Kevin Warnock

Brief excerpt from paper 'Hamilton-Jacobi equation' by Robert L. Warnock

I like to think I am a smart and inventive guy.

I have two professional claims to fame:

I created the first online document assembly website (Hotpaper) and the first online office suite (gOffice).

Both of these categories of software proved to be quite popular.

In the United States, LegalZoom and Rocket Lawyer now dominate the online document assembly business.

In the United States, Google Docs and Zoho now dominate the online office productivity business.

I am proud that I created the first versions of these significant components to the fabric of the Internet.

While my contributions to the Internet may not have the sex appeal of the social network Facebook or the political influence of the micro-blogging website Twitter, my contributions do allow people to get real work done online.

Getting work done is important to the advancement of humanity. Friending and Tweeting also help advance humanity, but the importance of writing and communicating well with the help of productivity software and document assembly software should not be discounted. How long could you go without Microsoft PowerPoint, Word and Excel or their new online competitors? Probably not long if you are a white collar worker.

I bought a nice house in San Francisco with the spoils of my inventions, and I believe I lead a comfortable and richly satisfying life.

I am shockingly happy. I am surprisingly happy for Google, Zoho, LegalZoom and RocketLawyer — despite their making more money from my innovations than I did.

However, I am not smart like my father Robert Warnock.

Yesterday I learned that my father’s paper Hamilton-Jacobi Equation is included on the peer-reviewed ScholarPedia website.

ScholarPedia is a WikiPedia like website for scientific papers.

Creating an online office suite like I did is a piece of cake compared to what my father works on. Many smart 20 year olds today could build the software I was first to build. But I don’t think any 20 year old could write the papers my father writes, no matter how hard they tried.

Don’t think I am putting myself down by this post.

I am simply showing you how outstandingly bright my father is. My mother is also outstandingly bright, and I’m certain I got my smarts from them.

I regard myself as quite smart.

I continue to invent things on a weekly basis. My mind is frequently dreaming up improvements to many everyday problems. I will never have the time to implement even a small portion of all the crazy ideas I come up with. The best I can hope for is to write a minority of them down and publish them to this blog, where hopefully others will find and then implement them.

I am devoting considerable energy to developing ideas to improve the efficiency of living, including heating, cooling, food production and water usage. Look for many more thoughts from me on these subjects over the coming years. My hope is that my ideas in these areas will have a profound influence on the state of the human condition by the end of my life.

As a side note, I am impressed that Scholarpedia uses Web Fonts to display math equations. That means you can copy and paste the mathematical equations in articles published on Scholarpedia. You generally can’t do this on WikiPedia, where equations are entered as LaTeX source code but then converted to image files for display.

Dr. Janet Rowley. Photo from University of Chicago Laboratory Schools Facebook page.

Remember my post from January 7, 2012 where I shared my mother’s prediction that Janet Rowley, the mother of one of my classmates from elementary, middle and high school, would win a Nobel prize?

Today is January 25, 2012, and Dr. Rowley has won a prestigious prize.

It’s not a Nobel, but it’s getting close.

Dr. Rowley won the Japan Prize, in the field of healthcare and medical technology.

Rowley shares this Japan Prize with two others, Dr. Brian Druker and Dr. Nicholas Lydon. The annual prize has been awarded for 28 years.

Rowley, Druker and Lydon will equally share the generous 50 million Yen prize, today worth about USD $650,000 according the news release published by the Japan Prize organizers.

