Sit-stand desks, “collaboration lounges” sprinkled among cubicles, “focus rooms” for privacy, and windows with views of nature are all among today’s cool office trends.

But here’s the rub. As amazing as modern offices appear to be, they may not be helping employees do their jobs. They may even be distracting them from getting work done.

That’s the premise of a provocative new book co-authored by Berkeley-Haas Senior Lecturer Cristina Banks. In Built to Thrive: How to Build the Best Workplaces for Health, Well-Being, & Productivity, Banks and her collaborators combine research insights and workplace experiences to argue that too much attention is paid to physical space at the expense of the psychological and social needs of today’s employees.

Case in point: sit-stand desks. While they’re meant to get workers up on their feet for health reasons, studies show the novelty quickly wears off and employees mostly sit. “Collaboration” lounges rarely get used because they’re too close to cubicles. “Focus” rooms are rarely soundproof, meaning conversations intended to be private aren’t. And what about those outside views of trees and grass? The only beneficiaries are people who work on the office periphery.

Though well-intentioned, piecemeal features like these don’t go nearly far enough to promote employee health and well-being. “They miss a fundamental understanding of what leads to employee productivity and that is a multi-pronged approach,” says Banks, who teaches management and also serves as director of the UC Berkeley Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces (ICHW), which published the book. Berkeley Haas also sponsors the Center.

“Built to Thrive” relies on empirical research findings and professional advice to make the case for why a holistic understanding of the physical, emotional and social needs of employees is crucial in today’s workplace. The book’s 10 authors, each of whom contribute a chapter, are experts from a number of fields including environmental psychology, real estate, architecture, public health, and design strategy.

The authors argue that to inspire motivation and a sense of well-being businesses should pay attention to autonomy, social connection, bodily security, and work with purpose. Physical spaces, they argue, either enhance or detract from those goals.

For example, environmental psychologist Sally Augustin writes about the important roles that mood and emotion play in the workplace. Extroverts, for example, are happy to sit on a sofa with coworkers and collaborate, while introverts prefer to sit behind a desk or table. Cognitive thinking improves under blue lighting, while warmer hues encourage more socialization. Even scents serve a purpose: the smell of lemon improves performance, while cinnamon inspires creativity.

In separate chapters, Gervais Tompkin, a principal with the global design firm Gensler, describes the power of experience in the workplace, including the use of sound and projections of nature on screens or augmented reality glasses. Kevin Kelly, a senior architect with the General Services Administration, explains why employees’ subjective opinions of their workspace matter more than objective reality. And Google executive Anthony Ravitz details how the company relies on employee surveys and other data sources to measure office quality.

The book ends with a general framework to guide businesses on their existing and future office design projects. The approach emphasizes user needs while also recognizing that all departments need to be integrated into the process. It also points out that creating an optimal workspace doesn’t have to be costly and can actually be fun.

“There’s this myth that designing wellness into the workplace is more expensive than not doing it,” says Banks. “This book shows why that’s not the case, and why office design needs to be among the top three concerns for any business leader.”

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Geoffrey Easterling, pictured center, was a U.S. Army Assistant Squadron Operations Officer.

Geoffrey Easterling, MBA 21, a U.S. Army veteran who served in Afghanistan before coming to Haas, is taking on a new role here as the newly-elected president of the MBA Association (MBAA), the full-time MBA student government body. We talked to Easterling about his upbringing, military service, and his plans as MBAA president.

Where did you grow up?

I grew up in Columbia, MD, outside of Baltimore. At the time, it was America’s first planned community. It was very utopian in a way. Everything was very egalitarian. For example, no schools could have lights at their football stadiums or new books until all 12 schools could afford them. There was purposely low-income housing developments built next to million-dollar houses. It was just a very different way of seeing the world. That was something that I was always very proud of and gives me hope that everyone in world can work well together. However, I didn’t realize at the time that that wasn’t how the rest of the world worked. 

I went to West Point for my undergraduate studies. I wanted to play football and it was the only football school that recruited me so that’s where I was going. I loved West Point. I met people from all over the world. I travelled a lot and I think I gained a greater understanding and respect for what it takes to make this whole country and planet tick. 

What was it like serving in the military? 

I came straight from West Point to my first unit in Fort Hood, Texas. Three months later, I was deployed to Afghanistan. I was a fire direction officer and counterfire officer, which are two jobs relating to rockets, bombs, and artillery. I learned about myself and leading others and having a little grace and patience. You don’t realize how good you have it in America and how different things could’ve gone until you take the time to meet with an Afghan local. That was an experience I needed to have. 

Did you always want to go to business school?

I didn’t always know that I wanted to go to business school. I found Haas because my former boss, Kendrick Vaughn, MBA 16, went to Haas. I always had the utmost respect for him. He was the kind and smart leader that I wanted to be. If this [Haas] business program can help me become half as smart and talented as he is, then I will have made the right decision. 

What drew you to Haas?

