Best of SCET Series

The Series

At the Sutardja Center, we are committed to creating positive change, and we do this with the support of a group of highly talented instructors and mentors.

The Best of Series features some of the brightest minds teaching at SCET. These virtual series serve as an introduction to our courses, where students from all over the world can gain insights into who we are and what we do.

From new technologies to healthcare, to plant-based foods, each video will focus on a topic that’s relevant to innovation and society. Our instructors will take you on a journey of discovery through their areas of expertise as they address some of the big questions of the moment.

Featured Speaker: Jocelyn Weber

The UC Berkeley Blockchain Ecosystem: What's next in digital assets?

What is the current blockchain ecosystem at UC Berkeley, and what resources are available to students and researchers? Driven by the College of Engineering, Hass School of Business, and SCET, Berkeley’s Blockchain ecosystem gives teams from around the world access to a wide range of resources.

The combination of faculty, student groups, and industry experts gives the Blockchain Xcelerator a unique position within Berkeley’s blockchain ecosystem, allowing teams to learn and apply their knowledge. What are the future trends of digital assets? What’s next for blockchain and cryptocurrency? Join us to learn more.

Jocelyn Weber

Jocelyn Weber is a highly skilled executive with over 30 years of experience in business development and product management. Jocelyn was a part of Hewlett-Packard during the pre-and post-dot-com boom and worked on furthering the adoption of new technology in various marketing and management positions.

For the past 5 years, Jocelyn has been focused on several blockchain efforts including launching the UC Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator in collaboration with Haas Business School.

As the Director of X-Labs and the Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator, Jocelyn works with teams from around the world to advance the Blockchain industry in a credible manner while educating and providing opportunities for all students and entrepreneurs.

Featured Speaker: Ken Sandy

Product Management: Stakeholder management and leading through influence

Product management is now common in most companies as product managers must navigate complex strategic and executional challenges across engineering, design, and the business. A good product manager can mean the difference between product failure and wasteful engineering or can ensure market success through solving a meaningful customer problem.

Effective product managers lead through influence, winning the hearts and minds of those around them. They do this by aligning beliefs, behaviors, actions, and outcomes behind a common shared purpose. Influence is a more effective (and even pleasant) technique to master than managing through authority.

Ken Sandy

Ken Sandy is a senior technology executive with more than 20 years of experience in Product Management. Ken served as VP of Product Management at MasterClass and lynda.com (Linkedin Learning) and is currently an executive consultant and advisor for startup and scale-up companies.

Ken pioneered and teaches the first Product Management course offered in the Engineering school at UC Berkeley, which has over 400 alumni in practicing industry.

Most recently, Ken released “The Influential Product Manager – How to Lead and Launch Successful Technology Products” a highly practical guide to becoming more effective and navigating the collaborative aspects of the product manager’s role.

Featured Speaker: Mathieu Aguesse

Deplastify the Planet: Leading the transitions to a more sustainable world

The need to reduce plastic use and consumption is a global phenomenon that is widely accepted, so how can we do more to reduce our dependence on plastic? More so, how did we plastified the planet in the first place and why?

Plastic has become such a big part of people’s daily lives, that the task of reducing its influence can be daunting. By learning how to better consume plastics and by investing in technology to replace them, students of the Deplastify the Planet course learn to change standards instead of changing structures currently in use in society to create a more lasting impact.

Mathieu Aguesse

Mathieu Aguesse is an entrepreneur, teacher, and CEO of SchooLab San Francisco an innovation studio that brings together students, startups, and corporations to solve some of the major problems the world faces today.

As a member of the SchooLab team in France and in the US, Mathieu has worked and mentored many successful startups and organizations, helping them build great products and services.

As an instructor for the Deplastying the Planet course, Mathieu guides innovative students in their work with companies hoping to solve plastic waste and take advantage of the benefits of the circular economy.

Featured Speaker: Ken Singer

Thriving in the Storm: Innovating in an era of changes and disruptions

As an entrepreneur, what do you do when everything around you is disrupted? The answer is simple, you innovate. Many successful companies that we know today were created in times of crisis and disruption. The process to make this happen is not as difficult as many would think.

To innovate in a time of disruption, you must first look for the shifts caused by such disruption. When you have a systemic shift, how do you model the future? Unable to make predictions, big companies freeze and begin a process of reassessment. It is the job of entrepreneurs to identify the shifting priorities before the big companies do.

Ken Singer

Ken Singer is an executive coach, serial entrepreneur, and advisor to numerous startups in the US and Europe. A 20-year veteran of the mobile industry, Ken has been working in or with technology startups throughout Silicon Valley and around the world.

