Lester Center for Entrepreneurship

The Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program is a program and the primary locus for the study and promotion of entrepreneurship and new enterprise development at the University of California Berkeley. The offices are located in the Faculty Building of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
History.
The Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program was founded in 1991 through a gift from the late W. Howard Lester, chairman of Williams-Sonoma, Inc.
Speaker series.
The Berkeley-Haas Entrepreneurship Program sponsors three speaker series, two of which are open to members of the community as well as students, faculty and staff:
Notable alumni.
John Hanke, MBA '96 – Hanke founded Keyhole, Inc., which eventually became Google Earth.
<br>Peter Vlastelica and Jack Kloster, both MBA '06- Vlastelica and Kloster founded Yardbarker, which aims to be the main social website for sports fans, players and others.
<br>Danae Ringelmann and Eric Schell, both MBA '08- The two, along with Slava Rubin, founded Indiegogo, a crowdfunding platform for all creative, cause, and entrepreneurial projects.
<br>Brett Wilson and John Hughes, MBA '07 – The two entrepreneurs founded TubeMogul, a programmatic advertising platform for video advertising, and won the 2007 Bplan competition. The company went public on the NASDAQ (TUBE) in 2014 and was acquired by Adobe in 2017 for $540 million.