Tag: business

Investing for Good

What if you could align your values with your investment portfolio?

Leaders from the world of impact investing discuss what it means to invest for good. Their stories are fascinating and you will understand the path of early stage ventures that create meaningful social and environmental value.

First up is a panel with Lewam Kefela, Investor at VilCap Investments; Noushin Ketabi, Founder of Vega Coffee; Nancy Swanson, Executive Director of Linked Foundation. The moderator is Julia Sze an impact Investment strategy advisor. They discuss their paths to investing for good.

Then, Kat Taylor, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Radicle Impact, talks about the problem with the banking system and how it can be fixed. She is the CEO of the Oakland-based Beneficial State Bank, a Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI) whose mission is to bring beneficial banking to low-income communities in an economically and environmentally sustainable manner.

Watch — Investing for Good: Women in Innovation and Entrepreneurship Series

Seven Steps to Building a Best-Selling Brand

Building a brand is about more than spending money on marketing. It’s about how you think about your brand conceptually, and the strategies you employ at every level of your business. That was the message from brand architect and strategist Larry Gulko when he spoke at the Rady School of Business at UC San Diego recently.

Gulko laid out his recipe for success in seven simple steps. His first piece of advice: specialists win, generalist lose. He points to several examples of companies that lost sight of their core business and ended up failing. Gulko told the crowd, “be the Q-tip.” He says it’s a brand unmatched in specialization and name recognition. His next six steps touched on everything from connecting with your customer, to inspiring your employees to be brand ambassadors.

After his talk, Gulko sat down with two UC San Diego alumni-turned-entrepreneurs to learn their brand secrets. Pierre Sleiman is the CEO of Go Green Agriculture, and Suman Kanuganti co-founded Aira, a high-tech company improving the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired. Gulko, Sleiman, and Kanuganti have a lot of expertise to share about branding, including why you don’t remember your second kiss, and what that has to do with being a best-selling brand.

Watch Building and Growing Brands with Larry Gulko: Global Business Leadership Forum

New Ventures from UCSB Students

After eight months of activities and curriculum the UCSB New Venture Competition culminated with six teams presenting a pitch and a question-and-answer session for a panel of expert judges and an enthusiastic audience of peers, faculty and mentors.

The finalist teams, pared down from an initial pool of 32, represented diverse technologies and industries. The top six teams were: MoreSolar, utilizing wind power as a novel method for cleaning solar panels to increase efficiency; Adomi, addressing California’s housing shortage with a scalable solution that is also profitable to homeowners; Okra Systems, software for engineers that streamlines the process of selecting and qualifying microcontrollers; Snip, a social media platform for podcast lovers that allows users to curate and share podcasts; Soilight utilizing the microbes in soil to provide energy for low-powered applications; and Veneta, a web- and mobile-based software service that streamlines inventory management research labs.

Meet these young tech entrepreneurs and see who landed in the top spot.

Watch 2018 New Venture Competition Finals

The Resurgence of Manufacturing

The most recent presidential election brought the issue of outsourcing to the forefront of Americans’ minds as citizens became concerned that they were losing their jobs to factories in China or Bangladesh.

However, Peter Cowhey, Dean of the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at UC San Diego, tells us that the U.S. remains the largest manufacturer based on total output.

As rumors stir about the de-industrialization of America, Cowhey explains that the rate of manufacturing only seems to be drastically declining, because it is not growing as fast as the rest of our economy.

In “The Resurgence of Manufacturing in the United States,” Cowhey is joined by Qualcomm CEO Paul Jacobs, Vizio CEO Willliam Wang, former Gateway CEO Ted Waitt and journalist James Fallows to discuss the trends of manufacturing as well as strategies for keeping and creating jobs in the United States.

For more videos with Peter Cowhey, click here or see what other programs on globalization are available.

Research Universities & Economic Growth with Chancellor Khosla

Since beginning his tenure as UC San Diego’s eighth chancellor in August 2012, Pradeep Khosla hasn’t wasted any time getting to know his campus and the region within which it resides. Now he’s ready to make his case for the economic value that research universities like UC San Diego create within their surrounding regions and the nation.

Tune in tonight (March 4) at 8pm for “The Role of a Research University on Economic Development,” also available online, during which Chancellor Khosla argues for investing in research universities. He points to the successes of UC San Diego in attracting $1 billion a year in research funding, spawning hundreds of new companies in telecommunications and biotechnology.