From the press release:

“Janet Rowley, M.D., Blum-Riese Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine, Molecular Genetics & Cell Biology and Human Genetics of the University of Chicago, Brian Druker, M.D., Director of the Oregon Health & Science University Knight Cancer Institute, and Nicholas Lydon, Ph.D., Founder and Director of Blueprint Medicines, were recognized for their contribution to the “development of a new therapeutic drug targeting cancer-specific molecules,” called Imatinib.”

and later in the same release:

“I am particularly pleased to share this award with my good friend and collaborator, Nick Lydon, and one of my personal heroes, Dr. Janet Rowley,” Dr. Druker said in his acceptance speech at the press conference.  Speaking about the development of Imatinib, he said: “Today patients who once had a life expectancy of three to five years are now expected to live 30 years.  With Imatinib, we’ve turned a fatal cancer into a manageable disease …. There are incredible opportunities in cancer research.  What Imatinib tells us is that by understanding cancer we can develop effective treatments.  Imatinib tells us we are on the right track but we can’t be complacent.  We can’t be patient.  We must seize this momentum to reach the finish line of curing cancer.”

I’m sure my classmate Roger Rowley will be talking excitedly with his mother today. Congratulations to all. I called my mother at 8:30 this morning to tell her the good news.

Who else has won the Japan Prize? Last year two of the developers of the UNIX computer operating system, Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie won the Japan Prize in a different category. Here’s a nice writeup on the Google blog. Thompson works at Google.

Please read the press release of Rowley’s win at the website of the Japan Prize. If that website link in the future breaks, you may then read this archived PDF version that I created so that this important document won’t be lost from my blog years from now.

Please participate in the UC Berkeley Startup Competition, formerly known as the UC Berkeley Business Plan Competition. Here’s the email notice I received this morning from the competition organizers. Since this link will eventually not work, I prepared a screen capture of the email and I show it below this paragraph.

My friend Kelly Karns of  AutoTB is shown in the picture at the lower right of the email screen capture above. That’s Andre Marquis, the Executive Director of The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship in the lower left. Marquis is shaking things up and making changes — I wrote to him October 5, 2011 suggesting the name of this event be changed to The Berkeley Startup Competition, and today I open my email and the name has been changed. My suggestion may not have been unique, so I am not trying to take all or even a majority of the credit for renaming the premier entrepreneurial competition at Berkeley. But I will take my earned share, however tiny or substantial that turns out to be.

I made the name change suggestion to take the focus off of writing business plans that few will read or pay attention to. Instead, I want the focus to be on creating viable startups that create jobs and change the world. Achieving this goal will require a lot more than a new name, and I hope to be invited to contribute more of my many ideas to help reach this goal.

I was a finalist in this event in 1999 and my success I trace directly to this competition. I am grateful that the rules allowed me to compete. I am grateful the rules still allow me to compete, should I want to start a new company.

I have donated USD $20,000 to the competition since 2000 — I am that grateful.

The Lester Center has extended to me many perks beyond what I technically ‘paid for’ with this $20,000, and I thank them for their extraordinary generosity. For example, I’ve recently concluded a dozen year stint on the Advisory Council of the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum. I paid nothing for this membership during this dozen years, despite the Council being a fund raising mechanism for the Lester Center. I enjoyed dozens of fascinating dinners during this period, and I made a lot of smart and interesting friends by my membership, including Jerry Engel, Brian Goncher, Robert Dellenbach, Laura Oliphant, Sam Angus and Tom Kintner and by association his brother Avery Kintner. I will miss these twice yearly dinners, which I never missed unless I was out of California.

I am talking with Marquis to expand and extend my assistance to the competition over the next 14 years. There is so much more I can do to help, and the future looks bright under the stewardship of Andre Marquis and the leadership of the student organizers, who have the responsibility to run and perpetuate the event.

Kevin Warnock at Occupy Cal following Robert Reich speech at UC Berkeley, November 15, 2011

I was at the Occupy Cal protest at University of California at Berkeley last evening, November 15, 2011. There were over 1,000 protesters there. The energy in the air was positive and infectious.

As far as I could detect, the Occupy Cal event wasn’t marred by the shooting of a Berkeley student by campus police earlier in the afternoon. That student later died at the hospital. That student, Christopher Nathen Elliot Travis, age 32, was a transfer student from Ohlone College in Fremont, California.

