Lecturer | Senior Fellow
Entrepreneurship
About
Mark Coopersmith is an educator, author, entrepreneur, and global executive. In his teaching at UC Berkeley and programs around the world, he provides students, business leaders, and teams with insights, inspiration, and know-how to drive innovation and growth in organizations of all sizes, and to launch new ventures and initiatives ranging from Silicon Valley startups to new divisions of global enterprises.
As a Fortune 500 global executive and Silicon Valley entrepreneur, he has spent three decades launching, building, and fixing high-growth organizations ranging from raw startups (his e-commerce venture WebOrder is now owned by Google) to launching new divisions of multinational corporations such as Sony, to reinvigorating existing businesses, all while leading teams from 2 to 2,000 spread across many continents. Coopersmith has also served on boards of directors, advised startups at UC Berkeley’s SkyDeck accelerator, and invested in startups as an angel investor and a partner in several venture funds.
He started teaching at UC Berkeley in 2003. His courses have included the core entrepreneurship class, the experiential Workshop for Startups course where new ventures are launched in real time, and Social Entrepreneurship. He combines his passion and expertise for entrepreneurship and innovation with his real-world experiences in startups, the Fortune 500 executive suite and boardroom, and also original research, insights, tools and frameworks — such as the 7 Stage Failure Value Cycle from his book “The Other ‘F’ Word” co-authored with John Danner — to inspire and focus leaders and teams and to help them attain the positive outcomes they seek.
Expertise and Research Interests
- Growth Strategies
- Governance and Boards
- Corporate Entrepreneurship
- Entrepreneurship
- Innovation
- Technology
- Leadership
- Mark Coopersmith. The Entrepreneurial Mindset. Strive.
2019 - Mark Coopersmith, John Danner. The Other “F” Word: How Smart Leaders, Teams, and Entrepreneurs Put Failure to Work. John Wiley & Sons.
2015 - John Danner and Mark Coopersmith. How Not to Flunk at Failure. The Wall Street Journal.
2015
At Haas since 2003
2010 – 2018, ETwater: Managing Director; Board Member
2001 – present, Managing Director, Berkeley Innovation Consortium (previously The Argonauts Group)
2006 – 2007, Group VP and General Manager, Newell Rubbermaid, Global Technology Brands
2005 – 2010, Addis: President of Strategy, Board Member
1998 – 2001, CEO, WebOrder, SVP Netopia (now Google)
1992 – 1998, Executive Vice President, Sony
1986 – 1992, Management Consultant, Ernst & Young
- Managing Director, ETwater
- The Entrepreneurial Mindset (and my Top 10 list), Medium, 04/25/2019
- Failure is grief but not ‘game over’ – authors John Danner and Mark Coopersmith on how to put failure to work, YourStory, 01/31/2019
- The entrepreneurial mindset, The Strive Project, 01/01/2019
- Shop Talk: Topdrawer; Catscapes; SpotAngels, Berkeleyside, 11/08/2018
- 7 steps to help you bounce back from a failure stronger than ever, Business Insider, 08/17/2015
- The other F word: How to make the most of failure, Fast Company, 04/17/2015
- The seven stages of failure, HuffPost, 12/06/2007
- 5 things you must do to successfully launch a business, Entrepreneur, 09/25/2014
- Entrepreneurship, MBA 295A
- Workshop for Startups, MBA 295I
- “The Other F Word,” Learning from Failure, MBA 295T