Barry Eggers (’85) is a founding partner at Lightspeed Ventures, a venture capitalist firm which focuses largely on IT and Technology start-ups (If that name rings a bell, it is because a few years ago they seed funded a little known company called Snapchat). What most don’t know is that his journey, which led him to Silicon Valley, started in Westwood.
Barry Eggers
At UCLA, Eggers majored in Economics Business and loved the subject. An athlete at heart, Eggers was a part of the NCAA Men’s Water Polo team, fondly recalling their experiences competing against other PAC 10 schools. Aside from this, he was a passionate UCLA football fan and a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, where he cultivated his social circles. As such, he often found himself working with small, dedicated teams since his college days.
After graduating from Stanford Business School, he joined Cisco. Cisco, at the time, had recently gone public and was still in its infancy. He watched as Cisco grew from 400 to 12,000 employees, and loved working in different roles as the company grew; it felt like he had a new job every year. However, as Cisco grew larger, Eggers missed the intimacy and excitement of working in a smaller and dynamic environment. The venture capital world was, quite literally, calling.
After leaving Cisco, he founded Lightspeed Ventures and began working with small start-ups. He loved the feeling of discovering a company and watching the journey it made. These were risky ventures and no one knew where a company would go. However, this was really exciting for him, because he never knew where the next great journey would come from.
Rather conveniently, he discovered Snapchat in his home when he saw his daughter using the app with her friends. This sparked Barry’s interest, and he talked to his partner Jeremy Liew. After Jeremy tracked down Evan Spiegel, Lightspeed became Snap’s first investor. Since then, Barry has watched Evan Spiegel grow from an aspiring 21-year old entrepreneur at Stanford to the CEO of an emerging social media powerhouse.
Eggers recalled that something like this was virtually impossible when he was still in school: the word “entrepreneurship” did not exist. He describes how back in his time, you would graduate college, get a job, and climb the corporate ladder. Now, the opportunities are limitless, and he is actively trying to bring these opportunities to UCLA students. Lightspeed Ventures sponsors StartUp UCLA. Eggers himself endowed an annual seed fund prize for UCLA teams, and is a driving force of the entrepreneurship minor.
He believes that college is a great place to learn interpersonal skills, that in order to succeed in Silicon Valley you must get familiar with the ecosystem. The VCs, angel investors, consumers and directors present in Silicon Valley act as catalysts for success to anyone who can adapt to the system. UCLA, much like Silicon Valley, is an ecosystem ripe with opportunities. Anyone who takes advantage of these opportunities will walk out with a set of interpersonal skills and experiences that will help him or her succeed anywhere in the world.
His parting advice would be that you never know where life will take you and where you will end up. He never thought he would be working as a VC. However, if you work at a growing company that you are passionate about, you are sure to move forward and end up somewhere you like. You never know, but one fine day, you could discover the next Snapchat.
Written by Harsh Gupta
Click here to see more Alumni Interviews.
Barry Eggers
/in Alumni Interview /by Jerry LiuBarry Eggers (’85) is a founding partner at Lightspeed Ventures, a venture capitalist firm which focuses largely on IT and Technology start-ups (If that name rings a bell, it is because a few years ago they seed funded a little known company called Snapchat). What most don’t know is that his journey, which led him to Silicon Valley, started in Westwood.
Barry Eggers
At UCLA, Eggers majored in Economics Business and loved the subject. An athlete at heart, Eggers was a part of the NCAA Men’s Water Polo team, fondly recalling their experiences competing against other PAC 10 schools. Aside from this, he was a passionate UCLA football fan and a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, where he cultivated his social circles. As such, he often found himself working with small, dedicated teams since his college days.
After graduating from Stanford Business School, he joined Cisco. Cisco, at the time, had recently gone public and was still in its infancy. He watched as Cisco grew from 400 to 12,000 employees, and loved working in different roles as the company grew; it felt like he had a new job every year. However, as Cisco grew larger, Eggers missed the intimacy and excitement of working in a smaller and dynamic environment. The venture capital world was, quite literally, calling.
After leaving Cisco, he founded Lightspeed Ventures and began working with small start-ups. He loved the feeling of discovering a company and watching the journey it made. These were risky ventures and no one knew where a company would go. However, this was really exciting for him, because he never knew where the next great journey would come from.
Rather conveniently, he discovered Snapchat in his home when he saw his daughter using the app with her friends. This sparked Barry’s interest, and he talked to his partner Jeremy Liew. After Jeremy tracked down Evan Spiegel, Lightspeed became Snap’s first investor. Since then, Barry has watched Evan Spiegel grow from an aspiring 21-year old entrepreneur at Stanford to the CEO of an emerging social media powerhouse.