Haas School of Business Dean Richard Lyons addressed the school’s students this morning. Later, Lyons posted this letter to the Haas Newsroom and publicized it via the micro-blogging website Twitter.

My friend Heather Sepulveda went to Ohlone College before she transferred to UC Berkeley years ago — a very strange coincidence to be sure.

Occupy Cal general assembly at UC Berkeley, November 15, 2011

There was a drum beat to the protest, thanks to the talented musicians that showed up. One of the musicians looked to be about 60, and he said he had participated in the anti war protests at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. I feature some of the music in the video I am editing from the event, which I hope to post tomorrow. I got some great video, including of the camping tents being carried into place.

Board member of the Mario Savio Lecture Fund addressing Occupy Cal protesters November 15, 2011 at Sproul Plaza

Robert Reich speaking at Occupy Cal protest, November 15, 2011

The event incorporated a gathering of The Savio Lecture Fund, which originally was to take place indoors at the Pauley Ballroom in the Martin Luther King Jr. Student Center, also on the UC Berkeley campus. My guess is the change of venue was decided close to the last minute to benefit from the association with the Occupy Cal movement. I was not previously familiar with Mario Savio, I am embarrassed to admit. I concluded from the talks I heard last night that Savio would have embraced the Occupy Cal movement and message. Savio spoke on December 2, 1964 from the same steps of Sproul Hall where the speakers last night spoke from.

The Savio Lecture speaker last evening was former United States Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, who is a Professor of Public Policy at UC Berkeley. I captured his speech to high definition video and presented it on my blog earlier today.

Camping tents being moved onto Sproul Plaza as part of the Occupy Cal protest November 15, 2011

In the photograph above you can see some of the camping tents already in place, along with another tent being carried into place already set up. Organizers were distributing hot food on the Sproul Hall steps. Even though there were a lot of people there, it was possible to easily move among the crowd, and I had no trouble taking pictures and video, even though I had brought a tripod with me, for many of the time exposures I took to capture the low light images you see here.

Soap bubbles by the hundreds liven up the view from the steps of Sproul Hall during Occupy Cal protest at UC Berkeley November 15, 2011

Sproul Hall after Robert Reich concluded his speech on the steps. UC Berkeley, November 15, 2011.

I took the above shot right before I departed, after 10pm. The group front and center appeared to be in their 50s and 60s. The age mix of the crowd was inspiring — it definitely wasn’t just current students in their teens and twenties. I felt that people were really passionate about the Occupy movement, and that this movement will be long lived and will accomplish real change in the world. I am glad I made the trip from San Francisco.

I uploaded these pictures at full 21 megapixel resolution. To see them at full size, click on them twice, with a pause in between the clicks to allow the photographs to load in a separate window. If you’d like to use these pictures for something, please give me a link back to my blog. If you like this blog, please subscribe, and please add this post to your status feed on Facebook. Thank you!

Robert Reich delivering speech 'Class Warfare in America' on Sproul Hall steps at UC Berkeley during Occupy CAL protest on November 15, 2011

I attended the Occupy Cal protest at University of California at Berkeley last evening, November 15, 2011. There were over 1,000 protesters there, including many approaching retirement age that indicated by a show of hands that they had earlier been there protesting in the 1960s and 1970s. It was an electrifying event that I will cover in detail in another blog post.

The event was made more thrilling by a speech given by Robert Reich, a professor of public policy at Cal. Cal is an abbreviation for University of California at Berkeley, for my readers unfamiliar with the word. The definition of Cal is well known locally, but on the world stage UC Berkeley is better known.

Reich was United States Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. Reich is also a frequent commentator on NPR (formerly National Public Radio) in the United States. NPR is my favorite radio station, and I’ve heard Reich speak many times on the air. Last night was the first time I’ve seen him speak.