Most recently, Ken was the co-founder and CEO of AppCentral, the first enterprise app store to let companies distribute mobile applications to their employees' iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Alongside with being SCET’s Chief Learning Officer & Managing Director, Ken has been teaching entrepreneurship courses in the College of Engineering at UC Berkeley since 2008.

Featured Speaker: Pamela Induni

The Idea Equation: Innovative ideas and the journey from concept to in-market

How many people have ideas and never act on them, and why does this matter? Idea-creation is a common process, but most ideas never see the light of day. The person may not be driven, but more commonly they simply didn’t know where to begin. The result is often regret, yet regret for self-accomplishment is insignificant if compared to how an unrealized big idea could have benefited humanity.

As an industry lecturer at UC Berkeley, Pamela immerses her students in an experiential, hands-on journey to take an idea from concept to in-market. Students are able to follow a delivery/development method of knowing where to begin and how to scale their idea.

Pamela Induni

Pamela Induni is a highly skilled coach/advisor with a very strategic mindset and strong entrepreneurial spirit, passionate about launching people, products, and programs into the market.

As an entrepreneur coach/advisor, Pamela is highly skilled at brokering conversations between business and tech teams, as well as between startups and large corporations.

With over 15 years at IBM in various Program Director and Global Product Marketing roles, along with being the co-founder of an automotive tech startup, Pamela brings her unique perspective to her Critical Product Management class at UC Berkeley.

Featured Speaker: Ricardo San Martin

Creating Plant-based Foods: A phased approach to animal welfare and human health

By empowering students to create the next generation of plant-based foods, the Alt. Meat lab at UC Berkeley explores the complex issues regarding food, nutritional choices, and cultural behaviors. Why do we eat certain foods and not others, and what defines our choices? Is human health the main design factor for the development of plant-based foods or is it animal welfare?

From the study of fermentation to the mimicking of chicken, in vitro production, or the analysis of bean qualities, students work on developing prototypes for new foods and are challenged by investors on the market viability of their ideas.

Ricardo San Martin

Ricardo San Martin is a successful inventor and entrepreneur in the chemical and biological sciences. Co-Founder and Research Director of the Alt. Meat Program at UC Berkeley, Professor San Martin works with students to develop the next generation of plant-based foods.

A Founding Director of the Master of Design Program at Universidad Católica de Chile, Ricardo began his research on the study of soapbark tree compounds that allows him to create emulsions for plant-based foods and most recently to work on the development of adjuvants for COVID vaccines.

A UC Berkeley and Imperial College London alumni, Ricardo applies his knowledge and research on the study and development of sustainable food sources for the future.

Featured Speaker: Mark Searle

Don't Stop Starting: Startup acceleration and how to deliver value to customers

What is the difference between startups and big companies and how do startups find a scalable business model? These are some of the questions explored by UC Berkeley lecturer Mark Searle in this video.

The key is experimentation and expanding your customer segments or your value proposition to those segments. So how can you increase your value? Whether you deliver value to more people or deliver more value to the same amount of people, figuring out how to scale your business model and to increase your company’s value is key to organizational success.

Mark Searle

Mark Searle is a successful entrepreneur and senior executive with diverse industry and technology experience, including enterprise software, big data, information security, manufacturing, and food-tech, among others.

Co-Founder and Managing Director of Innovation Acceleration Group, Mark is particularly adept at coordinating, aligning, and balancing the activities of diverse groups and cultures across an organization to attain optimal overall performance in high-growth environments.

A Princeton and Harvard alumni, Mark applies his knowledge on innovation and management as a lecturer and industry fellow at the Sutardja Center by teaching the Startup Acceleration Collider.

Featured Speaker: Victoria Howell

Best of Newton: How to talk to an angel investor and most successful failures

The A. Richard Newton Lecture Series features a selection of highly accomplished industry speakers who share their unique insights on industry developments, leadership, and innovation accumulated through experience in their careers.

In two different recollections of the Newton lectures, students are presented with insights on how to talk to angel investors and why this is one of the key aspects every entrepreneur must develop before they scale their project. Equally important, is how failure often plays a positive role in shaping ideas as it gives entrepreneurs the ability to learn and reinvent themselves.

Victoria Howell

Victoria Howell is a marketing and strategic planning executive dedicated to connecting exceptional individuals to diverse audiences. Victoria focuses on creating opportunities to mentor and engage students and professionals in higher education and entrepreneurship.

Victoria runs SCET’s Silicon Valley Innovation Leadership Week each October at UC Berkeley, and the Engineering Leadership Professional Program held each semester in Silicon Valley.

