BGA Speaker Series: Why Place Matters, Even Today with Jon Metzler
BGA presents a speaker series for deep tech founders and builders.
The Berkeley Gateway Accelerator Speaker Series puts experienced operators and investors in a small room with the people building what’s next. Every session is invite-only and capped at 20 people, so there is real room for questions, honest conversation, and one-on-one time with the speaker. It’s built for founders, builders, and aspiring entrepreneurs working on deep tech.
This session: Why Place Matters, Even Today
Speaker: Jon Metzler
Jon is an instructor in two faculty groups at the Berkeley Haas School of Business: Business and Public Policy, and Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He has taught undergraduates and MBAs for more than a decade and holds a staff appointment at the Institute for Business Innovation at Haas. Before returning to campus, he founded Blue Field Strategies, a consulting firm that helps infrastructure clients harness and accelerate innovation, and earlier worked at a wireless location startup and in print, TV, and cable in the US and Japan.
Coming out of the pandemic, Jon launched a Haas class on this topic, Clusters: Location, Ecosystems, and Opportunity, which ran from 2021 to 2023. He applies the ideas in his Opportunity Recognition class, draws on the work of Annalee Saxenian, Michael Porter, Enrico Moretti, and Richard Florida, and writes about industrial clusters, Detroit, and downtown San Francisco’s recovery on his Substack.
If you’re a founder deciding where to build, who to build with, or how to read the ecosystem around you, this is a chance to see how place shapes opportunity, from someone who has studied and taught it for years.
Who should attend: Founders, builders, and aspiring entrepreneurs working on deep tech. Space is limited to 20, so please request to join and we’ll confirm your spot.
About the Berkeley Gateway Accelerator
BGA is a deep tech accelerator and fund in Berkeley, California, that turns breakthrough science into world-changing companies. Our founder-centric, five-month commercialization program includes funding, housing, and office space. Founders work with an embedded team of entrepreneurs in residence, UC Berkeley faculty and students, and outside experts, with warm introductions to VCs. We’ve evaluated 120+ technologies and made two dozen early-stage investments, including modular robotics, solid-state power electronics, and quantum AI hardware.
Building a deep tech company? Apply to the next BGA cohort here