I brought my tripod and set up my Canon 5D Mark II camera with two of the legs touching one of the Occupy Cal camping tents that had earlier been set up before the steps of Sproul Hall at Sproul Plaza. This was  a fantastic vantage point because the tent was already blocking the view of those sitting behind it, so my tripod didn’t appreciably further block the view. I simply sat on the pavement while the camera recorded. I recorded the full speech, and you can watch it in the video below. This is a compressed upload, but I have the full 7 gigabyte file in full HD. If you need the file for some project, please contact me.

Reich’s talk was very well received by the audience, including the tent dwellers sitting right next to me who graciously allowed me to set up there.

It was an inspiring and powerful speech. I am not going to try to summarize it since it’s brief and presented here in its entirety. I encourage you to watch it all the way through, and share it with your social network. I was so taken with it that I stayed up late into the morning editing and compressing the video so I could get this posted today during the day.

Networking hour at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum held at Google, Inc., October 27, 2011

Thursday October 27, 2011, I attended the first Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum ever held away from the University of California at Berkeley campus.

The Forum was held in Building 40 at Google, Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, California USA. Getting to the event was a challenge because Google was throwing a huge celebration for the Indian national holiday Diwali. As a result, parking was tight and there were hundreds of people in the huge courtyard between the massive Google buildings. I’m not complaining for it was festive and an adventure. I photographed the 6,000 burning candles artfully arranged in the courtyard, as you can see at the bottom of this post. There was a live band. The Google cafeteria was packed. It was exciting.

The Entrepreneurs Forum was a small event compared to the outdoor Diwali celebration.

The title of the Forum was ‘Power Hungry: Developments in Energy-Efficiency Technologies for Data Centers.’ This was an appropriate event to have at Google, which I suspect runs the largest collection of computers in the world.

I learned a lot at this forum. For example, computer rooms that are chilly are computer rooms that are horribly inefficient. Modern servers can run fine at temperatures around 85F degrees, and sometimes even warmer. Here’s the official video, immediately above.

Dale Sartor, John Robison and Joyce Dickerson on panel at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Dale Sartor, P.E., Applications Team - Environmental Energy Technologies Division, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

John H. Robison, Principal, NGEN Partners, LLC, at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Joyce Dickerson, Sustainable IT at Stanford University, at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Sylvia Burks, Partner, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman LLP, at Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, October 27, 2011

Diwali Festival of Lights with 6,000 candles at Google, Inc. headquarters in Mountain View, California, October 27, 2011. Photograph by Kevin Warnock.

[Note: I received a free pass to this event courtesy of my membership on the Advisory Council for the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum. I am writing here as a private citizen, not in any official capacity with UC Berkeley or the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum.]

Soragora Android application discovery application being demonstrated

On October 6, 2011, my birthday, I attended the first Demo Day for the brand new Founder School at the University of California at Berkeley.

Without question, I was exceptionally impressed with the results of Founder School as explained at Demo Day. In fact, I was more impressed with what I learned and saw than I have been by anything else I have ever seen at UC Berkeley.

The only events that can compare for shear impact were two rock concerts I saw years ago — the B52s promoting what I consider their best recording Wild Planet at the Zellerbach Auditorium, and Alanis Morissette promoting Jagged Little Pill at The Greek Theatre.

Yes, I am comparing presenters at a geeky entrepreneur event to actual rock stars, which I’ve never done before.

Founder School was that impressive.

Here’s the video of the event so you can see what I am talking about here:

Founder School Demo Day was held at Sutardja Dai Hall at the University of California at Berkeley campus

The website for Founder School does a good job of describing the basics of what it is. But their site doesn’t capture the excitement I felt at Demo Day. What got me so excited?

First and foremost, Founder School is more than even the most ambitious business plan competition. I am a fan of business plan competitions, and have judged three separate competitions at three schools within UC Berkeley over the years. But those competitions are all outclassed by Founder School, because Founder School resulted in three out of the five companies raising USD $3,000,000 before Demo Day. The biggest prize I have ever seen at a university business plan competition is USD $50,000. It’s possible to start a company on well below $50,000, of course. But Founder School companies that raised money raised an average of USD $1,000,000 each during a program that was just ten short weeks. It’s much more possible to start an important company on $1,000,000 because that’s enough to hire paid staff, where $50,000 really isn’t.

