Ikhlaq Sidhu

Ikhaliq Sidhu belongs to a rare category: people who have built the substrate of a technological revolution and then turned around to teach the next generation how to think about it. His sixty patents at 3Com in the 1990s—in voice-over-IP routing, packet quality of service, and wireless handoff protocols—became part of the invisible infrastructure now running inside every tool that lets you talk to someone over the internet. Then, rather than riding that success into further technical work, he built a school. The Sutardja Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology at Berkeley, which he directed for sixteen years, produced the Berkeley Method of Entrepreneurship—a pedagogy built on the insight that founders, like machine-learning systems, learn inductively: by exposure to real problems, real customers, and real feedback loops, not by deducing strategies from first principles. That structural parallel between human and machine learning was not accidental; Sidhu saw it early. His foundational claim—that