Here at Haas Haas Podcasts (Produced by University FM)

H@H Ep 79: Xan Wood, current FTMBA student at the Haas School of Business talks to hosts Ameya Purandare and Marissa Maliwanag about tech, venture capital, private equity, and much more. In this episode, we explore the Berkeley entrepreneurship ecosystem, the need for a venture fund dedicated to Berkeley Entrepreneurs, the formation of Courtyard Ventures Fund 2, and many other things.
 
 
On Courtyard Ventures:
"Courtyard is a fund run by MBAs and Berkeley students to invest in startups from Berkeley. The genesis of that is that students are very close to companies. We are in the ecosystem. We are able to meet with people and also know Berkeley itself… It’s not just MBA, the undergraduate level, Ph.D. level there are amazing companies coming out of Berkeley"
 
On the entrepreneurial spirit in Berkeley:
"Berkeley is a hotbed of innovation. You can tell just by walking around the Berkeley campus, it’s a huge amount of entrepreneurship and general people trying to do different things. If you just look at the kinds of developments happening in this area of the world, like nuclear fusion or other things … It highlights that there’s just a huge amount of stuff happening here." 
 
On the need for a dedicated venture fund for Berkeley:
"I read a report by a Stanford professor on the number of unicorns created by Haas MBAs. I think we’ve got 1.4 in a thousand vs Harvard’s 1.6. Berkeley as a public school is relatively siloed, the budget of Berkely per student is $65000 per year vs $235000 at Harvard and $400000 at Stanford. So as students in this ecosystem, we can really play a role to create a lubricant and help generate and push the startups forward."


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H@H: AtB Ep 7 – In this episode, Nate Pola, Director of Programming @ Berkeley Blockchain Xcelerator and Defi Governance and Stakeholder Incentives Researcher talks to Paul Bryzek about his love for teaching, his interest in crypto, and how it culminated in him revamping the edX courses as the director of programming for Blockchain at Berkeley B@B. Nate and Paul further discuss all things blockchain from basics such as the unspent transaction output (UTXO) model, algorithmic stablecoins, and various macroeconomic principles which are used to design them to the recent Terra Luna collapse which shook the crypto ecosystem.
Blockchain at Berkeley
B@B EdX Course: Blockchain Fundamentals 
UTXO model:
Algorithmic stablecoins:
Terra Luna:

Notable Episode Quotes:
Nate Pola on the UTXO transaction model:
"It's just like making a piggy bank. And first it starts by creating smaller denominations of this Bitcoin. And so it transfers that half of Bitcoin to the intended recipient from there, it then takes the. Little piggy bank is the transaction fee." 

Nate Pola on Algorithmic Stablecoins: 
"Algorithm ones are the ones that don't have a direct one-to-one backing per se. And they instead are backed by computer science."

Nate Pola on the Terra Luna Collapse: 
"Terra had a large reserve of Bitcoin in store. And so Terraform labs sold about 3 billion in Bitcoin just to buy Terra and try to prevent the stable coin from collapse. And so all this was done with the intention to pump the new Terra Luna ecosystem and provide more reserves and more liquidity and value in the protocol."


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Dr. Kurt Beyer, Haas lecturer specializing in Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Navy veteran, and founder of the California Innovation Fund chats with host Paulina Lee on her last episode for Here@Haas (originally recorded in Spring 2022). Dr. Beyer shares his journey to Haas from flying planes to writing a book to his first start-up to teaching at Haas and everything in between. This episode is filled with great advice for business and life.