2011 Berkeley Founder School Demo Day networking

The next feature of Founder School is that it’s the first large scale jointly run event sponsored by The Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology (CET) and The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship. The technology I saw as a judge for the business plan competition at the engineering school in about 2006 was more memorable and to my eye more sophisticated than what I usually see at the larger Berkeley Business Plan Competition. I’ve been telling people for years that the engineers need to be incorporated more into the teams for the Business Plan Competition. The Business Plan Competition teams are far too heavily weighted towards MBA candidates, to the decisive detriment of the teams.

Jennifer Walske, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship

Founder School was conceived by serial entrepreneur Steve Newcomb. He approached Jennifer Walske, Director of Social Entrepreneurship at The Lester Center, shown in the picture above. Walske then introduced Newcomb to Andre Marquis, the executive director of The Lester Center. Marquis and Newcomb had a series of meetings, and Ikhlaq Sidhu was brought into the mix. Sidhu is Director of CET, the Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at UC Berkeley. Newcomb, Marquis and Sidhu worked together to make Founder School happen. From what I can gather, the success of Founder School was a huge group effort, with many more than these three people contributing tremendous effort. I gather that it would never have happened and been successful without the relentless push provided by Newcomb, who has started a sold an impressive series of companies.

Here’s some background on the graduating companies, from the Lester Center website:

Thirst: Building new web and iOS apps that will use proprietary natural language processing technology for social media (think Rapportive or Xobni for Social Media).

Soragora: Augmented reality app allowing users to see the world in a novel way-simply point your phone at any nearby business, restaurant, landmark, or point of interest and learn all about it!

Flotype: Software that lets programmers build massively scalable web applications using Node.JS.

500Friends: Innovative Software-as-a-Service platform that enables leading e-commerce retailers to increase customer retention, acquisition, average order value, and social media engagement by rewarding shoppers not only for purchases but also for brand promotion, product referrals, and creating UGC.

I’m not sure if there were any MBA students on the teams at Founder School, but the staff of The Lester Center was prominently featured and highlighted, so I think in future years more and more mixing of business students with engineering students is likely.

I think that’s key to getting a Google or Apple sized company to come out of the University of California. Are you beginning to understand why I am so ecstatic?

Darrel Sumi and Neil Sharma, founders of Soragora.com

Kunal Modi and Anuj Verma, founders of Thirstlabs.com

Sridatta Thatipamala, Eric Zhang and Darshan Shankar of Flotype.com

Justin Yoshimura, Cofounder & Chief Executive Officer of 500friends.com

Ikhlaq Sidhu, Andre Marquis and Steve Newcomb.

Andre Marquis, Steve Newcomb and Ikhlaq Sidhu. Newcomb showing his award plaque recognizing his contribution to Founder School.

Steve Newcomb, founder of Founder School. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

Christian Perry, Producer at SFBeta.com

Another great perk provided by Founder School is the access it has arranged for graduating companies to present at SFBeta. For those of you who don’t know it, SFBeta is Bay Area’s ‘finest startup mixer’ according to their website. The founder of SFBeta is Christian Perry, in the green shirt immediately above. Perry invited everyone in the audience to attend as his guest the next SFBeta event on November 8, 2011. For those not in the audience, here’s the link to buy a ticket to attend the November 8, 2011 SFBeta.

Yes, it’s nice to give companies a soapbox on campus to talk about their startup, but the real movers and shakers of the Internet world don’t come to Berkeley to see these pitches. Instead, they’re at events put on by TechCrunch, AlwaysOn and other industry taste makers and pace setters. To my knowledge, no winning teams from any other business plan competition at Berkeley have been awarded guaranteed spots to demo at SFBeta.

