Andre Marquis
Executive Director, UC Berkeley
Andre Marquis is the Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship and the Innovation Acceleration Group at the at the University of California Berkeley. He and his team have built a scalable, global infrastructure to deliver leading-edge, hands-on training to hundreds of startups and thousands of entrepreneurs and corporate innovators. Though world-class programs including the reality TV show America’s Greatest Makers, the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps, Innovate for Digital India, the Berkeley LAUNCH Startup Accelerator, Global Social Venture Competition and innovation accelerators for global corporations including HP, Caterpillar and Intel, his team has redefined how to teach the process of evidence-based entrepreneurship and corporate innovation while creating funded, scalable enterprises and driving deep culture change.
Mr. Marquis has a long record of successful startups. Two web companies Mr. Marquis helped start became publicly traded and a third was acquired by Amazon for over $190 million. The Chorus Group at Eli Lilly which he co-founded is a significant corporate lean business model innovation that dramatically speed up and lowered the cost of drug development and his most recent company, Amplyx Pharmaceuticals, just raised $54m in venture capital.