About StEP

What is StEP?

A 10 week startup incubator program that connects UC Berkeley community members with complementary skills and helps bring their ideas into the world.

Why are we here?

We all know that, if we look at the number of VC-backed startups, UC Berkeley is the top university in the world. However, if you look at the data from a different perspective, we are lagging behind in terms of startups per capita and this data is even more relevant given the extraordinary pool of talents that we have at UC Berkeley.

We decided to investigate the issue and we realized that, although more than 60% of businesspeople joined classes designed to teach entrepreneurship or were in the ideation phase, less than 5% of this population was actually able to access accelerators or pre-seed funding. Moreover, we identified three key problems:

1. Lack of key competencies in the founding teams

2. A siloed mindset across campus organizations and schools

3. An undeveloped entrepreneur-investor ecosystem

StEP is here to tackle those issues and help undergraduate students, graduate students, PhDs, postdocs, faculty, and alumni start their own business!