At the end of the day, I wanted to be around the kind of people whom I’d met at Haas. The other big draw was as a veteran coming from diversity. I appreciated the fact that Haas was very upfront in saying, ‘Hey, there’s a diversity problem here and we’re trying to fix it.’ I like that people owned up to it and that they had a clear and articulate plan that seemed to be working to improve the number of veterans, to improve the number of women, to improve the number of African Americans. 

What would you like to accomplish as MBAA president?

One, the main goal so far is to really celebrate the culture of Haas. 

Two, taking the next step in diversity and inclusion. There are plenty of ways to change what it means to be inclusive, but what I’m going to focus most on is making sure our entire community feels included. Also, I want to make sure we engage with Haasies from all six degree programs. 

Three, I plan on working with as many faculty and staff members as possible to make sure that we’re in tune with their goals for the school. I hope to speak with the dean, DEI officer, and other key leaders. I’ve already been in conversation with some program officers, but there are 12 people on our board, so there’s plenty of conversation to go around.

Where can people find you on campus?

I’m usually in the MBAA lounge at Haas or the stadium gym. I’m back and forth between those places. 

What are you most excited about this year?

I’m unbelievably excited to work with my board members. I have the most amazing board. I think they represent the best of our school, which is already an amazing group of people. Our board spans the entire gamut. We have people from across the United States, Asia, South America, men, women, Latinx, black. I think that the Haas community is well represented and we’re proud of that representation. We look forward to serving our Haas family. 

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Though women now make up 47% of the workforce and hold over half of management, professional, and related occupations, companies are still struggling to support the needs of dual-career couples.

Enter the Supporting Dual Career Couples: An Equity Fluent Leadership Playbook, launching Jan. 16. It’s the first in a series of guides — dubbed “playbooks”— developed by the Center for Equity, Gender & Leadership (EGAL) at Haas.

From more flex-time to paid parental leave for all employees, the guide offers strategies and tools for organizations struggling to create a workplace that better supports dual-career couples. “Diversity, equity, and inclusion in the workplace isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution, which is where the playbook can help,” said Kellie McElhaney, EGAL’s founding director. “We can’t assume that what works for a white woman works for a black woman or what works for a straight woman works for a transgender man. We’ve designed every play to be different based on the myriad of diverse lived experiences.”

Genevieve Macfarlane Smith, EGAL’s Associate Director, who developed the playbook with coauthor Ishita Rustagi of EGAL, prototyped it with the help of Gap Inc., Zendesk, and the Boston Consulting Group. She said the current workplace structure is outdated. “Though about 62 percent of full-time employees in the U.S. have a partner working full-time, workplaces are built for a traditional heterosexual couple with one partner (often assumed to be a man) who supports the family financially and another partner (often assumed to be a woman) who stays home to support unpaid care and household needs.”

The playbook offers seven evidence-backed actions — which Smith and Rustagi call “plays” — that employers can implement. Each play includes the steps to put it into action, as well as the business benefits and methods for measuring success. Plays also include mini-cases from company leaders such as IKEA, Patagonia, Boston Consulting Group, and Gap Inc.

IKEA, for example, offers 16 weeks of paid parental leave to adoptive and foster parents as well as birth parents at the company’s U.S.-based locations. The company makes paid leave available to all workers, not just top-tier, salaried, and/or full-time workers. Patagonia provides employer-sponsored onsite childcare at its headquarters in Ventura, California, and at its distribution center in Reno, Nevada, with the capacity to serve over 250 children between the ages of three months to kindergarten. Patagonia reports that 99% of working mothers return to work after maternity leave.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) launched a program in 2004 called PTO (predictability, teaming, and open communication), which is now a global initiative across 900 BCG teams in 30 countries.  Under PTO, consulting teams set terms for working remotely and meeting etiquette (e.g., no meetings before 8 am), and set expectations for being accessible online.

Since launching PTO, BCG has seen improvements in personal satisfaction and project performance. Teams that embraced PTO were more likely to be efficient than those that did not (75% vs. 42%) and individuals on those teams were more satisfied with their work/life balance (62% vs. 38%) and more likely to imagine themselves at BCG for the long term (69% vs. 40%).

Abby Davisson, a senior director at the Gap Foundation who founded Gap Parents—an employee resource group at Gap Inc.— in 2019, said she met with McElhaney when she was planning to start the group, which now has nearly 400 members. Gap Inc., where 70% of employees are women, already had a very family-friendly culture, she said, but Gap Parents has brought people even closer together—with even employees who are just starting to think about having children joining.

“A lot of parents were reinventing the wheel with figuring out how to get childcare or how to take advantage of their family leave, and now they have a formal community where they can connect and share tricks and hacks,” she said. Sign up to receive the playbook when it goes live.

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A new Berkeley Haas program will give undergraduates the option of applying early for a coveted spot in the full-time MBA program and deferring for two to five years to gain the required professional experience.

Accelerated Access, which launches today, will be initially open only to UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students in their final year of study, with a plan to expand to students throughout the University of California system and then more broadly in the future. A kickoff event will be held on Tuesday, Jan. 28, in Chou Hall from 6-8pm.

