SCET Instructor Highlight: Sandy Diao
At the Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology (SCET), we believe that the best way for students to learn entrepreneurship is through direct interaction with industry experts. Our instructors are accomplished entrepreneurs, executives, and leaders who have first-hand experience building businesses. This approach ensures that students learn practical skills from individuals who have tackled real-world challenges and understand what it takes to innovate in today’s fast-paced industries.
One such instructor is Sandy Diao, a seasoned industry leader with over a decade of experience leading growth teams at high-profile companies such as Meta, Pinterest, and Descript. With a deep background in growth marketing, Sandy is currently teaching two versions of the Growth Marketing course at SCET—one tailored for Berkeley students and another designed for professionals. Her classes focus on equipping students with practical skills in growth marketing, leveraging her background growing users from zero to hundreds of millions. Sandy’s teaching style is hands-on, blending her experience with real-time marketing insights to help students understand the core principles of growth marketing and how to apply them effectively.
Sandy’s unique journey into entrepreneurship and her passion for innovation were sparked during her time as a UC Berkeley SCET student. She credits a pivotal mentorship experience with reshaping her understanding of learning, growth, and what it means to innovate. In her classes, Sandy encourages students to adopt an entrepreneurial mindset by “doing things”—an approach that aligns with her own belief that knowledge is best gained through practice.
Here’s a Q&A with Sandy, where she shares insights into her teaching philosophy, the value of entrepreneurship skills, and her advice for students looking to make the most of their Berkeley experience.
Q: What inspired you to focus your teaching on entrepreneurship and technology innovation, and how has your industry and/or founder experience shaped your approach in the classroom?
Sandy Diao: My interest in entrepreneurship came in an unexpected way when I studied at Cal over a decade ago. I received a leadership scholarship as one of five recipients from Aaron Mendelson (who remains an amazing mentor and is a Cal Bear). This scholarship led me to take a private trip down to Sandhill Road, where I found myself sitting across from the early investors of Apple, Oracle, Facebook, Salesforce, and many of today’s giants. Watching these technologists piece together the future from ideas, experiences, and conviction changed everything for me. Aaron never taught me through a formal classroom setting, yet he profoundly taught me the most important lesson that I took away from school: real learning happens by doing things.
This lesson has held true for me throughout my roles as a growth executive serving some of the world’s fastest-growing companies and startups like Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram, Descript, and more. I leaned into the emerging field of growth, a role that didn’t even exist for new grads when I left school, by crafting opportunities through my bias for execution and getting things done.
That’s why I intend to teach my growth marketing class at SCET more like a startup workshop than a lecture hall. I’m building, launching, and learning alongside our students, and sharing the practical tools I wish I’d had when I graduated. I’m learning tons from SCET’s veteran teachers and staff, and I hope to show that doing gets to knowing, and knowing drives growing.
Q: Why do you think it is helpful for everyone, regardless of their field of study, to learn innovation and entrepreneurship skills?
Sandy Diao: From working at some of the fastest-growing startups, I’ve learned that entrepreneurship is fundamentally about creative problem-solving. It’s the scientific method in action: developing insights, forming hypotheses, and validating those hypotheses with experiment after experiment.
Whether you want to be a founder or not, entrepreneurial skills teach you how to solve problems with real-world constraints – time, people, resources. And that’s a superpower to be used in any career.
Q: What advice would you give to incoming freshmen or transfer students to help them maximize their potential and make the most of the opportunities available at Berkeley?
Sandy Diao: At UC Berkeley, you’ll get more than just a world-class education – you’ll find genuinely kind humans who’ll support you long after graduation.
Most students are great at diving into student organizations and internships. Looking back, I wish I had also invested more into relationships. The connections that I’ve maintained from Berkeley have had a huge impact on me personally and professionally. Those classmates you casually sit next to in your SCET class could become your future cofounder or even best friend. So grab that coffee or lunch and invest in the people around you. Ten years from now, you’ll be grateful for the ambitious friends who’ve known you since day one.
Q: What are some of the biggest challenges you see students facing when trying to apply entrepreneurial thinking to real-world problems, and how do you help them overcome those challenges?
Sandy Diao: I see the biggest challenge students face in entrepreneurial thinking as the gap between knowing and doing. For example, concepts like marketing funnels or SEO can make perfect sense in a classroom, but it can be hard to translate knowledge into doing because of the perception that doing something is harder than it actually is.
That’s why my approach in the classroom is to give students “training wheels” through live tutorials and hands-on exercises using the simplest tools. We start doing before overthinking. Most things are easier to get started with than they appear. The hardest part is often just beginning. I’ve found the best way to bridge the knowing-doing gap is by using training wheels – the easiest, simplest tools possible to overcome that initial cold start.
Through her teaching, Sandy Diao brings the dynamic world of growth marketing into the classroom, enabling students to learn by doing and developing the skills necessary for entrepreneurial success. Her classes at SCET provide a valuable opportunity for students to engage directly with industry practices, preparing them for the challenges of building and scaling innovative solutions in a rapidly changing world.
Aspiring and current entrepreneurs can connect with Sandy Diao on LinkedIn and can follow her writing on sandydiao.com.