I predict that next year the graduates of Founder School will be covered the day after Demo Day by TechCrunch, as it’s likely others have noticed the results this year and won’t miss it next year.

Kristin Sverchek and Andre Gharakhanian, law partners at Silicon Legal Strategy

Naval Ravikant, founder of AngelList.com. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

Anuj Verma and Kunal Modi - founders of Thirstlabs.com

Justin Yoshimura of 500friends.com

The video above shows the graduating teams describing their startups, and they do it better than I could write about it, so please watch the full video, even though it’s over an hour. It will be an hour that will change your impression of UC Berkeley, I promise.

I introduced myself to Steve Newcomb, the instigator of Founder School. I told him then that what I had just seen was the most impressive thing I had ever seen at UC Berkeley. I’ll say it again here in case he’s reading this.

Founder School is the most impressive thing I have ever seen at the University of California at Berkeley.

I want to help put on Founder School next year. Please let me know how I may contribute.

Here’s a short clip of the networking hour and the audience as they’re taking their seats. These scenes are not included in the official video above, but they capture some of the energy and sold out excitement of the event, so I am publishing this clip.

Lab space visible from walkway to Sutardja Dai Hall at UC Berkeley

[Note: I am a member of the Advisory Council for the Entrepreneurs Forum at The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship. I am a Venture Coach at CET. I am writing here as an independent blogger, not in any other capacity.]

Traditional Korean drum. Photo by Flickr.com user berniebernardo.

On Friday, October 6, 2011, my birthday, I attended Founder School Demo Day on the University of California at Berkeley campus. As I was heading back to the Bay Area Rapid Transit train station, I heard a loud and surprisingly good percussion performance. I followed my ears and discovered the student group named ‘EGO: UC Berkeley Traditional Korean Drumming (P’ungmul).’ Here’s some information on Korean musical instruments.

I had my good camera with me since I took photographs and video at the Founder School Demo Day. I was so impressed with the drumming that I switched lenses to my Nikon 50mm F1.4 lens that I’ve had since college.

I waited for a break and then started capturing video in the extremely low light conditions, since it was about 9pm and the open gathering spot wasn’t illuminated except by sunlight bouncing off the moon and a street light in the distance.

I introduced myself to the students at the conclusion of the piece I recorded. Dan Kong explained that EGO is student group that practices and performs traditional Korean percussion works. I gave him my gOffice business card as I was out of my new blogger cards, having given them all out at the Demo Day.

I explained to the students I am a blogger and that I liked what I heard and saw so much that I planned to write about it and post the video. I made sure they were all OK with that, as I didn’t know for certain if they might be doing something the university might object to, like make a LOT of noise on campus. The students assured me it was fine to post, and they were excited they were about to get some ‘press’, I gathered.

Sadly, I know little about percussion groups or compositions. But I liked what I heard very much. Kong and the other students asked me to mention that they were just practicing, so there were likely to be some errors in their playing. I didn’t detect any errors.

Kong emailed me later that night and provided me with the address to the Facebook page of their group. Here’s a bit of what he had to say to me in his email:

“Sorry about our brief conversation; like I was saying we were practicing for our performance tomorrow and I felt like our conversation may have somewhat been curtailed. I just wanted to provide you with a little bit of info on the piece we were playing, called 사물놀이 (Samulnori which literally translates into “entertainment of four instruments”), and as you may have noticed, there ware four different types of instruments, each representing a weather conditions of: thunder, rain, wind and cloud.”

I captured the video in full HD, but I uploaded it at less than full HD size since I’m running out of space on my main iMac, so I didn’t have room to process the full size file, which was nearly 3 gigabytes.

The video doesn’t capture the impact of this group. I was mesmerized watching them, as they displayed genuine enthusiasm, excitement, and from what I could tell, skill. I hope to see them perform a finished and fully rehearsed piece one day.