“Accelerated Access is an innovative way for students to secure a seat in our MBA program, providing a way for them to pursue full-time work that aligns with their passions, with reassurance that they will be able to return to a top-ranked MBA program in a few years,” said Morgan Bernstein, director of strategic initiatives, who is spearheading the launch.

Reaching across campus

Under Accelerated Access, undergraduates will apply to the MBA program during the final year of their bachelor’s program. Successful applicants will gain conditional admission, and can enroll after a flexible two-to-five-year deferment period for professional experience.

Haas Dean Ann Harrison said Accelerated Access is another way that Haas is reaching across campus to offer new opportunities to students who previously might not have considered an MBA.

“We’re so excited to offer this program exclusively to UC Berkeley students this year,” she said. “We have so much talent here in the Berkeley community—and this is another way that we are cultivating and committing to that talent.”

Bernstein has been introducing the program across campus in recent weeks, and says the early response has been enthusiastic.

“We believe that this program will increase the diversity of our class, compelling students from a wide variety of academic disciplines to consider an MBA—from students in environmental science who want to pursue careers in sustainability to engineering students who want to complement their technical skills with a business foundation,” she said.

Application fee waived

There are two application deadlines in the pilot cycle: Thursday, April 2, 2020 and Thursday, June 11, 2020. The application process is similar to that of the full-time MBA program, with requirements including a resume, two letters of recommendation, two short essays, undergraduate transcripts, and either the GMAT or GRE standardized test. An interview will be required for admission.

Haas will waive the $200 application fee for UC Berkeley applicants this year and will be making up to five $100,000 scholarship awards to celebrate the launch as well as the 10th anniversary of the Defining Leadership Principles: Question the Status Quo, Confidence Without Attitude, Students Always and Beyond Yourself.  Embodiment of the principles will be among the criteria that are considered for the awards.

Shaibya Dalal, who earned a BA in political science in 2011 from Berkeley and returned in 2018 as a full-time MBA student, said she couldn’t be happier that she chose Cal twice.

“The MBA culture at Haas is incredibly collaborative—whether you need notes from a class, advice for your start-up, or even help moving furniture, you can rely on Haasies,” she said. “My peers are kind, generous, open-minded, and intellectually curious. Constantly being around such brilliant people has challenged and stimulated me in completely new ways.”

For more information about the program please email accelerate@haas.berkeley.edu.

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While working for Uber as the company’s regional operations manager in India and South Asia, Tushar Misra became fascinated with how electric vehicles could be used to improve transportation in cities. 

The biggest obstacle he saw was a lack of infrastructure to support cars and a growing fleet of mopeds and motorcycles. 

“The charging structure basically doesn’t exist,” he said. 

That realization led him to startup Grido at Haas with fellow students Sid Mullick and Jorge Morel, all MBA 20. Grido designed a portable, e-scooter charging dock that the company launched in April. Since then, Grido hasn’t stopped, partnering with companies, including Lime (founded by Haas alumni), Bird, Movo, and Grin and has built charging stations in Oakland, Atlanta, Puebla, Mexico City, and Guadalajara.

Grido’s business model is two-fold: it provides scooter companies access to charging stations and increases foot traffic to local businesses that host its charging docks. The portable charging docks, which look like A-Frame signs, are placed on sidewalk curbs. So far, Grido has charged over 15,000 e-scooters. 

The founders developed Grido from the ground up. Mullick, with his mechanical engineering experience, built the charging docks, while Morel devised a plan to turn Grido into a profitable business.

The trio began pitching their business plan and raising capital last year receiving a total of $25,000 in Haas fellowships, including the Trione Student Venture Fund, the Hansoo Lee Fellowship, and the Jack Larson Fellowship. They also raised $250,000 from Contrary Capital and had four angel investors from Berkeley, Uber, and Energy Space. 

In April, Misra and his co-founders participated in LAUNCH Demo Day, competing against 11 teams for prizes ranging from $5,000 to $25,000. While they didn’t win, the competition led to an opportunity to pitch to 60 investors – and eventually to their acceptance into Berkeley’s SkyDeck Accelerator Program. 

“LAUNCH was literally our turning point in some ways,” he said. “We were hoping to make it into the top three, but we didn’t. We were so sad but one week later, everything changed.

Now, the Grido team has access to SkyDeck mentors, a network of Silicon Valley venture capitalists, and $100,000 in funding. Soon, they’ll pitch Grido to more than 600 investors at SkyDeck Demo Day.

While success has come fast, they’ve also experienced a few setbacks, including a first trial run in Mexico City that was a failure. Business owners didn’t want to hang the charging docks, which at the time looked like fuse boxes, to their walls. After Mullick redesigned the charging docks in the form of A-Frame signs, their signs were a hit. 

Another setback has been hiring the wrong people, Misra said.

“Hiring is one of the most difficult aspects for startups because you’re resource constrained but at the same time you want top talent and those two things don’t usually match,” he said.

