Read this today before class...Intro to Eliot Sun from Kloudless

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Hey Startup Students, We're excited to have you in the class! This semester will present an awesome forum for you all to gain exposure to the startup world. We look forward to exposing you to the resources and opportunities out there, and our awesome lineup of speakers should provide some unique and varied insights that will both inspire and engage. Tomorrow night, we will be opening up the night with a focus on The Cloud. What is The Cloud everyone keeps talking about? Why is it important? Is it DropBox? Google? We'll cover an overview tomorrow. In the meantime, read this recent New York Times article by UC Berkeley Professor Quintin Hardy before class. It is a bit focused, but it touches on a practical application of cloud systems by the largest Design software company Autodesk. We will touch on this and provide some big picture insights. We are fortunate to have Eliot Sun, CEO and founder of Kloudless, coming to class. Kloudless helps users organize all of the content they put in the cloud and the overall madness that is email. He is one of UC Berkeley's best and brightest rising startup CEOs. Eliot is a serial entrepreneur and will tell you what it's like to run a startup while in schhol. Through a very competitive process, Kloudless became part of the inaugural class of 5 companies taking residence in the UC Berkeley Startup Accelerater called Skydeck. Kloudless was also the IT and Web Tack winner of the UC Berkeley Startup Competition last Spring. Finally, Eliot is a Kairos Society Global Fellow. See below for an interview I conducted with Eliot this past Winter when he was the featured fellow of the month. He will build off of some of the lessons mentioned. With this class, you'll get what you put in. Come tomorrow prepared to ask questions and engage! Cheers, Jeremy & Nish  "You don’t learn to walk by following rules. You learn by doing, and by falling over." -Sir Richard Brason, CEO Virgin Group

Interview: Eliot Sun, Co-Founder and CEO of Kloudless By Jeremy Fiance, Executive Fellow at UC Berkeley Eliot Sun is a Fellow from UC Berkelely and the Co-Founder and CEO of Kloudless. He majors in Mathematics and Economics, minors in Chinese, Latin, and Management in Engineering and Innovation. Kloudless is a startup located in Berkeley, CA, and was founded in July 2011. Kloudless helps users manage all the stuff that they have in the cloud and across devices. The company neatly organizes users’ information and puts it all in one place. 1) Where did you find the inspiration to start Kloudless?  As students, we generate a ton of documents. As geeks, we like to try every new thing that comes out, whether that's a new gadget or a new internet website. It became difficult for us to keep track of all the stuff we were putting in different places. The market trends are pretty clear. People are putting more stuff in the cloud and using more devices than ever before. Over 200 million files are moving to Dropbox every day and 3 billion photos a month are uploaded to Facebook. Over 850 million people in the world are sending attachments that get lost in email inboxes. Finding and managing personal data that has been fragmented across cloud sources and devices is a huge problem. 2) Kloudless helps users organize the "black hole" of their cloud content. How are you guys tackling the issue information and file management?  We create an additional layer of meta data that sits on top of all your files. This information can tell you where the file is from, how it got there, who you've shared it with, etc. Our goal is to give your stuff more context, so that you can better organize all your data. The user experience that we've built is tied in to the native filing system on your computer. This allows you to manipulate and organize files in a manner that you're already familiar with. 3) What challenges have you faced as both a student and founder/CEO?  Managing risk is everything. It goes without saying that being a founder while being a student is tough due to time constraints. The key is make decisions based on your evaluation of risk and reward. The risks for a student are pretty straightforward: can I afford to be president of this organization, study x hours a week, go to this party, and still pull off an A in class and get that dream job once I graduate. Throw running your own startup into the mix and everything goes wonky. All of a sudden, you've got ton more choices and subsequently a ton more risk. Whether you want to devote a significant amount of time to building your startup is a big decision. On one hand, if you don't devote enough time, the likelihood of success diminishes. On the other, if you devote enough time, you're jeopardizing that dream job of yours. It's a tricky balance, and the answer differs from person to person based on his/her personal risk profile. 4) Can you briefly summarize your journey from the conception of your idea to now?  My team worked on a previous startup together called Simplynk. We were accepted into a startup incubator at the beginning of Summer 2011 and ended up shutting Simplynk down, effectively labeling it a failed startup. Given that we worked on the project for nearly a year, it was a tough, but necessary decision for us. We began thinking about bigger problems, problems that we had ourselves, problems that market trends were clearly pointing to. In late July 2011, we put down the first lines of code for Kloudless and exhibited the first, fully operational prototype in the middle of August. The difference between us now and us in the past was not the ability to operate mistake free (we certainly don't), but to recognize mistakes early on and correct them appropriately. We opened our private beta program late 2011 and will be launching our public beta in February 2012. 5) What advice, if any, do you have for other Kairos fellows in the process of starting their own ventures?  Time is your most valuable asset. Do what you love and surround yourself with people that you like. Also, if you're not constantly learning new things, put yourself in a position to do so.