Networking hour at the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum, September 22, 2011. Photograph by Kevin Warnock.

The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship has been hosting The Entrepreneurs Forum for about 20 years. I have been attending the forums for about 19 years. I have written occasionally about some of the events, such as when the finals for the Berkeley Business Plan Competition are held.

I have never tried to simply write about each forum to spread the word about what goes on there. I am a big fan of the forum, and I like to blog, so you would think it would have occurred to me to blog about each forum. But I didn’t think to start regular blogging about the forum until yesterday afternoon, hours before the forum last evening.

I brought my Canon 5D Mark II DSLR camera and shot some stills and video. I uploaded the stills at full resolution. Click once on a picture to present it alone on a webpage, and then click a second time to enlarge the picture to full 21 megapixel size.

Cupcakes by That Takes the Cake cupcakery, 2271 Union St., San Francisco, CA

The title of the forum this month was Food Entrepreneurship: Surviving the Recession — Strategies to Remain Profitable in Hard Times.

Here’s the description of the event from the website of the forum:

“The Bay Area is home to many innovators in the food industry. Each year, new food start-ups crop up at the ready to take their products to market. It is a notoriously competitive industry, made more difficult in a down economy. Come hear from Noah Alper, the Founder and former CEO of Noah’s Bagels, and in-the-trenches executives of food companies as they discuss lessons learned in the challenges of a down market and how their companies have responded to them.

The evening will also include a special networking hour, prior to the panel, featuring displays from some of the Bay Area’s most beloved, as well as up and coming food companies including 18 Rabbits Granola & Bars, Alicia’s Tamales Los Mayas, Bridge Brands Chocolate, Casa de Chocolates, Fava, Slow Girl Foods and Sukhi’s Gourmet Indian Foods. [note I removed one of the companies linked to from the forum website because there appears to be a technical problem that needs to be fixed before visiting.]“

This session sold-out Andersen Auditorium last year and is not to be missed for anyone interested in the business of food!”

There were perhaps a dozen food businesses in attendance. To promote their products, each business set up a table in the Bank of America Forum, the large lobby area outside the Anderson Auditorium where the forum programs are usually held. The food was delicious and photogenic.

The panelists Bob Burke, Joel Gott and Noah Alper were engaging and entertaining. I learned a lot about the restaurant business, a business I knew little about before this forum. The panel was moderated by Greg Beattie, a Partner at MBV Law.

I was surprised to hear Burke give what I thought was a good word for Groupon, a company I don’t think much of. He said it’s expensive but it drives instant traffic into restaurants.

All the panelists were very bullish on social media. Burke said traditional media like print and radio has mostly been supplanted by social media. Burke advises some fancy restaurants. I was surprised social media is now so important to costly restaurants.

Perhaps the most famous panelist was Noah Alper, the founder of Noah’s New York Bagels, which he built into a chain of 38 stores before he sold them in 1995 for USD $100,000,000.00. Noah’s Bagels is an institution in the San Francisco Bay Area where I live.

Alper warned against giving out free product to drive store traffic. He said Noah’s Bagels tried that once and their stores were overrun with guests for the day of the promotion. However, he said traffic died back down to exactly normal just a few days later. The result was they had given away a ton of bagels for free with nothing much to show for it.

Gott said that the employees his businesses are able to hire during this recession are truly outstanding compared to during the original dot com boom in the late 1990s. He said they get stacks of resumes from great candidates. He said employees in San Francisco cost him 5% more than elsewhere, a figure I was surprised by since the City requires restaurants to provide sick days and health coverage, unlike almost all other jurisdictions in the United States.

Noah Alper, founder of Noah's New York Bagels, September 22, 2011. Photo by Kevin Warnock.