Despite these hurdles, Grido is growing, and fast. The team has hired five part-time MBA students and seven engineers and operations staff to assist with the company’s expansion.

“We want Grido to become the back end of the micro-mobility industry,” said Misra. “We want to build a network of charging stations that are equipped to charge any form of electric vehicles, from electric scooters to electric skateboards.”

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The Berkeley Full-time MBA Program ranked #8 in the US in the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking published today. Globally the program ranked #12.

Alumni salaries, which account for 40% of the ranking, remained strong. The weighted salary of Haas alumni three years post-MBA, which is adjusted for regional purchasing power (PPP) and sectors, was the sixth highest in the world.

The ranking is based on a survey of full-time MBA alumni three years after graduation and on data provided by participating business schools.

In 2019, Berkeley Haas ranked #10 globally and #7 among US schools.

The rankings package includes profiles of two alumni: April Underwood, MBA 07, whose Silicon Valley career led her to found #angels to fight the gender equity gap in the tech entrepreneurship sector, and Alvaro Silberstein, MBA 17, whose startup Wheel the World leads adventure trips for people with disabilities.

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A total of 72 students in the Class of 2019 graduated from the Berkeley MBA for Executives Program Saturday, surrounded by friends and family.

“Today is a celebration of your personal achievements,” Haas Dean Ann Harrison said. “Finding ways to balance (work, family, and school) commitments is nothing short of remarkable, and we applaud you.”

Watch the slideshow! All photos: Jim Block.

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Attracting funding is difficult for any aspiring entrepreneur. But for underrepresented minorities, the challenge can be even more daunting: just 1% of venture-backed founders in the U.S. are black and about 1.8% are Latino, according to a 2019 study.

That’s a big reason why Dan Kihanya, MBA 96, a serial entrepreneur who runs a mobile banking startup, decided to build Founders Unfound, an online platform to showcase underrepresented minority founders whose startups are ready for seed funding. The site features company information, a blog, and podcasts.

“My approach is to find companies that are at the stage of being venture backed so we can highlight them through the lens of getting the attention of investors and the larger startup community,” said Kihanya, whose father is from Kenya and mother is of English and Scottish descent.

The podcast interviews veer in interesting directions, covering everything from family background and life challenges, to sources of entrepreneurial inspiration, to the complexity of taxes and global manufacturing.

Building something that lasts

Interviewees so far include Stella Ashaolu, founder of WeSolv, which uses data analytics to help large companies improve workforce diversity; Baratunde Cola, founder of Carbice, is developing technology to prevent electronic devices from overheating; and AK Ikwuakor, founder of ELETE Styles, is designing fashionable professional clothes for the athletic build.

In one podcast, Ikwauakor, a former collegiate track and field star at the University of Oregon, discussed the link between sports and startup perseverance, comparing the pain of completing the 400-meter hurdle race to the pain of being rejected when someone doesn’t like your presentation. “It’s really about success in life…are you willing to go through the pain, the discomfort, the doubt?” he said.

Cola, who grew up in Pensacola, Florida, with a dad whom he described as a “street entrepreneur from the Bronx,” detailed his decades-long commitment to creating a new kind of thermal material for his startup, Carbice.

“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and build something that would last,” said Cola, who earned a PhD at Purdue.

A mechanical engineering undergrad who formerly worked in the Detroit auto industry, Kihanya moved to the Bay Area to enroll at Haas. “I was drawn to the place where you start something from scratch,” he said.

And Kihanya did. In 1996, he co-founded internet loyalty program MyPoints.com and took it public. A top performing IPO of 1999, MyPoints was acquired by United Airlines’ Loyalty Services Division in 2001.

Showcasing black founders

Kihanya went on to serve as an advisor to many startups, as well as a venture partner for Stockton Ventures on the East Coast. In 2017, he founded Wizely, which provides millennial consumers in India with mobile banking services, and today he commutes between his home in Seattle and Wizely’s India-based headquarters.

Before launching Founders Unfound, Kihanya considered simply increasing his angel investing and mentoring. But he ultimately decided that a digital platform, coupled with social media campaigns, would be a more powerful way to showcase a growing pipeline of black founders.

“I’m at the point in my career where it’s giving-back time,” he said.

When choosing a team of advisors for Founders Unfound, Kihanya turned to Haas, appointing Élida Bautista, the school’s director of inclusion and diversity, and Laurence “Lo” Toney, MBA 97, managing partner at Plexo Capital, whom Kihanya met at Haas.

For now, the website focuses on entrepreneurs of African descent, including Afro-Caribbeans and African-Americans. Kihanya plans to expand to include interviews with Latinx founders this year.

Another goal is to post 100 interviews—as fast as possible.

“If we had 10,000 listeners, 100,000 downloads, and if it’s the right audience, that’d be tremendous,” Kihanya says. “If an interviewee comes to me later and says, ‘This employee, or that investor, or this partner came to me because they heard me on Founders Unfound,’ that’s how I’d judge success.”

