Owl Have You Know
Building an Entrepreneurship Program for the Future feat. Professor Yael Hochberg
Published: 15 April 2026 at 10:00 Europe/London
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Episode notes
When Professor Yael Hochberg made the decision to come to Rice, she had a vision for building an entrepreneurship program like no other — it would be one for the modern era that would set the pace for entrepreneurship education going forward.
Now, more than a decade later, Rice consistently ranks number one in the country for entrepreneurship and is leading the way in world-changing innovation through hubs like the Liu Idea Lab for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, or Lilie.
In this episode, Professor Hochberg, head of the Rice Entrepreneurship Initiative and Lilie, joins co-host Brian Jackson ’21 to discuss how she brought her vision for a modern entrepreneurship program to life at Rice, the innovation that’s come out of Lilie’s 10 years, and what the future holds for entrepreneurship education in the age of AI.
Episode Guide:
00:00 Introduction to Professor Yael Hochberg
00:37 Her “Accidental” Entrepreneurship Origins
05:50 Why She Chose Rice & Her Vision for Better Entrepreneurship Education
09:18 Inside the Liu Idea Lab
16:22 Student Startup Wins
19:53 Alumni Network Power
22:59 Research-Driven Teaching
30:32 AI and Entrepreneurship
35:02 What's Next for Lilie
41:47 The Most Rewarding Moments
The Owl Have You Know Podcast is a production of Rice Business and is produced by University FM.
Episode Quotes:
On the entrepreneurial spirit at Rice
39:31: [Brian Jackson] When I think about the entrepreneurial spirit that's present at Rice, I think a big driver pulling that in is the recognition we consistently get, be it Princeton Review ranking us as a, you know, the nation's top graduate school for entrepreneurship seven years in a row. When you think about that success, what do you think is the biggest driver behind it? What's making that possible?39:54: [Yael Hochberg] I think it's a combination of many things. It's our students, our amazing students who come in with the drive to create things. It's our alumni who are willing to stand behind us and support us. It's people like Frank Liu who were willing to see the resources that were necessary here on campus to, to truly support entrepreneurial ventures. It's the amazing staff and faculty at Lilie who, you know, give 90 to a hundred-hour weeks, 365 days a year to make sure that our students have the support that they need, that our faculty have the support that they need.
Entrepreneurship can be taught if there’s a drive
AI is changing how fast you can build and test ideas
31:02: The tools that are available today really do change how you think about things, because the tools offer you an opportunity to build things faster than you could ever imagined before, to test things faster than you could ever imagined before. We have classes where nearly all of our classes are experiential. The students are actually building something. They're doing something, they're walking through the process, and they're getting it in the wraps, right? And it may be on something stupid like Uber for cats, I don't care. I want them to learn the process and actually go out and experience it. And when the right idea comes along, they'll already know how to actually do it.
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