Five years ago, UC Berkeley hosted an event for incoming graduate students to introduce them to entrepreneurship opportunities on campus. Turnout was sparse, with fewer students than speakers.
Four years later, the scene looked entirely different. The panel drew such a crowd that students sat on the floor and spilled into the hallway. By 2025, organizers scheduled two sessions, and both filled beyond capacity.
“And we asked them, ‘What are you doing here?’” said Darren Cooke, Berkeley’s interim chief innovation and entrepreneurship officer, with a laugh. “They said, ‘We came here — we’re grad students at Berkeley — for this.’”
Cooke shared the story before a similarly packed house at last week’s Luncheon in the Library event, held in the Roger W. Heyns Reading Room. More than 200 attendees gathered to hear Cooke and his colleagues — Mike Alvarez Cohen, Berkeley’s director of innovation ecosystem development, and Laura Hassner, executive director of the Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship — in a conversation about the rise of entrepreneurship culture at Berkeley. Their discussion drew from the recently published book Startup Campus: How UC Berkeley Became an Unexpected Leader in Entrepreneurship and Startups.
The book, primarily authored by Alvarez Cohen and spearheaded by Chancellor Rich Lyons, traces UC Berkeley’s evolution into a powerhouse for entrepreneurship and startups, told from the perspective of the faculty, staff, and alumni who drove the transformation.
Alvarez Cohen summed up his biggest challenge in putting the book together with an acronym: FONI, or fear of not including — a playful twist on FOMO, fear of missing out.
“There (are) so many great stories on the campus, so many great programs, great people,” he said. “We really didn’t want to leave anyone out.”
Writing a book is like developing a startup
Like any successful startup, Alvarez Cohen said, the key to making smart decisions about what to include was setting clear goals for each of the book’s primary audiences: students; academic, organizational, and government leaders; and Californians at large.
“We wanted (students) to know that if you have a passion for entrepreneurship, innovation, starting companies, Berkeley is the place for you,” he said. “This is the startup campus.”
For business and government leaders, the message was about partnership — that Berkeley is an open and eager collaborator. And for Californians, including alums, the hope was simple: to instill pride for their world‑class public university.
Teamwork, he added, was essential to completing the book in just 19 months. He praised Hassner and Cooke for serving in roles akin to executive producers, noting that there is far more to publishing than producing a manuscript.
Other collaborators came in the form of beta testers. Startups often release a minimum viable product, or MVP, to gather quick input and iterate. Alvarez Cohen adopted a similar strategy, dubbing it the minimum credible manuscript, or MCM. He shared dozens of early copies with reviewers, whose comments shaped the final version.
One theme that surfaced was the urgency of getting the story out as a way to counter criticism facing American universities.
From challenge to change
During the Q&A, an audience member asked about failure in startup culture. Alvarez Cohen noted that the team made an early decision to emphasize successes over failures.
Still, the book includes 13 profiles of startup founders. Many of those stories highlight how fragile early ventures can be, chronicling the setbacks founders navigated on the way to success. As Alvarez Cohen put it, a story resonates more when a character overcomes adversity.
Another audience member asked about standout success stories, and Alvarez Cohen shared the example of We Care Solar, a nonprofit founded by former physician Laura Stachel and her husband, solar energy educator Hal Aronson. Stachel, who earned her doctor of public health degree at UC Berkeley, discovered during her studies that many maternity wards in African hospitals lacked reliable electricity. The organization’s signature innovation is a portable “solar suitcase,” designed to provide power for these facilities.
Hassner underscored that many startups are driven by humanitarian aims. “If our chancellor were here today, he would remind us that many people think of the mission of UC Berkeley as teaching, research, and service,” she said. “But that is a ‘what,’ that is a ‘how.’ Our profound ‘why’ is long-term societal benefit.”
In that spirit, all proceeds from sales of Startup Campus return to the university. The team has also distributed roughly 70,000 electronic copies, providing one to every Cal student, faculty member, and staff member. Anyone with a UC Berkeley email address can download a free copy of the book from the project’s website.
Building momentum for a sequel
The panel also explored what Berkeley’s innovation ecosystem looks like today — and where it’s headed next.
PitchBook’s 2025 university rankings offer one clear indicator: For the third straight year, UC Berkeley graduates founded more venture‑backed companies than undergraduate alumni from any other university in the world.
That momentum stems from the work of the Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship, launched in January 2020. Cooke noted that the office’s Innovation & Entrepreneurship Council now brings together 68 distinct organizations across campus.
He added that Berkeley’s initiatives — including the book — have helped put the university “on the map.” Schools across the country are reaching out to learn from Berkeley’s model.
“What they want to know is: ‘How are you doing this?’” Cooke said. “And luckily, now I have the opportunity to say, ‘Well, guess what? We wrote a book. The last chapter is literally: If you want to copy us, this is what you should do.’”
Another significant initiative is the Berkeley Changemaker program, which Hassner co-leads. It began with a single course in the summer of 2020, at the height of the COVID‑19 pandemic. Organizers expected 100 people to register; instead, 517 students signed up. As of last fall, more than 13,000 people have taken at least one course in the program.
“Now we have students who are coming to Berkeley because they want to be a Berkeley Changemaker,” she said. “Because they see themselves in that. Because our humanists feel that they belong in that. Our tech entrepreneurs feel that they belong in it.”
The program includes more than 50 courses taught by over 80 faculty members. And it continues to grow, with a long‑term vision that more than half of all Berkeley students will graduate having taken at least one Berkeley Changemaker course.
These successes have the team thinking about a follow‑up book. After all, on a campus built on big ideas, there’s always another story waiting to be told.
The Luncheon in the Library is a private, invite-only event honoring Library supporters. Past speakers include Rita Moreno, dancer, singer, and actress; Rich Lyons, chancellor of UC Berkeley; and Dorothy Lazard, author and librarian.