Tag: CSE Alumni Profiles

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Advice from Angel Investor Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96

Advice from Angel Investor Taner Halıcıoğlu ’96

By Katie E. Ismael

Taner Halıcıoğlu (BS ’96) is the founder and manager of angel investment firm Keshif Ventures. According to the San Diego Business Journal, which included him in its “San Diego 500, The Book of Influential Business Leaders,” he is “one of San Diego’s few ‘super angels’ in local tech, meaning he’s an active investor in early-stage startups.” He’s also a founding partner of SEED San Diego, a small investor group that supports local startups. His portfolio companies include Empyr, Portfolium, Doctible, CloudBeds, Soci and MixMode.

What do you look for when you are considering investing in a company?

When considering a company for investment, I value the team over everything else. Mainly, what is the composition of the team, how well do they seem to work together and are they open to taking direction/advice from investors and advisors. The next factor is the more obvious one, which is “what is this company trying to solve/do?”.

What motivates someone to start their own company? 

I’ve been an early employee at several startups (Halıcıoğlu was Facebook’s first full-time employee back in 2004), and of course, I’ve also seen plenty of people starting up companies.

They are motivated to do this for various reasons, but one common theme I’ve seen is they see a certain need and have a way to solve that need- or perhaps solve it in a better way than it’s currently being solved. 

What are some successes and challenges you’ve seen in starting a company? 

One of the harder things for startups to do is gain traction for their product or service. This is usually because they are a no-name company, and it’s hard to sell something when people realize you are a startup, perhaps on a shoestring budget, that might disappear if you run out of money or face other challenges.

On a related note, it’s hard to raise money for your company, since in the early days- when all you have is basically an idea- you need to either self-bootstrap or you need to find some angel investors, or perhaps friends and family who believe in you and your idea.

One thing about startups is you’re not going to be sleeping a lot and you’re probably going to be wearing a lot of different hats.

How did CSE shape or influence you and your success?

Without the resources and opportunities that CSE had provided me, I’m not sure I would have been able to do what I have done, let alone do it well and succeed.  Between the professors and classes, to the labs and other resources like having a supercomputer center right here on campus, there are many advantages to being a CSE alumnus.

Halıcıoğlu has remained a familiar face around CSE and UC San Diego, serving as a lecturer in computer science since 2013 and as a member of the CSE Alumni Advisory Board. Halıcıoğlu donated $75 million to his alma mater to help create the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute and was recently honored as a CSE Distinguished Alumnus.

 

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V7

Brina Lee ’13 Forges Another Frontier, This Time in Audio

Brina Lee ’13 Forges Another Frontier, This Time in Audio

By Xochitl Rojas-Rocha

Brina Lee (MA ’13) has learned a thing or two about overcoming fear. It’s been a necessity for someone who has blazed a career path that includes being Instagram’s first female engineer and co-founding a company. As she works toward growing her startup, Hamul, the UC San Diego Computer Science and Engineering Department (CSE) graduate can summarize the most important lesson she’s learned in one short phrase.

“Don’t let you hold yourself back,” she says. “It’s as simple as that.”

“If you tell me I can’t do it, I’m one hundred percent committed to proving you wrong.” 

Ahead of the curve

Lee grew up in Orange County, California, and graduated from UC San Diego with a bachelor’s degree in communications in 2008. Just as the Great Recession hit, she snagged a marketing position at a tiny startup, where she was handed a book on HTML and asked to build a website from scratch.

To her surprise, Lee found herself staying up late to pursue this newfound form of creative freedom. Typing in a line of code and watching the website change as a result seemed inexplicable and surprising, “literally like magic,” she says. And she wanted to see where it could take her.

In the 2000s, however, switching from a nontechnical field like communications to computer science was almost unheard of. Websites like Coursera did not yet exist, and as a college graduate, Lee couldn’t return to university for a new bachelor’s degree.

Undeterred, she visited UC San Diego Extension to meet with Rick Ord, a CSE lecturer leading an introductory course in computer science. She still remembers his bewildered reaction. He had just given a test that had weeded out students in mathematics and engineering. What was a communications student doing on his doorstep?

Lee placed within the ninety-ninth percentile in Ord’s class and went on to tutor other students. Her work began turning heads, even as she burned through her savings paying for classes and access to laboratory resources.

With persistence, time, and the support of mentors like Ord, Lee was accepted into a master’s program in computer science at UC San Diego. She found a community that encouraged teamwork instead of competition, and saw doors opening for her at companies like Facebook and Google. In the workplace, students from other universities expressed admiration for the tight bond between her and her UC San Diego classmates.

“UC San Diego is very team-based,” says Lee. “It brings up the entire class of people, versus everyone competing against each other.”

Shortly after Lee graduated with her master’s, she made news as Instagram’s first female engineer. It was there that she worked on initiatives to improve user experience and met the two graduates who would someday become her cofounders.

Audio as the next social frontier

Lee met Joshua Li and Hendri (no surname) while the three worked as software engineers at Instagram during the social media giant’s early years. Together, they worked hard to connect people and capture meaningful moments in their lives, an effort they’re continuing at their new business, Hamul.

Hamul curates a collection of audio clips, or voice lines, from popular culture to create social tools for gamers. The team’s goal is to allow gamers to customize their online presence and contribute to a more positive gaming environment through audio.

“Through Hamul, we hope that people have more ways to express themselves and connect to like-minded gamers,” says Lee. “We want to blaze the way for positive community spaces and improve the quality of relationships made online. If we can do this in the gaming industry, I would be very happy and excited.”

