10/07/2026
"My dream school was getting into Berkeley. I was living in Japan, got the call, and I was like, yes! I'm going to California."
Alex Zekoff arrived at Haas in 2017 with and went “all-in as a Berkeley Bear.” He found his people. And when he left, he carried a belief—almost irrational in its confidence—that he could go build something from nothing.
By 2019, he was trying to build in a space that didn't yet have a name. "I didn't even know what to call it. I was just like—’digital workers.’ That was the term." What he was working on is what’s now called agentic AI. He counts himself lucky to find a mentor: Associate Professor Omri Even-Tov, who really cared about what the students were building.
The company Alex built, healthcare management platform AI, sold for $600 million in five years. But its rapid rise doesn’t mean it was easy. "The first three years were crazy." While it was thrilling, it also involved sleepless nights and many “decisions that don't show up in press releases.”
Alex came out of it with a passion to share back all that he’s learned with the next generation of entrepreneurs—who are increasingly AI natives. "I think students need to hear what it's like to go build something so fast. I wanted to bring that realness to the classroom," Alex says.
Together, he and Even-Tov built the AI Entrepreneurship course—a structured accelerator launched last spring for 60 MBA students modeled on the Y Combinator experience, with A-list mentors from Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic and others joining every class session. The 27 student teams had 13 weeks to go from identifying a problem to defining a possible exit strategy.
He and Even-Tov carried the experience through with a full Demo Day, filling Andersen Auditorium with Silicon Valley VCs, alumni, and judges. Of the 27 teams who presented, 20 committed to keep working on their ideas after semester’s end. Six were accepted into accelerators like SkyDeck and Vercel.
Zekoff’s message to students: The gatekeepers are gone. "AI is now making everyone a builder. It’s a beautiful moment for everyone to come together and think from first principles—what are the ideas of the future? Organizations got big, but someone in this class could potentially create a company to disrupt Oracle or SAP or Salesforce.
"It's available to everyone," he said. "You can do this.”
Zekoff is returning next semester for round 2 of the course with Even-Tov.