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Two pioneering women in tech sales and broadcast television will serve as commencement speakers for the full-time, evening & weekend and undergraduate programs this May.

Laura Clayton McDonnell, MBA 85,  a visionary sales executive who has held leadership roles at two of the world’s top tech companies, was chosen as speaker at the 2020 Full-time MBA and Evening & Weekend MBA commencement; Diane Dwyer, BS 87, former KTVU and NBC broadcast journalist, was chosen to speak at undergraduate commencement.

The MBA commencement will take place on Friday, May 22, 2020, at the Greek Theatre.

The undergraduate commencement will take place on Monday, May 18, 2020, at the Greek Theatre. 

“We are so thrilled to welcome two successful female alumnae who represent our Defining Leadership Principles to speak at our commencements,” said Haas Dean Ann Harrison. “Laura questions the status quo as a business leader in so many ways and Diane, as a professional faculty member, is a student always.”

McDonnell, who is vice president of enterprise sales for management software company ServiceNow, was previously vice president of Microsoft’s New York region. Managing a team of more than 230 people, she was responsible for increasing sales revenue and expanding Microsoft’s influence in the region by building relationships with key stakeholders, such as New York City’s Department of Education. 

McDonnell also piloted innovative programs such as Microsoft’s Tech Jobs Academy, an educational program that offers free tech training to underrepresented communities. 

 At IBM, where she previously worked for 11 years, she rose to vice president of strategic services for North America, before taking on a role as senior vice president of North America Sales at Aspect Software.

Dwyer, a professional faculty member at Haas who teaches Innovations in communications and public relations, has been a broadcast journalist for 25 years, reporting important stories from the inauguration of President Bill Clinton to the Oakland Hills Firestorm.  

She began her career as an anchor and reporter at KXLF in Butte, Montana, in 1988. Two years later she and joined the KTVU-Channel 2 newsroom, where she launched and co-hosted the Morning Show on KTVU with Ross McGowan for several years. 

She then moved to San Jose to become the weekend news solo anchor for NBC Bay Area. Her reporting won her two Emmy awards and other prestigious awards from the Associated Press and the National Academy of Radio and Television Artists. In addition to teaching, Dwyer runs her own consulting business, Dwyer Media Consulting.

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Deciding on the best place to build a new bike-sharing station in New York City based on ridership data landed a team of Berkeley Master of Financial Engineering students first place in the Citadel West Coast Datathon. The competition was held at the San Francisco Marriott Hotel on January 25. 

Team members: Raymond Ji, MFE 20, Yili Wang, MFE 20, and Weipeng Shao, MFE 20,  working with Ying Jin, PhD 24 (statistics), of Stanford University.

The Field: Twenty-three teams from top U.S. universities on the West Coast, including Caltech, Stanford, UCLA, University of Southern California, and the University of Washington, competed for $20,000 in prize money and the chance to move on to the Citadel National Data Championship in April.

The Challenge and Team’s Plan: The team had to decide where to build a bike-sharing station in New York City based on current and future ridership, demographics, proximity of public transportation, and the popularity of ride-sharing alternatives. Using those data points, the team built a regression model that accurately predicted South Brooklyn as the best location for a bike-sharing station.

The Secret Sauce: “Our wide skill set as well as our extensive preparation set us apart from the other teams,” said Raymond Ji, MFE 20. “Our ability to dig well in depth into a topic question while still covering a broad range of aspects and techniques helped us win the competition.”

The Haas Factor: The students said Prof. Martin Lettau’s Empirical Method in Finance course and Prof. Laurent El Ghaoui’s Finance Data Science course provided useful knowledge for the competition.

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Listening to people’s stories about their problems as a young legislative aide in Texas ignited Terrell Baptiste’s interest in healthcare policy as a way to improve lives on a larger scale.

That led Baptiste, EWMBA 20, on a career journey from Washington D.C., where he worked as a senior legislative associate in healthcare policy, and then in communications at the FDA, to Bay Area pharmaceutical company BioMarin, which specializes in rare diseases.

Now focused on investing in healthcare companies, he also volunteers at the MLK Jr. Outpatient Center in Los Angeles, which treats adults with sickle cell disease, a red blood cell disorder that disproportionately impacts the African American community. 

We spoke with Baptiste about his healthcare journey, his commitment to improving healthcare in marginalized communities, and his most useful Berkeley courses.

Where did you grow up?
I grew up in Houston and went to high school in Sugarland, a wonderfully diverse community. I don’t identify as a Texan but I have a soft spot for Texas as it brings me positive memories and connects me back to my childhood.

How did you end up in the Texas legislature?
As an undergraduate student at the University of Texas in San Antonio, I became enamored with politics. One of my professors introduced me to a Texas state representative for whom I ultimately interned. Six months later I found myself running his re-election campaign and working 20 hours a day in the process. I’m still tired from that job!

Is that when you became interested in healthcare?
Yes, that’s where I found health policy. It was formative to me. I enjoyed the idea that I could listen to stories, help people, and make things happen from a legislative perspective. It lit a fire in me to figure out how I could make an even bigger impact for good.

