Brett Yokom

Lecturer

Contact Information

Email: byokom@calpoly.edu

Brett Yokom is an instructor in the Entrepreneurship Minor at California Polytechnic State University. In addition, he is a long-time instructor, presenter and workshop facilitator in UC Berkeley’s “Berkeley Global” program. He has been active in the Silicon Valley and San Francisco region for four decades and has experienced firsthand the tremendous and constant growth and change of the technology industry.

Brett worked for almost ten years in Silicon Valley itself in various sales and business development roles, then moved on to start and run two small digital media companies of his own for a number of years. He combines his start-up knowledge, intercultural experience and communication instruction skills in his current work as an educator. His areas of expertise include workplace communication; business negotiating; entrepreneurship and the founder’s journey; and almost anything related to “soft” skills.

More recently, Brett completed a Ph.D. in Business Psychology (“The Influence of Developable Personality Traits on the Frequency of Technology Start-Up Founder Pivoting”, https://www.proquest.com/docview/3044332863), with an emphasis on the experiences of start-up founders in the tech ecosystem, and has increasingly been invited to speak and facilitate events in the Silicon Valley/SF area and beyond.