They say it's spring, Part 2

of cherry blossoms, SVB, long primaries and SkyDeck Demo Day

Friends - it was very nice to hear from some of you after my last post. (Don’t remember it? Here it is again.)

They say it's spring

UC-Berkeley went on spring break the week of March 27. I seized the opportunity for a brief trip to Japan. (Alas, I did not overlap with the ~90 Berkeley Haas MBAs who also went, culminating in a farewell event with alumni in Tokyo on Friday March 31.)

But I did manage to see cherry blossoms, in full bloom (満開!) , for the first time since I left Japan in 1998. (In 2016 I had made it in April, and did catch the tail end of cherry blossom season when I made it up to Niigata.) It was a wonderful reminder of how breathtaking they are. Below is from the Tokyo Tech University campus in the Ookayama, Meguro area of Tokyo.

Who says engineering and beauty can’t co-exist?

I’ll add one more from a walk through Kamakura, out from Hachimangu along Wakamiya Boulevard. My local navigator, my Japan Society board colleague / author / consultant / board director Michi Kaifu, informed me these had recently been trimmed and replanted, which must have been traumatic to residents and merchants at the time but thankfully they’re coming back in.

Ephemeral beauty, playing for two weeks a year

I was also pleasantly surprised to discover that Verve Coffee, pride of Santa Cruz, had come to Kamakura. Glad to see another artisanal NorCal brand follow in the footsteps of Blue Bottle and Dandelion Chocolate in entering the Japan market.

Verve coffee, Kamakura

The next day, on March 30, Michi and I joined our board colleagues Yoshi Tsurumi and Satoru Watanabe for a discussion of Silicon Valley Bank. Thanks to our hosts TMIP (Tokyo Marunouchi Innovation Platform), operated by Mitsubishi Estate, for the kind hospitality.

(I would embed the corresponding Japan Society Twitter post here, but since Twitter is being feudal about cross-linking with Substack I’ll link to JSNC LinkedIn and a post from JSNC president Steve Pollock. Screen cap below. Belt and suspenders.)

I add my closing comment at that event, which was attended by a number of firms with some manner of corporate venture activity. And that is - not to conflate what has transpired with SVB with the value of, and opportunities in, corporate venture; and that corporate venturing dollars will likely go further in this moment. Or, to quote Warren Buffett: be fearful when others are greedy; be greedy when others are fearful. I saw too many corporations retrench in 2002 and 2008-2009, and ultimately end up having to redevelop their corporate venture presences.

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Post-return, I was able to catch the tail end of SkyDeck Demo Day, for Batch 15 on April 4. After wrapping up Strategy with FTMBA Gold cohort, I hustled over to Zellerbach Hall to catch the last several presentations. A lot of work goes into this, and here I’ll give a shout-out to the SkyDeck team and my faculty colleague Dave Riemer (author of the recent Get Your Startup Story Straight) who in his role as faculty mentor works with the portfolio companies on telling their stories clearly and succinctly. They certainly did that. Here, the staff takes a deserved bow.

The Berkeley SkyDeck team

From Batch 15, I’ve had the pleasure of spending time with the founders of Jacobi Robotics and SirenOpt. Coming up is Batch 16, for which SkyDeck received some 1800 applications.

Thursday April 6 - again, hustling over after Strategy with Gold cohort - I was delighted to hear Leah Stokes with UCSB in a guest talk at the Social Science Building on the sausage-making and tear-shedding that went into, and the likely benefits of, the Inflation Reduction Act. I’d read/heard any number of op-eds and podcasts with Dr. Stokes and it was a delight to hear her in person.

A surprising insight from her talk (and I have since ordered her book, Short Circuiting Policy), was a defense of the interminably long Democratic (capital D, as in the party) primary process, which in her telling, led to a contest of ideas around mitigation of climate change. Ideas promoted by Washington governor Jay Inslee, for example, found adoption in other candidates’ platforms before ultimately finding a home in the IRA. Which, as this weekend’s WSJ highlighted, seems to be having the desired impact in stimulating manufacturing projects. Something to keep in mind during the next long primary.

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Reads and Listens

• David Riemer, listed above, recently appeared on the Unsiloed Podcast, hosted by my faculty colleague Greg La Blanc.

• I have Greg to thank for two fascinating reads: Innovation in Real Places, by Dan Breznitz; and (the eerily prescient) The Politics of Innovation, by Mark Zachary Taylor. Both will find a home in the fall 2023 edition of Clusters class. Greg, naturally, has interviewed both of them (Breznitz interview | Taylor interview).

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With that, I will leave you with the track that inspired the title of my last two posts: Blossom Dearie’s version of They Say It’s Spring. Find a view and the drink of your choice and enjoy. (Not familiar with Blossom Dearie? If you are of a certain generation, she was one of the voices of Schoolhouse Rock, including Figure 8 and Unpack Your Adjectives.)

Onward and upward,

Jon