Eggers recalled that something like this was virtually impossible when he was still in school: the word “entrepreneurship” did not exist. He describes how back in his time, you would graduate college, get a job, and climb the corporate ladder. Now, the opportunities are limitless, and he is actively trying to bring these opportunities to UCLA students. Lightspeed Ventures sponsors StartUp UCLA. Eggers himself endowed an annual seed fund prize for UCLA teams, and is a driving force of the entrepreneurship minor.
He believes that college is a great place to learn interpersonal skills, that in order to succeed in Silicon Valley you must get familiar with the ecosystem. The VCs, angel investors, consumers and directors present in Silicon Valley act as catalysts for success to anyone who can adapt to the system. UCLA, much like Silicon Valley, is an ecosystem ripe with opportunities. Anyone who takes advantage of these opportunities will walk out with a set of interpersonal skills and experiences that will help him or her succeed anywhere in the world.
His parting advice would be that you never know where life will take you and where you will end up. He never thought he would be working as a VC. However, if you work at a growing company that you are passionate about, you are sure to move forward and end up somewhere you like. You never know, but one fine day, you could discover the next Snapchat.
Written by Harsh Gupta
Click here to see more Alumni Interviews.
Adriana Lleras-Muney in Vox and The New York Times
/in News /by adminAdriana Lleras-Muney’s co-authored article on mothers’ pensions has been cited in two national news outlets this month, The New York Times and Vox. The New York Times article cites Lleras-Muney’s study in an article about supply side economics, while Vox draws upon her research in connection to child poverty in the U.S.. Professor Lleras-Muney’s paper shows how paying cash to poor families where the breadwinner died led those children to earn significantly higher incomes.
Jay Lu wins Winter 2017 Scoville Teaching Award
/in News /by adminWe would like to congratulate Jay Lu for winning the Scoville Award for best undergraduate teaching in Winter 2017 for his class Econ 148 on Behavioral Economics.
Jay Lu
Behavioral economics is a subfield of economics that incorporates insights from psychology and other social sciences. The broad goal is to improve the realism of economic models by incorporating features such as aversion for losses, problems with self-control, or concern for others. The class reviews some of the standard assumptions made in economics, examines evidence on how human behavior systematically departs from these assumptions and explores alternative models of human decision-making in order to help improve economic analyses. This is Jay Lu’s second time winning this award. Congratulations!
2017 West Coast Experiments Conference
/in News /by adminRosa Matzkin
The tenth annual West Coast Experiments Conference was co-organized by Professor Rodrigo Pinto.
The Conference was held at UCLA on April 24-25, 2017, preceded by in-depth methods training workshops on Sunday, April 23. The West Coast Experiments Conference is an annual conference that brings together leading scholars and graduate students in economics, political science, and other social sciences who share an interest in causal identification broadly speaking. Now in its tenth year, the WCE is a venue for methodological instruction and debate over design-based and observational methods for causal inference, both theory and applications.
UCLA Professor Roza Matzkin presented a paper on identification in simulation equation models. The conference was attended by a PhD students and experts, including Nobel Prize winner Angus Deaton and Turing Awards winner Judea Pearl.
Marek Pycia featured in Reuters
/in News /by Simon BoardToday, Marek Pycia‘s paper on UCLA’s voucher system was featured in Reuters. Traditionally, kidney donors directly donate kidneys to their relatives. However, what if the kidney donor is elderly, and the relative does not need the kidney immediately (e.g. they have early stage kidney disease)? Professor Pycia’s paper discusses UCLA’s new voucher system which enables donors to “pay it forward”, donating today in return for a promise that their relative will be at the front of the queue when they need a kidney. The paper is with Jeffrey Veale, a member of UCLA’s Medical School, and other coauthors. It is published in Transplantation and has become the basis for a national system of kidney transplant vouchers used by over twenty transplant centers.
John Asker awarded Lanzillotti antitrust prize.
/in News /by adminThe abstract of the paper reads as follows:
Martin Hackmann featured in Bloomberg
/in News /by Simon BoardThis article in Bloomberg discusses Professor Hackmann’s work that studies the impact of nurses on mortality in hospitals and nursing homes.
John Asker wins Antitrust Award
/in News /by Simon BoardProfessor John Asker was awarded the “Best Antitrust Academic Article in Economics” by the Concurrences Antitrust Writing Awards for his article entitled “Diagnosing Foreclosure due to Exclusive Dealing” published in the Journal of Industrial Economics in September 2016.
