AI ventures create, rather than erase, meaningful jobs and skill pathways?
  • Global AI Entrepreneurship: How can AI give emerging economies a chance to leapfrog and compete on the global stage?

With every breakthrough from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, or DeepSeek, entire categories of startups vanish overnight. Features once seen as companies are reduced to lines of API calls, and business models collapse before they even launch. The challenge is no longer just speed—it’s endurance: can you build a company that creates lasting value in a world racing toward Superintelligence?

 

About Challenge Labs

Challenge Labs are 4 unit courses for students of all academic backgrounds who seek a rigorous, interactive, team-based, and hands-on learning experience in entrepreneurship and technology. These courses use a unique pedagogy, The Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, that involves the use of games, industry guest speakers, team exercises, videos and labs to cover the early part of the startup lifecycle. In these highly experiential courses, students form start-up teams to create technology solutions or services to address a broadly-defined problem posed by an industry partner or social challenge.

Instructor

Vik

Vik Thairani

Vik Thairani is the Managing Partner of Sterling Keep, a venture studio supporting early-stage SaaS companies in healthcare and financial technology. He brings two decades of experience spanning big tech, startups, and venture acceleration, with a focus on applying AI to transform how companies operate and grow.

Vik began his career at Microsoft, where he spent over a decade in product, marketing, and sales leadership roles. That experience gave him a rare cross-functional view into how global businesses scale, from go-to-market execution to enterprise customer adoption.

His move into entrepreneurship sharpened that perspective. Vik co-founded Tine Health, a digital health company building just in time training and patient engagement tools. He later served as Chief Marketing and Operating Officer at Wearsafe Labs, a connected safety company, where he helped guide product strategy and market expansion. These operating roles gave him firsthand experience turning early ideas into market-ready solutions.

In addition to building and scaling startups, Vik has also mentored founders as an Entrepreneur in Residence at Berkeley SkyDeck, UC Berkeley’s accelerator, where he contributed to program design and growth strategy. He holds an MBA from the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and a BA in Economics with a minor in Computer Science from UC Davis.

Based in San Francisco for more than 20 years, Vik lives with his wife, daughter, and their dog, Henri.