BERKELEY, Calif. — After routinely residing at the top of reputable rankings lists such as bobsratings.com, BestSchoolz, and InflateMyEgo, UC Berkeley once again leaps ahead of the competition by being the number one school in the observable multiverse for the number of “companies” founded by undergraduate alumni who literally just downloaded a hackathon app template and “hired” a couple software engineers (freshman CS61A students).
We reached out to Erling Stocking, the inventor and CEO of SockCoin, a startup first conceived at a 2019 Berkeley-hosted hackathon.
“It was my 30-minute walk to Soda Hall from my Southside apartment that made me think of SockCoin, really. Between all that perambulating, my natural affinity for socks, and my love for passive income and the blockchain, the idea was born—why not make a product that allows users to make money through the friction and heat generated by their feet?”
The hackathon’s main judge, a multi-millionaire who built his riches on making custom wraps and decals for Lockheed Martin sentinel drones, commented on Stocking’s success after the hackathon.
“It really only took him a weekend to make an idea almost as genius as my own—blockchain socks (or at least the proof of concept, which was a sock with Sharpie-drawn designs and a Bluetooth companion app ripped from someone’s Github). The applications of his design were endless—imagine giving socks to people who need them under the guise of philanthropy while really just having them generate passive income for yourself! I just had to fund Stocking’s endeavor, so I gave his team a $150 Amazon gift card and a pat on the back.”
When asked to share a few words about Berkeley’s role in the development of his multi-dollar startup, Stocking said, “Between unresponsive advising, class over enrollment, and shitty WiFi, Berkeley provided me with just the amount of inadequate support and scrappiness necessary to stimulate startup growth and innovative ideas.”
There’s more in store for SockCoin, as Stocking exclusively announced on LinkedIn his newest invention, the “Sock Market,” where users can record and exchange sock puppet shows as a means of mining SockCoin. UC Berkeley’s well-deserved news spotlight only serves to highlight the thousands of similar, groundbreaking startups continuing to emerge out of the school.