Freeman Ding's Blog

I just read a great chronology of UC Berkeley’s ties to China. It was posted to Haas@Cal website. In courtesy of the author, I forwarded the full text here to share with more readers.

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One of my favorite course at Haas School of Business right now is an elective course called “MBA294.1 Life as an Entrepreneur”.  It is jointed hosted by Haas School of Business and the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (CET) at UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering.  Basically each week one guest speaker was invited to give one hour speech, either at Bechtel Engineering Center in the College of Engineering, or Arthur Andersen Auditorium in Haas School of Business.  Most speakers are successful entrepreneurs or venture capitalists (usually these successful VCs used to be great entrepreneurs as well.).

This web page at CET center lists all the schedule and each speaker’s name and photo.  Among all the speakers so far, I particularly enjoyed following speakers:

From left to right:

• Ted Hoff, Inventor of the Microprocessor.  I enjoyed his story of inventing the first generation CPU Intel 8086/8088.
• Maurice Gunderson, Senior Partner, CMEA.  Mr. Gunderson is a veteran in energy industry.
• Charles Giancarlo, Managing Director, Silver Lake.  Mr. Giancarlo used to be one of the most influential people at Cisco, LinkSys and Avaya.  He is really a senior executive with tons of experiences in Telecommunication, computer network and IT industry.

Just today Oct 20th, the speaker is a cool young guy Charles Huang, co-creator of Guitar Hero.

As I am an international student, I am not familiar with the name of Guitar Hero.  Now I learned it is a very popular music video game in the U.S.

Actually “MBA294.1 Life as an Entrepreneur” is just one of the many “Speaker Series” courses under the same umbrella of MBA 294 series:

Course       Title

MBA294.1 Life as an Entrepreneur
MBA294.2 Real Estate
MBA294.3 Careers in Marketing
MBA294.4 Market-Based Approaches to Poverty
MBA294.5 Investment Management Spkr Series
MBA294.6 Microfinance Speaker Series
MBA294.7 Managing Internet & Digital Media
MBA294.8 General Mgt. & Strategy Spkr Series
MBA294.9 Careers in Consulting
MBA294.11 Education Leadership Speaker Series
MBA294.12 Private Equity Speaker Series
MBA294.13 Careers 101
MBA294.14 Topics in Technology
MBA294.15 Health Care Speaker Series
MBA294.16 Alternative Energy Speaker Series

Haas MBA body is pretty much diversified, so many classmates are taking other MBA 294.x Speaker Series, and it seems that almost everyone is enjoying it!