As the instructor for the Newton Lecture Series, Victoria brings together leading innovators to speak to students on the stories and insights behind some of the most interesting entrepreneurs and innovators in our world.

Featured Speaker: Luke Kowalski

Emerging Technologies: How to make social impact possible

Does the world need another food delivery app? Will another initial coin offer help with the global recession? These are some of the questions asked to the students of the Emerging Technologies and social impact Challenge Lab.

Through the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship, students are given the opportunity to learn about Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), Fintech, and Blockchain. The course has developed five methods that challenge students to think in a critical way allowing them to understand human needs and how technology enables entrepreneurs to create positive change and social impact.

Luke Kowalski

Luke Kowalski is a seasoned Silicon Valley executive with experience across multiple disciplines. He has executed projects involving legal issues (antitrust, IP, audits, litigation), acquisitions, and government affairs (EU/US trade, IP reform, repatriation).

Luke currently serves as a VP in the corporate architecture group at Oracle. He has worked for various startups as well as for Netscape's Server and E-commerce divisions. He holds several patents and serves as an ISO representative for the US through ANSI.

Luke currently teaches a blockchain challenge lab at UC Berkeley's Engineering School and is pursuing a distance learning Ph.D. at the University of Leicester.

Featured Speaker: Mike Kyriacou

The unicorn in the room: Positive deviance and the wisdom of outliers

Uncommon but successful behaviors and strategies practiced by certain individuals inside a community are known as positive deviance.

Positive deviance offers ways to find the greatest opportunities hidden in plain sight, enabling people to make the maximum impact through scientific breakthroughs, corporate innovation, organizational change, or disruptive ventures. How can entrepreneurs approach problems through the lens of positive deviance? To build the necessary skills to uncover opportunities and maximize their impact, entrepreneurs must learn to see the world through the lens of generalized positive deviance.

Mike Kyriacou

Mike Kyriacou is an entrepreneurial technology executive and venture/product adviser. He has initiated, led, and participated in ventures, buyout bids & transactions, and has developed innovative products and systems now used across the planet.

Named in Australia’s 30 Most Inspiring Young Engineers, Mike has designed user-oriented products, crunched data, raised capital, and assembled successful LBO teams.

Passionate about product development and new ideas, Mike teaches Machine Learning at UC Berkeley, helping the next generation of students innovate in a wide range of areas.

Featured Speaker: Naeem Zafar

No crisis should go to waste: Disruption means new rules and new opportunities

This year, society came to a halt when an unexpected crisis disrupted the way of life of billions of people around the world. The COVID-19 pandemic has been a test for pre-established rules, so how can entrepreneurs thrive in such a scenario? New ideas sprout when the current order is broken, so the disruption of existing rules and paradigms means new rules come into play. Understanding crises as opportunities is a key factor in creating innovative solutions in today’s world.

Naeem Zafar

Naeem Zafar is an entrepreneur, teacher, investor, and mentor. Having co-founded or worked at seven startup companies, he is steeped in the Silicon Valley culture and promotes the lessons of Silicon Valley to organizations and entrepreneurs all over the world.

Naeem has been teaching entrepreneurship as a faculty member at UC Berkeley since 2005 to graduate and undergraduate students in the College of Engineering and Haas Business School MBA program.

His latest venture TeleSense is an AgTech company addressing the need to create efficiency and reduce spoilage for the post-harvest grain industry.

Featured Speaker: Shomit Ghose

Crisis as Catalyst: The COVID-19 impact on healthcare innovation

The scope of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought a new set of requirements to healthcare practice worldwide. Curve-flattening and non-pharmaceutical intervention have now entered the lexicon and reflect healthcare’s broader need to become more scalable and virtualized. Data-driven technology innovations will not only help address COVID-19’s short-term needs but will also catalyze the development of virtualized solutions for a range of healthcare conditions for our post-COVID future. Innovations in non-contact, data-driven healthcare will be among the most impactful and longest-lasting legacies of the COVID-19 crisis.

Shomit Ghose

Shomit Ghose is a longtime Silicon Valley entrepreneur with deep experience in software start-ups, both as a venture capitalist/board member, and as an operating executive.

Shomit started his entrepreneurial life as a UC Berkeley-trained software engineer and has served in every operating role in a variety of successful start-ups: board member, CEO, COO, VP Marketing, VP Sales, VP Engineering, VP Services.

Currently, a managing director and partner at ONSET Ventures, Shomit is active in supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs through deep involvement at UC Berkeley College of Engineering.

Best of Series

Best of SCET Series

The Series

Featured Speaker: Jocelyn Weber