So why did you end up choosing to get an MBA?
At the FDA, we would interact with pharmaceutical companies at a distance while we were evaluating their products. We would hear about the state of the companies, but I didn’t have the background to understand what certain things meant. I didn’t understand how the companies were being financially supported. I came to business school to understand more about that. My overarching goal with my career has been and is to improve the lives of marginalized patients and so I see my Berkeley MBA as a tool to further that objective.

Your plan is to shift over to biotech hedge fund investing? Why?
I never imagined I’d go from working with the FDA to actually evaluating these companies from an investment perspective at a biotech hedge fund. It’s nice to be able to take my understanding of the way the government thinks about treatments for people as well as the operating experience from BioMarin—where I worked as a regulatory policy analyst, pipeline commercialization associate, and global market access senior analyst—and apply that to investing roles. It’s not a traditional path. I am able to conceptualize what people are doing and see it from different angles.

Which MBA courses have you found most useful to your job?
The entire core program at Haas gives you a fluency in business. You share a common language with people around the world, and a conceptual framework. Turnarounds: Effective Leadership in Crisis with Peter Goodson helped me conceptualize as an investor what options CEOs have and what companies are going through. I took M&A at Berkeley Law with Steven Davidoff Solomon. I wanted a deeper understanding of M&A and I wanted to understand what the process was. This course wasn’t about value creation, but about the legal mechanics behind deal making. I wanted to educate myself on that as an investor or future operator.

What led you to volunteer at the sickle cell center?
At the Sickle Cell Clinic at MLK Jr. Outpatient Center, I’m a lead author of a research study on the impact of innovative adult sickle cell care. My experiences in Washington D.C. and at the FDA have allowed me to see firsthand how a marginalized community can receive uneven care, especially for a disease with limited treatment options.

Working with marginalized populations makes sense to me because you need to have core values connected to the work you do. One main reason I went to France to study for a semester last spring is that I wanted to go to a country that believes that philanthropic and social values are connected to work. I wanted to see that live in action. Here, I’d like to continue to have a hybridized world where I work with real patients and I do projects to support them, and where I can also work as a healthcare investor.

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Cryptocurrencies are not investments for the faint of heart. As anyone who has followed the Bitcoin saga knows, the rollercoaster price movements of these digital assets are only for those with strong stomachs (or who want to conceal their transactions). In recent years, however, a new form of cryptocurrency has emerged with the promise of much less volatility. So-called stable coins, such as Tether, the stable coin market leader, are pegged one-to-one to the U.S. dollar or other asset, in theory making them safer.

Berkeley Haas News spoke to Rich Lyons, professor of finance and economics, and Haas dean from 2008 to 2018, about this new wrinkle in cryptocurrencies. Lyons, an expert in currency exchange rates who holds the William & Janet Cronk Chair in Innovative Leadership, recently co-authored a paper with Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj of England’s Warwick Business School examining what keeps stable coins stable.

Among their conclusions: Stable coins could open the door to the wider crypto world without the wild price swings of free-floating cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Even so, as Lyons stresses, stable coins are not necessarily the safe havens they are advertised to be.

If you look at a price chart of Bitcoin over the past few years, it looks like a trek through the Himalayas, with enormous peaks and valleys. Why are cryptocurrencies so much more volatile than traditional currencies?

We can answer that question by thinking about the dollar-euro exchange rate, which is more volatile than people originally thought it would be. The issue is that the euro’s fundamental value is a difficult thing to pin down, leaving a lot of room for speculation. Instability like that gets magnified in the world of cryptocurrency. At the end of the day, the Bitcoin-dollar exchange rate is just another exchange rate, and a lot of those same speculative dynamics are there.

But why are Bitcoin’s price movements so much greater than those of traditional currencies?

The big issue is that the fundamental value of Bitcoin is even more nebulous than that of the euro. We can at least start to think about the fundamentals of the dollar-euro exchange rate, like the growth rate in Europe versus the U.S. With a cryptocurrency like Bitcoin, the fundamental picture is much harder to pin down. You have the same speculative dynamics as in a regular currency market, but with much fuzzier fundamentals.

What exactly are cryptocurrencies?

Over the past five-to-ten years, what some people are calling the digital asset economy has emerged. The digital asset economy lies outside the traditional banking system and is generally housed on a blockchain, which is a secure, decentralized electronic ledger used to record transactions. The digital asset economy includes cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and so-called initial coin offerings. These assets serve multiple purposes. For example, I could issue 100 tokens, and by buying one, you could own one one-hundredth of a work of art. We can break up lumpy assets and give people ownership of small slices. In addition, this digital asset economy gives people in countries that might not be able to hold assets because of capital controls or other restrictions access to more of the world’s assets.

What’s the purpose of stable coins?

