At Berkeley’s Collider Cup in December 2021, Alina Su managed a pleasing piece of electoral efficiency. Her company, NovaXS Biotech, won first place and the People’s Choice award. The judges and the room had agreed. For a student founder learning to persuade people with different reasons for listening, that was a useful afternoon’s work.
Ten teams competed at the Bechtel Engineering Center on December 10. Su represented a venture connected to the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship Bootcamp. The photograph afterward put her beside instructor Gigi Wang and the cup. It is an unusually economical picture of an entrepreneurial education: the student, the teacher, and something tangible to take home.
A trophy is easy to put in a biography. The education that precedes it requires more explanation. Su’s path offers a reason to linger over the less photogenic parts of starting a business: seeking advice, finding collaborators, making an idea intelligible, and returning to people who know something you do not. These activities rarely receive a ceremonial cup. Their absence can be expensive.
The instructor beside the cup
When Berkeley asked Su about her experience in 2022, she singled out Wang as her favorite instructor and mentor. She valued Wang’s dedication and the example she offered as a woman leading in business. Asked where she had grown most, Su answered with a single word: vision.
That answer gives the relationship some texture. A founder can learn to improve a slide or calculate a budget and still remain uncertain about what she is trying to build. Su credited the entrepreneurship program with giving her a framework for approaching a real problem. Her favorite course was Challenge Lab. Her advice emphasized concentrating on one task and doing it well.
There is something appealingly unglamorous about that prescription. Universities offer a splendid buffet of possibilities; entrepreneurship introduces the bill. Choosing a problem means passing up other problems. Choosing a collaborator means learning how to work together. Su’s account of Berkeley makes room for teaching in a business culture that can be rather fond of pretending its founders arrived fully assembled.
“Focus like a laser.”Alina Su, 2022
A company before graduation
NovaXS took shape while Su was still a Berkeley student. In September 2020, the founding group included Alex Zou, Jonathan Xing, and professor Irina Conboy. Su brought the company to the stage as CEO. The combination put a student founder in close working proximity to academic and business experience.
Her undergraduate training was in bioengineering. By December 2022, she was pursuing doctoral study at Harvard and participating in the Harvard Innovation Labs community. The two roles overlapped. She was learning inside a university while taking on obligations that belonged to a company. A syllabus can tell a student what comes next. A founder has to write much of that document herself.
The institutional route matters because the familiar shorthand for a young entrepreneur tends to omit it. A founder leaves school, starts a company, and appears on a list. Su’s earlier years contain classrooms, mentors, accelerator programs, and a team. The business was being built among those connections. Graduation was one date in a longer sequence of work.
Learning to hold the room
Su later described the mechanics of her pitches in a first-person essay. She separated a problem into parts, then explained how the proposed product addressed those parts. She could fit that structure into four minutes. The method gives an audience a small set of promises to remember, followed by an answer to each.
It also gives the speaker a discipline. An audience should be able to connect an explanation’s beginning to its end without doing homework in the middle. A founder who knows every technical detail has to decide which details belong in the room. A four-minute limit is a brisk editor. It has no affection for the slide you spent Sunday making.
At Harvard’s i-lab, Su was already discussing the next practical stage. NovaXS joined the student membership program in fall 2022. That December, she described exhibiting a physical prototype at events in Las Vegas and San Francisco and opening a public fundraising campaign on Republic. There was an object to demonstrate and a business to finance.
She also described a team that crossed disciplines: inventors, scientists, entrepreneurs, software development, and business training. Her account placed considerable weight on the experience around her. The founder held the microphone, but the company she described contained many kinds of work. Anyone who has watched a demonstration fail will appreciate the distinction between speaking for a team and doing everything yourself.
From the front row to the guest chair
In 2022, Su was invited to speak to students in Brown University’s master’s program in innovation management. She discussed her journey from China to the United States and her early experience building a company. The invitation caught her at an interesting point: still a Berkeley student, already someone another classroom wanted to hear from.
Teaching and building had begun to exchange places. She could bring a current problem to students rather than a polished retrospective. The business was still developing, so the useful material included decisions in progress. Early experience has a particular advantage in a classroom: its owner can still remember what was confusing.
The company’s university connections continued. In April 2023, NovaXS was named among four ventures advancing to the spring George Shultz Innovation Fund finals at the University of Chicago’s Polsky Center. Su was listed as CEO alongside Xing as COO and Zou as CTO. The venture had moved through another institution’s process of examination and selection.
These appearances give her career a rhythm that a single award cannot show. A pitch is revised, a prototype is presented, another group asks questions. A founder learns what travels between audiences and what needs explaining again. The repeated act of showing the work becomes part of the work itself.
Recognition followed the early company work. Su was included in the 2023 Forbes 30 Under 30 Local Boston list. The local designation matters: it locates the recognition in the university and startup community around her at that stage. Awards make a career easier to summarize, though each captures only a particular moment. In Su’s case, the more revealing sequence runs from entering competitions to answering students’ questions, then recruiting people and capital for the next company. The responsibilities kept moving even when the biography acquired another line.
Three names on the next company
At Generation Lab, Su became co-founder and CEO alongside Conboy, the chief scientific officer, and Michael Suswal, the chief operating officer. Conboy’s place in the founding team extended a relationship that had begun at Berkeley. Suswal brought experience from co-founding Standard AI.
The division of titles gives each person a different responsibility. A chief executive has to assemble a company around an idea; a scientific leader and an operating leader bring their own demands to that process. Su’s progression placed her in the position of coordinating people whose experience came from different settings. The name on the CEO line carried an obligation to make those contributions work together.
In October 2025, Generation Lab announced an $11 million seed round led by Accel, taking its reported total funding to $15 million. Samsung Next participated, along with Zone2 and investment firms connected to Steve Aoki, Giannis Antetokounmpo, and Simu Liu. It was a cap table with enough range to require several kinds of name recognition.
Seed round led by Accel
$15 million total funding reported
Money changes the scale of a founder’s obligations. There are additional people expecting decisions, progress, and an explanation of what happens next. The distance from a campus competition to an institutional financing round is therefore measured in more than dollars. The number of people entitled to ask difficult questions has increased.
The work behind the title
Su has spoken publicly about the stereotypes she encounters as a young woman leading a company. She has also emphasized collective effort and relationships. Taken together, those concerns make the CEO role look less like a performance of solitary certainty. Someone has to be decisive while remaining able to learn from other people.
Her 2025 SynBioBeta speaker biography locates her in San Francisco and includes a detail that entrepreneurial biographies sometimes forget to provide: she enjoys spending time with her dog, Han Han. It is a modest correction to the impression that a founder exists entirely in conference rooms. Even a calendar full of introductions has someone waiting at home.
By 2026, her name appeared among the Female Founders Retreat community in Palm Springs. The setting had changed from Berkeley classrooms, but the recurring feature was recognizable: founders gathering with other people who understand the job. Su’s career has repeatedly involved entering those rooms, first as a student and later as someone with experience to contribute.
Return to the photograph with Wang and the cup. The award records a result. The person standing beside Su helps explain how a student reached the point of producing it. That is the part of her education worth keeping in view as the financing figures grow: somebody taught, somebody listened, and a young founder put the lesson to use.