The abstract is as follows: Exclusive dealing arrangements, in which a distributor contracts to work exclusively with a single manufacturer, can be efficiency enhancing or they can be an anticompetitive means to foreclose markets. This paper evaluates the effect of exclusive distribution arrangements on competition in the Chicago beer market in 1994. A diagnostic test is provided to judge whether exclusive arrangements between brewers and their distributors lead to foreclosure. To implement this test I estimate a model of consumer demand and firm behavior that incorporates industry details and allows for distribution through exclusive and shared channels. The test indicates that foreclosure effects are not present in this market, suggesting that the most likely effect of intervention would be to reduce social welfare.
Ph.D. Student Placement
/in News /by Simon BoardCongratulations to our Ph.D. students for their success in the job market. They will be heading to the following places:
Omer Ali: Analysis Group
Adrien d’Avernas: Stockholm School of Economics
Xue Hu: Amazon
Mat Miller: Amazon
Ruoyao Shi: UC Riverside
Chad Stecher: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Colin Weiss: Federal Reserve Board
Sibo Yan: KPMG
Gabriel Zaourak: World Bank
Andreas Gulyas: University of Mannheim
Lauren Lucido Watkins
/in Alumni Interview /by Simon BoardEver since the 5th grade, Lauren Lucido Watkins knew she wanted to be a Bruin. There was no rhyme or reason, nor strong family legacy ties – Lauren was simply drawn to the prestige that came with the name and the energy that radiated from everyone who spoke about the university. Without ever considering a second option, she accepted her offer and graduated from UCLA in 2011 with a BA in Business Economics and a minor in Accounting.
Lauren Lucido Watkins
Lauren has always been a strategic thinker and natural problem-solver. Lauren attributes her first venture into the realm of strategy and consulting as a core member for the Daily Bruin, first working as an intern, moving to internal advertising sales, and ultimately working as the assistant manager during her junior and senior years. In a time where the technological revolution was on the cusp of breaking through, Lauren and other members of the Daily Bruin were tasked with countering the demise of print paper and shift to online news platforms. While figuring out how to generate revenue beyond print and assessing the internal structure of the Daily Bruin, Lauren realized the importance of aligning your team with your business needs. Without a strong people strategy, she knew that business changes couldn’t follow. Lauren followed her passion, which culminated into an internship in Los Angeles with Deloitte Consulting in their Human Capital practice.
Lauren excelled as a top analyst while at Deloitte. She worked in their organization and talent group for two years before being approached by Christian Dior, who at the time was looking for business-minded candidates to take part in their re-launched management training program. Lauren knew that an opportunity in high fashion may not come again, so she decided to take a leap of faith, recognizing a greater end goal, and leave her job at Deloitte. Within a week, Lauren went from being a consultant advising clients, to working the floor at the Christian Dior Boutique on Rodeo Drive learning all facets of the luxury retail landscape. Such a drastic change in environment is no easy feat. Lauren believes her time spent at UCLA working at the Daily Bruin contributed to her successful transition between two very distinct worlds. She draws parallels between working at the Daily Bruin and her first work experiences at Christian Dior, both times in which she was a part of a group of people whose main focus was working as a team to grow the business in a fast-moving environment.
The Daily Bruin was not Lauren’s only extracurricular activity at UCLA. Lauren is a sister of Kappa Alpha Theta, serving as the Internal Social Chair and VP of Membership, and was the Consulting Director of the Undergraduate Business Society during her senior year. In terms of academics, her favorite class she took while at UCLA was Real Estate Investments, taught in tandem with professors and students from the Anderson School of Management. She has used many of the learnings to assess investments in her own life, including purchasing a home in San Francisco.
Upon transitioning to Christian Dior, Lauren spent one year in Beverly Hills focused on client development strategies and was then promoted to Christian Dior’s New York flagship where she was tasked at driving sales and overseeing the shoe department. Fast-forward to present day and Lauren has scaled the corporate ladder, now the Assistant Boutique Manager for the Christian Dior boutique in San Francisco, which she helped to open last year.
As a lover of high fashion myself, I was keen on hearing about how Lauren acquired such a vast knowledge of the high fashion realm in order to be working at one of the powerhouses in the industry. Her advice was to constantly stay active in obtaining knowledge and keeping an eye on the ever-changing landscape of fashion. I also asked her if there was any advice she wished she could say to her college-self. “Be fearless, take risks, and do [things] you’re passionate about.” Lauren reminded us that unless you put yourself out there, you can never truly reap the rewards from all the opportunities in life.
Written by Katie Kim, Undergraduate
Click here to see more Alumni Interviews.