Because this digital asset economy is largely outside the traditional banking system, the issuers and traders of these assets aren’t like regulated financial institutions. They don’t have “know-your-customer” rules or anti-money-laundering regulations. At first, this digital asset economy lacked a store of value, that is, assets with relatively low volatility that people could hold knowing the value wouldn’t change drastically. Because Tether and other stable coins are pegged to traditional currencies, they have become stores of value in that alternative financial world that otherwise lacks a store of value.

Haven’t stable coins been controversial?

Yes. For example, there was a question of whether the issuers of Tether were manipulating the price of Bitcoin. Part of the reason that scenario is possible is that Tether is used as the medium of exchange in over 50% of Bitcoin transactions. When people are buying and selling bitcoins, more often than not they are trading tether for bitcoins. One reason is that when you go from dollars to bitcoins, you are also going from inside to outside the banking system. That has high transaction costs. Tether is already outside the banking system, which makes it a much cheaper and more frictionless way to go in and out of Bitcoin.

Most people see the cryptocurrency world as pretty wild and woolly. Are stable coins as safe as claimed?

Tether is pegged to the dollar at one-to-one, and its price has generally traded within 1% of one-to-one. But about a year-and-a-half ago, there was some concern in the market that Tether was not backed one-to-one with assets; i.e., if there was a mass redemption of Tether, the collateral would not be sufficient to cover the full amount. This concern led the price to fall as low as 95 cents to the dollar. There was an audit, which was not 100% transparent, but it did restore confidence in the marketplace.

What kinds of questions should we be asking about stable coins?

Stable coins come in a number of different flavors. Some purport to be 100% backed by redeemable collateral that’s in escrow, collateral that can’t be captured and run away with. But part of the question, even with Tether, is whether it really is 100% collateralized. And is all that collateral really liquid? If you have to sell in fire-sale conditions, even a “100% collateralized” asset may not turn out genuinely to be 100% collateralized.

What are the long-term prospects for stable coins and cryptocurrencies generally?

There will be a lot of shakeout. The stable coins that have the greatest market confidence concerning the legitimacy and liquidity of their collateral will win out. Meanwhile, if you think about the literally thousands of initial coin offerings, all the tokens, all the cryptocurrencies—90% of them will be valueless in 10 years, in my judgment.

In a shakeout scenario, do stable coins have an advantage?

Most stable coins have collateral. So, if a stable coin fails, it won’t be a complete cataclysm. Whatever collateral is left after liquidation costs will go to the holders. But, when you talk about cryptocurrencies that don’t have any collateral—the Bitcoins and ICOs that don’t have any fundamental value backing them—when those go away, their value goes to zero. I’m not predicting that Bitcoin will necessarily go to zero, but certainly there are a lot of assets in the digital economy that will go to zero over the next 10 years. At the same time, you’re seeing assets in the digital economy that are getting 10 times the valuation they had two years ago. You’ve just got to be in the right place. And it’s anybody’s guess what the right place looks like.

How are cryptocurrencies in general and stable coins in particular evolving?

This idea of inside the banking system versus outside the banking system—that’s a pretty bright line right now. But when central banks move into the digital asset world, the line won’t be as clear. A well-functioning stable coin adds a lot of value, and all of the big central banks are doing a lot of research on cryptocurrencies. Many of them are saying they will launch a digital currency in the next five years. My prediction is in 10 years we will have three or four important stable-coin digital currencies, based in blockchain, and issued by central banks. They will live more in the traditional regulated banking system. That will fill in the continuum.

You and Ganesh Viswanath-Natraj just released a paper titled “What Keeps Stable Coins Stable?” What questions were you looking at?

We wanted to look at how tightly the price of Tether was pegged to the dollar. What we found was somewhat surprising. Tether trades at both a discount and a premium to the dollar. You might think a stable coin would trade like the Argentine peso in the early 2000s, when the peso was pegged to the dollar. But people didn’t have full confidence that the Argentine central bank would support the peso, so the peso consistently traded at a discount, sometimes substantially so.

What might explain Tether trading at a premium to the dollar?

There is this vehicle currency demand that can cause Tether to trade at a premium. If I as an investor can get into Bitcoin by either using dollars or Tether, but it is expensive to get into Bitcoin using dollars because transaction costs are higher, than I’d much rather buy bitcoin using Tether because it gives me a near costless option for getting into Bitcoin whenever I want. That “vehicle-currency demand” for Tether is what pushes its price above one US dollar.

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The Berkeley Master of Financial Engineering Program ranked #1 for the fifth year in a row, according to The TFE Times’ ranking of Master’s of Financial Engineering programs published on Feb. 3, 2020.

This ranking is based on data provided by participating US schools and focuses primarily on the quality of the applicants. The rankings components are weighted as follows:

25% Mean GRE Scores

25% Mean Starting Salary and Bonus

15% Mean Undergraduate GPA

15% Acceptance Rate

10% Full Time Graduates Employed at Graduation

5% Full Time Graduates Employed 3 Months after Graduation

2.5% Total Number of Distinct Courses Available

2.5% Total Research Expenditures

The TFE ranking rates a variety of finance degree programs hosted in disciplines ranging from business schools to mathematics, engineering, and statistics.