I met and spoke with the founders of two of the exhibiters:

Arcelia Gallardo - chocolatier and owner, Casa De Chocolates, September 22, 2011

Casa De Chocolates – Arcelia Gallardo, chocolatier and owner — casadechocolates.com

I was drawn to Gallardo’s chocolate display by the sparkly sheen of the shiny smooth half spheres of rich chocolate. The sparkles were reminiscint of metalic automobile finishes — I’ve never seen such beautiful chocolate before. I spoke for a few minutes with Gallardo, and she told me how she got into the chocolate business. Sadly, I didn’t write any notes, and over the excitement of the rest of the night I forgot what she said. Here’s what the ‘about us’ page of her company’s website has to say about Gallardo:

“Arcelia Gallardo, owner and chocolatier, is passionate about pre-Columbian culture, chocolate and food. She started the company after graduating from UC Berkeley while working at the Le Cordon Bleu culinary school in Pasadena and has received training from world renowned pastry chefs Ewald Notter and Andrew Shotts. She was also a chef instructor at the Summer Cooking Academy in Los Angeles where she taught children and teenagers to work with chocolate.”

Derrick Jones, founder of cookie and truffle company Derrick Sky, September 22, 2011

Derrick Sky — Mr. Derrick Jones, owner — www.derricksky.com (note that you must prepend ‘www.’ to derricksky.com or the website won’t load)

Derrick Jones started Derrick Sky in 2009 after he almost died due to his undiagnosed food alergies. I tried all of his company’s products on display without knowing the story behind them. The products were apparently all vegan, delicious, inventive and scrumptious. It turns out they are perfect for those with allergies. I normally avoid gluten free products since I’ve assumed they sacrifice taste. But Jones’ products were really tasty, and I wasn’t aware I was eating something special for those with restricted diets.

The food at the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum is always delicious

The Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum is captured to video by a professional videographer. The full video is typically posted to the Lester Center website a couple of weeks after each forum. The official videos don’t include two key parts of each forum — the networking hour and a sequence of short ‘elevator pitches’ called ‘the numbers.’ I made a recommendation last evening to the videographer that he begin taking video of the elevator pitches. I think these pitches are part of what makes the forum special. I am fond of these pitches because I was a ‘number’ in early 1999 and I raised money for my first Internet company as a direct result of that pitch. I think these pitches should receive a wider audience than just those in the room, which is why I have decided to capture and publish them until the forum itself takes over, if ever. Note that I will be very upset if these videos are ever used to get somebody in trouble. The Berkeley Entrepreneurs Forum is a small gathering of smart people. If people ask for something in a pitch, please don’t give it to them casually. Investigate carefully, and be sure to comply with rules of the relevant authorities, such as the United States Securities Exchange Commission. By posting this clip and ones like it in the future, I do not intend to make any public offering, and I do not intend any harm to any presenter. I do not know any of the ‘number’ presenters.

[Note: I am a member of the Advisory Council for The Entrepreneurs Forum but I am writing here as a private citizen. The views I express here are my views alone, and I do not represent the Advisory Council, The Entrepreneurs Forum, The Lester Center for Entrepreneurship, the Haas School of Business or The University of California.]

Since about 2005 I have been a Venture Coach at the Center for Entrepreneurship & Technology at the College of Engineering at University of California at Berkeley.

I haven’t done much coaching recently, but when I was helping out regularly, it was a lot of fun. I sometimes had groups of six students in my office. The last time I met with students as a Venture Coach was in 2010.

I will make a special effort to participate in more events this coming academic year. I am very impressed with the quality of ideas from Berkeley’s engineering students.

One of the prototypes I saw in about 2006 particularly impressed me. A team made a refrigerator compressor as small as half my thumb. The compressor used so little electricity it could be powered by a single solar panel, yet it was so capable it could cool down an ice chest like you would take to the beach. The entire solar powered refrigerator would be able to be sold for USD $100.

I don’t know what became of the concept. I still think it’s a great idea. The team had in mind selling these eco refrigerators in the developing world, but I think they would sell well in much of the world, including at Target and Amazon. Who wouldn’t want to dispense with ice on a day at the beach?