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Ep. 290 How I Raised It with Caroline Winnett of UC Berkeley SkyDeck Accelerator

·32 min·1 clip

Carolyn and Pradeep funded Neurofocus with personal savings until the money hit zero.

1. How I Raised It focuses on UC Berkeley SkyDeck, Carolyn Winnett’s accelerator and incubator program for startups. 2. Carolyn Winnett is the Executive Director of SkyDeck, and Nathan Beckert hosts the interview for How I Raised It. 3. The episode asks how SkyDeck runs, how its university-linked fund works, and why Berkeley alumni matter to startup fundraising. 4. Carolyn says SkyDeck runs about 250 startups a year across four programs, including a Berkeley cohort, an incubator, an international founders program, and a Europe program. 5. She says the Berkeley Accelerator Track gets about 2,000 applications per batch, twice a year, and narrows them to 20 or 25 startups. 6. The selected startups receive $200,000 from the Berkeley SkyDeck Fund for 7.5% equity and stay in the program for almost six months. 7. Carolyn says SkyDeck’s staff is about nine people, with four additional people on the fund side. 8. She says the program can connect founders to 45,000 students, faculty including Nobel Prize winners, and nearly 600,000 living Berkeley alumni. 9. Carolyn explains that the fund shares half of its carry with UC Berkeley, so startup success can return money to education. 10. She says the fund is in its fifth year, has a fund two, and plans to raise a fund three starting in the summer or early next year. 11. Carolyn names MindsDB, Hayden AI, and Lime as examples of SkyDeck-linked companies with momentum or recognition. 12. She says Berkeley also feeds startups in consumer, robotics, therapeutics, enterprise software, quantum computing, material science, genomics, and AI. 13. Carolyn points to Databricks as a Berkeley success story and says Jennifer Doudna’s lab still produces startups that go through programs like SkyDeck. 14. She describes Berkeley’s Baker Fellows program and the Academic Innovation Catalyst as ways faculty and grad students can spin discoveries into companies. 15. Carolyn gives two lab-origin examples: a potential weight-loss drug with no side effects and a compound aimed at repairing severely damaged muscle. 16. She argues that university accelerators work best when they incentivize alumni, match the startup’s technical needs, and use a network with meaningful expertise. 17. Carolyn’s founder story begins with Neurofocus, where Pradeep proposed using an EEG cap to measure attention, emotion, and memory for marketing. 18. She says Neurofocus funded itself with personal savings, reached zero cash, and later grew to $25 million in revenue in five years before Nielsen acquired it. 19. The tone is practical and detailed, with Nathan asking direct follow-ups and Carolyn answering in a candid, operator-style way. 20. Founders, accelerator applicants, and university innovation teams will get the most from this episode; casual listeners seeking quick startup gossip may skip it.

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