More on the methodology.

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Daniil Pushkin, MBA 21, clearly remembers the night he got the call from Berkeley Haas admissions.

“I was in the middle of nowhere in a small Russian town working with a client, living in a hotel,” says Daniil, a former Moscow-based McKinsey consultant. “I was sitting in my room working on a presentation at 1 am, when I got a call from a person from Haas who congratulated me that I was off the waiting list.”

The news was especially sweet because it meant he’d be able to join his girlfriend, Eugenia Zanina, who had already been admitted to the full-time MBA program. Her work with Boston Consulting Group meant they were often apart, but now the wait was over. “I was so happy,” says Daniil, who woke Eugenia up at her client site in Uzbekistan, where the local time was 4 am.

There was one big thing to take care of before they headed to Berkeley: They decided to marry in July 2019. “We just wanted to reassure our parents that we were going far away from them as a married couple,” Daniil says. “That was important for us and for our families.”

The pair first made each other’s acquaintance as undergraduates at Moscow State University. Years later, they ran into each other in a Latin dance class. “We just started to walk together home. Then we started dating,” Daniil says. “That was eight years ago.”

As consultants based in Moscow, travel was a constant and they went for days without seeing each other. They spent weekends catching up. “We traveled a ton, which is one more reason we really wanted to go to the same place and live in the same house,” Eugenia says.

In Berkeley, the couple is enjoying life together, both in and out of class. They are in the same cohort and coordinated their schedules to include electives like Haas@Work and marketing analytics. Daniil, who is earning a dual MBA/MEng degree, also takes financial engineering courses.

While they’re both happy to be together, Eugenia worried that they wouldn’t get to know their classmates if they didn’t branch out. So they decided to sit apart sometimes and to join different course subgroups.

“The person who’s making me better”

At home in the Berkeley Hills, they relax, admire the Bay view and sunsets and the deer that wander through their yard. They also try to hike once a week near the ocean. “It’s so peaceful,” Daniil says. “All our life we’ve lived in a big city with limited flora and fauna. The weather was also not very good usually. Here we just enjoy this peaceful atmosphere.”

Asked what they love about each other, Eugenia notes Daniil’s positivity. “He literally brings good vibes to every day of our life,” she says. “It gives me an opportunity to feel life in all its bright colors.”

Daniil calls Eugenia “the person who’s making me better.”

“I’ve changed a lot in eight years,” he says. “I can definitely say that I am a better version of myself, and that’s thanks to Eugenia.”

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Influential economist Laura D’Andrea Tyson, who served as dean of Berkeley Haas and as a presidential advisor, has been named by Gov. Gavin Newsom to co-chair his new Council of Economic Advisors.

The 13-member panel, announced on Friday, will advise the governor and state finance director on wide-ranging economic issues “and deepen relationships between the administration and academic researchers to keep California moving toward an economy that is inclusive, resilient, and sustainable.”

Tyson will co-chair the council with Fernando Lozano, an economics professor at Pomona College. Also appointed was UC Berkeley economics and public policy Prof. Hilary Hoynes, the Haas Distinguished Chair in Economic Disparities and co-director of the Berkeley Opportunity Lab. Lieutenant Governor Eleni Kounalakis, MBA 92, will also serve on the panel.

 “I look forward to working with this expert group of advisors to support Gov. Newsom’s goal of fostering inclusive, sustainable, long-term economic growth for all of California,” Tyson said. “As the world’s 5th largest economy and the nation’s leader in innovation and new business formation, California is in a strong position to tackle major economic challenges—including adapting to climate change, creating good job opportunities throughout the state, and reducing homelessness.”

 An expert on trade, competitiveness, and the future of work, Tyson is a distinguished professor of the graduate school and faculty director of the Institute for Business & Social Impact, which she launched in 2013. She also chairs the board of trustees at UC Berkeley’s Blum Center for Developing Economies, which aims to develop solutions to global poverty. She served as Berkeley Haas interim dean from July to December 2018, and as dean from 1998 to 2001. She led London Business School as dean from 2002 to 2006.

Under the Clinton administration, Tyson served as Chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers from 1993 to 1995 and as Director of the White House National Economic Council from 1995 to 1996. She was the first woman to hold those positions.

Much of Tyson’s recent research focuses on the effects of automation on the future of work. She has also devoted considerable policy attention to the links between women’s rights and national economic performance.

The new council will meet with and advise Gov. Newsom upon request. The group will be guided by the Department of Finance’s Chief Economist Irena Asmundson.

“For California to continue thriving, we need our economy to work for everyone in every corner of the state,” Newsom said in a statement. “Our state is experiencing its longest economic expansion, with record-low unemployment—3.9 percent—increases in personal income, and billions in investments, but this expansion has unevenly benefited people across the state. We need to invest for the future, adapt to a changing climate and keep our budget balanced. This Council will keep its pulse on what’s happening in our economy while making policy recommendations to prepare us for what’s to come.”

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