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H@H: AtB Ep 6 – On this episode, Nick Helgeson, MBA 2022 and Johnny Antos, MBA 2022 a senior developer at Prysm Group (a consulting firm specializing in the economics of emerging technologies, particularly in the blockchain space), chat with Paul Bryzek. They share how they stumbled into the crypto ecosystem, the Web3 speaker series they created on the Haas campus, and what’s in store for the future of WEB3. This episode was recorded during the Terra Luna stablecoin collapse and Nick and Johnny provide their expert crypto perspectives. Tune into this conversation to learn more about exciting topics like token economics (tokenomics), stablecoins, and how to evaluate projects in the Defi space.
This episode is particularly notable as it was recorded during the Terra Luna collapse on May 10th, 2022. During that day the price of Luna fell from $17.52 to $1.07 and was noticeably falling during the interview itself.
WEB3 speaker series -Notion page
Stablecoins - Definition
Tokenomics - Definition
Terra Luna crash
Notables Episode Quotes:
Nick Helgeson on the motivation for starting the web3 speaker series:
“I wanted to help contribute in my own way. And so, I set out to build and deliver what's now UC Berkeley's first-ever web three course. It’s housed in the MBA, program, and MBA students can propose teaching or facilitating a one-credit class “
Johnny Antos On the difference between Web2 & Web3:
“The classic one is web2 was read, write, and interact. And now web three brings in read, write, interact still, but now you have verifiable ownership on a blockchain, which, you know, doesn't sound that game-changing maybe, but that, that opens up doors for interoperability and people actually owning their assets and moving it from one platform or one protocol to another.”
Nick Helgeson on Solana and the trilemma tradeoff:
“What's called the scalability, trilemma, and you're effectively trading off between, three things, on transaction throughput, the other one is decentralization. and then the third one is security. And so, in choosing a proof of history, consensus protocol, the Solana development team made a pretty conscious choice in optimizing for speed.”


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H@H: AtB Ep 5 – Electrical Engineering & Computer Science (EECS) and Senior Product manager from Blockchain @ Berkeley James Dai chats with hosts Paulina Lee and Paul Bryzek and shares his blockchain expertise as a seasoned blockchain developer. His diverse experiences and collaboration with The Berkeley Center for Responsible, Decentralized Intelligence (RDI), in collaboration with Professor Dawn Song, led him to identify the need for reliable content authenticity on the web, and has started his own project and is recruiting co-founders. If interested feel free to email James at jamesmdai@berkeley.edu
FakeNet AI – Detects synthetic (fake) media to protect users against attacks.
Automated Market Maker (AMM) – Definition
What is DAI? Description of MakerDAO and its cryptocurrency DAI.
 On Automated Market Makers (AMMs)
“That basically allows you to take a token and then convert it to different tokens. So, if I take an Ethereum, I can convert it to Dai or vice versa. This AMM is really just a way to decentralize what is existing today as a traditional market maker.”
 On the Problem with Misinformation today
“And so, I think we can all agree, misinformation is an issue today. How we're currently trying to solve it as rather algorithmic. Facebook, AI, created this deep fake detection challenge. And the best state of the art models can only accurately classify 65% correctly.”
 On Transparency of Legal Contracts on a Blockchain
“So, you could basically make it where all the contracts are put on the blockchain as well, along with all the transaction flow. And so, you can follow legal entities on a blockchain throughout. And then track all their transactions.”


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H@H: AtB Ep 4 – Partner at NGC Ventures Andrea Chang chats with hosts Paulina Lee and Paul Bryzek and shares her industry insights as a crypto VC. Andrea is a graduating full-time 2022 MBA originally from Taiwan who moved to California to attend Haas. She previously lived in Singapore and worked at Goldman Sachs doing equity research for a few years. Later she joined NGC Ventures, one of the largest institutional investors of blockchain and distributed ledger technologies and has been a key contributor to several leading blockchain projects.

On NGC Ventures
“NGC ventures we started in mid 2018. We were the early investor in multiple public blockchains, such as Solana, Avalanche, PolkaDot, to name a few. We are also active in many defi metaverse deals.”
 
On identifying Red Flags for startups
“Timeline, like seems focus too much on the token access strategy rather than product building. And second is that often times it needs to rely on the market secondary market condition, which is hard to predict for all of us.”
 
On Berkeley entrepreneurs raising rounds
“First is to be very clear about your product and solution and your vision as is the positioning of your product in the wider industry space. And I think second is that to make the best use of the Berkeley environment, especially the talents part. Because Berkeley has so many talents, in undergrads, graduates, and MBA.”


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