Inside SkyDeck: How accelerators act as a launchpad for startups
By Sibyl Chen
When I founded my own startup in 2014, I hadn’t heard of Berkeley SkyDeck. Even though I was a Berkeley alumna, no one was really talking about SkyDeck then. Fast forward a few years, SkyDeck has been steadily growing its presence and making a name for itself in the startup world.
Intending to transition into VC last year, I was asked by a friend of mine who is an advisor at SkyDeck if I might be interested in taking a look at the accelerator world, and introduced me to Chon Tang, SkyDeck’s Fund Manager. Every time I stepped foot into SkyDeck, I felt the buzz and energy. When the opportunity came up to join as the Senior Director of Program, the decision was a no-brainer. The idea of helping build a vibrant ecosystem was tremendously attractive to me.
At the start of this year, SkyDeck was named by Forbes as one of the top university accelerators in the US. While we are a part of UC Berkeley, we don’t just see ourselves as a university accelerator — we see ourselves as a global hub for entrepreneurship with many of the companies we invest in coming from outside of the U.S. In pulling back the curtain a bit and sharing SkyDeck’s story, I hope to convey the essence of what an accelerator like SkyDeck provides.
At SkyDeck, our tagline is bring us your moonshot. This has always struck me as a fairly appropriate mantra, given the name of our organization, not to mention the 360 degree views of Berkeley’s campus, downtown San Francisco and the Golden Gate Bridge.
There are three key factors that have helped our accelerator grow rapidly in prominence: our close proximity to Silicon Valley, access to UC Berkeley’s talent and resourcesl, and our vast network of over 500,000 living Berkeley alumni.
For starters, SkyDeck is located in the Bay Area, where our proximity to the action is key. We are not more than a 20 minute subway ride to San Francisco, Silicon Valley or a 45 minute ride to the long peninsula south of SF, where a great deal of the action takes place. During our six month program, we host over 50 workshops, 350 advisor office hours, 20 networking events. There’s no question that this would not be achievable if it weren’t for our strategic location.
Second, as UC Berkeley program, SkyDeck possesses deep ties with the university. The ties I speak of come from our relationships with campus leadership, faculty, and the student body itself. To date, we have three board members at SkyDeck: Berkeley’s Dean of Engineering, the Dean of the Haas Business School, and the Vice Chancellor for Research. We have also been blessed to be able to connect our startups with so many Berkeley undergrads, grad students and faculty. Today if you are on campus, almost any student you run has heard of SkyDeck and can tell you where we are located and what we do.
When it comes to faculty, to date we have some 20 faculty in residence, many of whom are not only teaching and researching, but are also deeply interested in supporting the commercialization of IP being developed at the university. Some of our faculty advisors have successfully taken IP and worked with their graduate student to found startups. Professor Alice Agogino and her company Squishy Robotics, is just one such example. After participating in the incubator program at SkyDeck, her startup went through the accelerator track this past spring.
Third, SkyDeck has the luxury of an incredibly vast network. Today our advisor network is 250 strong and 85% of them are Berkeley alumni. Most of these advisors have accumulated very impressive track records and around 40% of them are angel investors. Part of my role is overseeing the advisor program. Anytime we have a company that needs expert guidance in an area we don’t already have, we reach out and recruit advisors to join our network. The inbound interest to join is extraordinary and each year we have several hundred people apply to become advisors. Several of our advisors are tech luminaries in their own right, such as Jack McCauley, founder of Oculus, and Rebecca Lynn, Partner at Canvas Ventures. The one common denominator amongst all of these individuals is that they are genuinely invested in mentoring and find it gratifying and interesting to help young entrepreneurs.
SkyDeck works to ensure all startups have some real market traction before putting them in front of the 650 investors on Demo Day. On average, cohort teams take approximately 40–50 investor meetings in the few weeks following Demo Day. As a former founder myself, that sounds like a dream come true, especially since half the battle when you are fundraising is getting in front of the investors and getting meetings lined up.
In truth, an accelerator like ours acts as a tiny bubble for founders to learn, grow and build. Yet we make no pretense of the experience being all fun and games — rather, I’d describe life as a founder at SkyDeck as being intense and perhaps even grueling. There is definitely an expectation for the teams to work hard and deliver. You need only ask former SkyDeck alumni teams to hear the skinny on what the program was like for them. If running a startup is a marathon and not a sprint, for sure, SkyDeck gives founders a sprint start to the marathon ahead of them.
Founders interested in applying for SkyDeck’s Spring 2020 Cohort can apply between Dec 8, 2019 and Jan 8, 2020 via https://skydeck.berkeley.edu/apply/
