uc-berkeley-haas
(10)
Shiva Nathan
Shiva Nathan is the founder and CEO of Onymos, a Palo Alto software company he started in 2017 to end the endless rebuilding of the same app plumbing. A former head of Intuit's Platform and Services organization who also held engineering leadership roles at Oracle and CA, he built Onymos around a 'Features-as-a-Service' model that lets companies drop in login, payments, notifications and other features without handing over their data. Onymos has since expanded into AI-driven document processing for healthcare and life sciences through its DocKnow platform, including a collaboration with Mayo Clinic.
Tara Nickerson
Tara Nickerson, PhD, is President, CEO and Director of Therini Bio, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing fibrin-targeting immunotherapies for neurological and retinal diseases. A biopharma executive with more than 20 years of experience, she was a founding-team member and Chief Business Officer at both Maze Therapeutics and Prothena Corporation before taking the top job at Therini in 2024. She combines a research background from McGill University with an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School and a long track record of company-building, financing and dealmaking in the life sciences.
Kam Eshghi
Kam Eshghi is Chief Business Officer at OpenInfer, the Inference OS for the agentic era. He co-founded Lightbits Labs, where he helped pioneer NVMe/TCP storage and drove its adoption across data centers and AI clouds before the company was acquired by NVIDIA. Earlier in his career he led strategic alliances at DSSD (acquired by EMC for $1B), built the NVMe controller business at IDT, and shaped server chipset and Ethernet switch roadmaps at Intel. MIT EECS and Berkeley Haas MBA. Forbes Technology Council member.
Alex Abelin
Alex Abelin is the co-founder and CEO of PlantBaby, the Hawaii-based company behind Kiki Milk, a whole-food, organic plant-based milk built for kids. A three-time founder who spent seven years at Google and sold his smart-city startup LQD WiFi to Verizon in 2016, he traded payphone kiosks for pumpkin seeds after he and his wife Lauren couldn't find a clean plant milk for their son. PlantBaby has raised roughly $7M and hit $4.8M in revenue in 2024, selling through its own site plus Sprouts, Wegmans, Erewhon, Amazon and Thrive Market.
Enlai Chu
Enlai Chu is the founder and CEO of Productive.ai (Phoneic, Inc.), an AI call assistant that turns ordinary mobile phone calls into transcribed, summarized, CRM-logged records of work. A telecom builder with 25-plus years across messaging, voice and video, he co-founded the early group-texting startup 3jam (acquired by Skype in 2011), then held product roles at Skype and Microsoft before returning to founder life. His through-line: phone calls are where business actually happens, yet the moment you hang up the value vanishes.
Eric Rodriguez
Eric Rodriguez is the CEO and co-founder of Vendorflow, a Los Angeles SaaS company building the communications layer for trucking and logistics. After a decade in venture-backed startups - spanning restaurant analytics, document-management SaaS, and clinical research - he landed in freight at NEXT Trucking, where he met his technical co-founder Greg Bujak. Vendorflow unifies voice, SMS, WhatsApp, and ELD messaging into a single shared inbox that sits on top of the TMS, so dispatch and operations teams can work driver and carrier conversations in one place. The company raised $1.3M in seed funding in October 2021, led by TenOneTen Ventures. A UC Berkeley Haas graduate with degrees in business and economics, Eric once invented a 'Strategic Philanthropy' course and pitched it from the TEDxBerkeley stage.
Stephanie Lawrence
Stephanie Lawrence is the co-founder and co-CEO of Traveling Spoon, the marketplace she built to put travelers at a stranger's dinner table around the world. Born from a failed quest to learn dumplings from a Chinese grandmother, the company connects guests with vetted home cooks - 95% of them women - across dozens of countries for private meals, cooking classes, and market tours. A Dartmouth and UC Berkeley Haas MBA who worked with Alice Waters and Google.org before launching, Lawrence turned a travel frustration into a business that funnels income to local women while preserving family recipes that might otherwise vanish.
Hiroki Koga
Hiroki Koga is the co-founder and CEO of Oishii, the New Jersey company that grows the Omakase Berry inside the world's largest indoor vertical strawberry farm. A Tokyo native who watched Japan's vertical-farming boom collapse a decade before he built his own, Koga bet on a fruit nobody else would touch - strawberries - because they were the hardest crop to grow at scale and the only one with the economics to matter. By recreating the climate of the Japanese Alps indoors and getting bees to pollinate at over 90% success, Oishii became the only player to produce pollinated fruit commercially, pesticide-free and year-round.
Amit Dayal
Amit Dayal is Vice President and General Manager of Adobe's Digital Advertising, Learning, and Publishing Business - a portfolio that puts him at the intersection of AdTech, streaming media, and enterprise e-learning. With 30+ years of product leadership spanning Sequent Computer Systems, Oracle, Motorola, Yahoo, Samsung Electronics, and multiple Silicon Valley startups he co-founded or built PM functions from scratch, Dayal brings a rare depth of engineering-to-executive experience to one of tech's most creative companies. Based in Bengaluru, India, he leads strategy, product management, technology, marketing, and sales for Adobe Primetime and related platforms serving major media and entertainment companies globally.
Alex Bergonia
Alex Bergonia is Chief of Staff to the CEO at Babylist, the leading baby registry and family commerce platform headquartered in Emeryville, California. With a background bridging impact investing and high-growth consumer tech, she has spent her career at the intersection of strategy, operations, and mission-driven work. Before joining Babylist, she held progressive strategy and operations leadership roles at Farmer's Business Network (FBN Financial), and earlier built expertise in impact investing through fellowships and roles at Komaza, The Nature Conservancy, DBL Partners, and RSF Social Finance. She holds an MBA from UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business and a BA in International Relations from Claremont McKenna College.