Fall 2021 | UC Berkeley's DECODE Silicon Valley Startup Success
DECODE Silicon Valley Startup Success
Course Overview
Berkeley’s Computer Science curriculum and Business curriculum trains many graduate and undergraduate students with a high level of technical and theoretical ability. However, UC Berkeley is only ranked 4th by the number of founders who raised more than $1M based on a report from Crunchbase.
Serena Zhang
University of California, Berkeley | Class of 2024
B.A. Architecture
Ryo Weng
University of California, Berkeley | Class of 2024
B.S. Business Administration
Jin Yu
University of California, Berkeley | Class of 2024
B.S. Business Administration
Aamir Khan
University of California, Berkeley | Class of 2022
D.S. Data Science
Student Facilitators
Decode Silicon Valley Startup Success bridges the gap.
We teach startup intelligence. Our curriculum consists of guest speakers from top entrepreneurs and investors in Bay area and also hands-on assignments and projects to help students build their portfolio. By the end of our course, students will be able to:
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Learn the fundamentals of starting a new venture
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Identify, define, and characterize problems
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Spot opportunities for innovation
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Segment and analyze opportunities
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Evaluate and choose innovation diffusion pathways
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Evaluate and choose models of new ventures
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Conduct customer and market research both qualitatively and quantitatively
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Design customer journey
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Establish foundation of product development
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Evaluate and choose market strategy
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Develop an in depth understanding of your customer
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Identify and quantify sources of value
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Map and influence customer decision making process
As a result, this course will prepare students for starting up their own company or joining an early-stage start-up. However, students can enroll in the course even if they aren’t planning on starting up. Lots of concepts and skills about entrepreneurship are highly transferable to other aspects of career development.
There are no prerequisites for this course. We're working really hard to make the material accessible for all backgrounds.
Grading and Assignment
The course will be offered for 2 units, P/NP. The class is 6:30-8:30 PM PDT on Thursday, consisting of an introduction of the topic, guest speaker, Q&A, and group discussion.
There will be weekly assignments released on Thursdays after the lecture and due the following Thursday at the beginning of the class.
Projects are graded on effort. Every last 30 minutes of class is the group discussion for the weekly group project assignment. The idea is that students will discuss among the group in their approach to the problems, and the staff will facilitate this discussion.
Your grade in this course will be calculated on a 1000-point scale.
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Weekly Assignment (300 points)
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Semester Project (350 points)
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Attendance (350 points)
You will need 700 points to pass the course, which roughly corresponds to doing all the problem sets and coming to all the classes. As this is a new course, we reserve the right to adjust this boundary and the point system as a whole as the course progresses, but we want everyone to succeed in this class and learn.
Weekly Course Schedule
Time: Thursday 6:30-8:30 PM PDT
Location: Zoom
Week | Topic | Speakers (*Continuously Updating) |
|---|---|---|
Sep. 2 | Opening - Information Session | To be announced |
Sep. 9 | Validating Ideas | Fantasizing to Fantastic | Shuonan Chen:
General Partner at IOVC; Faculty at UC Berkeley; Board Director at DECODE |
Sep. 16 | MVP & Iteration | Make Something People Want | Kevin Tan:
CEO at SnackPass
Forbes 30 under 30 |
Sep. 23 | Product Market Fit | 1000 True Fans | Brian Ma:
General Partner of Iterative Capital, Former founder
CEO of Divvy Homes, Weave and Decide |
Sep. 30 | Business Model | How to make money | Steve Huffman:
CEO of the Reddit |
Oct. 7 | Team Building & Culture | The Unicorn's team | Sarah Hawley:
CEO and founder of Growmotely |
Oct. 14 | Enterprise Business | Not all startups looks like Instagram | Kenny Mendes:
Head of Finance, People, & Operations at Coda;
Angel Investor/Advisor |
Oct. 21 | The art of scale | No growth equals death | Marcel Santilli:
Head of Marketing at Scale AI |
Oct. 28 | Startup Finance, VC and beyond | Fundraise when you must | To be announced |
Nov. 4 | Legal | Things unnoticed that could kill your business | Reserved for Sam Angus:
Partner in the Venture Capital and Corporate Group of Fenwick & West LLP |
Nov. 18 | Emerging Technologies | Surf on the tide of tech (To be confirmed) | Michael Seibel:
CEO and Partner at Y Combinator |
Dec. 2 | Closing - Demo Day | Judges: To be announced |