With team-based online gaming on the rise, Lee and her cofounders also see an opportunity to provide a healthy example of social networking. Lee says this will be especially important for younger generations, who might try their hand at online, team-based games before they enter the world of social media. Hamul hopes to contribute to the gaming community, first through audio clips, then through other means in the future. The team is striving to publish their first product in the coming weeks.

Hamul isn’t the end point for Lee. Now that she’s had a taste of the entrepreneur’s journey, she sees herself starting “over and over again.” In interviews with students interested in launching their own companies, she warns that the most difficult part of their undertaking will not be logistical, but personal. They’ll have to push past their own doubts to truly invest themselves in their business and product.

Luckily, Lee has had a strong role model to look to. Her father — a NASA engineer who specialized in shuttle launches and missile defense — showed her the lengths one could go with hard work and perseverance. His example taught her that nothing is truly impossible.

“It’s the biggest driving force in what makes me, me,” says Lee.

 

 

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V7

Jason Oberg ’12, ’14: Taking a Founding Role in Hardware Security

Jason Oberg ’12, ’14: Taking a Founding Role in Hardware Security

By Katie E. Ismael

Jason Oberg (MA ’12, PhD ’14) is the co-founder and CEO of Tortuga Logic, a San Jose-based cybersecurity company specializing in hardware threat detection and prevention. He’s a leading expert in hardware security whose work has been cited over 1,000 times and been granted six issued and pending patents.

But the roots of these accomplishments go back to the halls of UC San Diego’s Computer Science and Engineering Department, where “wacky ideas,” unique and innovative ways of thinking and tremendous intellectual power combined to make a start-up dream a successful reality.

CSE and UC San Diego not only sparked the entrepreneurial spirit behind the company but played a major role in its founding. Its technology is based on previous research Oberg carried out as a PhD student in the lab of CSE Professor Ryan Kastner. And it’s been steered by a team of pioneers in the hardware security space that include Kastner and Tim Sherwood, a UC Santa Barbara computer science professor who is also a CSE alumnus (MS, PhD ’03).  

Free beer, “wacky ideas” and some of the brightest minds in the field

Oberg, who earned his undergraduate degree at UC Santa Barbara, says he was attracted to UC San Diego’s CSE department because it has some of the brightest minds in the field with a wide depth of expertise.

“My skills were at a really interesting intersection of hardware design and cybersecurity and it is difficult to find computer science departments that have such strong expertise in both of those areas,” he says. “The open and collaborative atmosphere between different groups and teams was also a huge bonus.”

On the social side, he recalls “many fond memories of free beer during our weekly graduate student social hours and playing hours of Street Fighter and NBA Jam on the arcade machine in Chez Bob, our communal break room.”  

“Not only did this help me in building lasting relationships with friends but provided a very unique environment to discuss completely wacky ideas. Wacky ideas often lead to the best research topics,” he reflects.  

And on the academic front, he recalls there was never a shortage of innovation and unique ideas either.

“I have several fond memories of discussing security-related aspects of programming languages, theory, entire systems, and hardware,” he says. “Getting access to experts across all domains was always just a few offices away. It’s really hard to find that type of intellectual power in one building.”

From that environment, where innovation and free thinking was allowed to flourish, Tortuga Logic emerged.

Oberg’s PhD advisors, Kastner and Sherwood, had been seeing the market need for hardware security grow significantly over the years, Oberg recalls.

What really kick-started their initiative, he says, was participating in National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Innovation Corps (I-Corps) program, which provides a small amount of funding to universities to conduct customer discovery and identify whether there is a market for the technology, what product would best serve that market and how to best go-to-market.

Following the completion of I-Corps, Oberg says the team saw a clear path to market and took the leap to start the company.

In the early days of Tortuga Logic, Oberg remarks that UC San Diego offered a variety of helpful resources to help start a company. He cites work the team did with the von Liebig Entrepreneurism Center during their NSF I-Corps for providing business mentorship and guidance.

“Those resources were really invaluable in helping us shape the necessary business mindsets for starting the company,” he says.

Extreme Risks, and Rewards

In 2017, the company became positioned for new growth. Thanks to an infusion of capital from the venture-capital firm Eclipse Ventures, Tortuga Logic received $2 million in seed funding to accelerate engineering efforts and expand sales and marketing.

“There is an enormous amount of software-based cybersecurity companies in the world, but with the advent of autonomous vehicles, growing complexity of mobile devices and trust issues in the supply chain for military applications, there is a gaping hole in how the industry approaches cybersecurity—specifically the hardware,” Oberg said in a story in the online publication TechCrunch about the funding.

With several years now under his belt as a company co-founder and CEO, Oberg offers some advice to others with an entrepreneurial spirit.

“Starting your own company is extremely tough,” he says. “There is a lot of allure around being a start-up founder with the huge successes we see in the public market. But the struggles cannot be overstated.”

He notes that leaders should be prepared to tackle everything from raising money to hiring the right team to driving the vision and plan and then keeping things on course through the successes and failures.

“For those considering starting their own company, you really have to accept that you have an extremely high likelihood of failure and be completely comfortable with that. More than 1 out of 10 startups fail,” he says.  

But the flip side is that with extreme risk comes huge rewards, he notes. And he’s prepared for the swings.

“I am very happy with the progress our team at Tortuga Logic has made thus far and extremely excited about the opportunities ahead. No matter how hard or easy they will be.”