(100) Days of Summer

40 speakers & events + 14 teams + 2 locations = 1 Summer

Wow! It's hard to believe that we're at the end of August.  Like it always does, the time flew by.  It seemed like just yesterday that teams were moving into the Cambridge & Menlo Park offices.

From the teams themselves, to our incredible speakers and exceptional partners that were so generous with their time & expertise, the summer has been an enjoyable experience on so many fronts. And, while it’s the end of the program itself, we hope that it’s only the continuation of some long relationships to come.

Robbie Greenglass of Highland played a huge part in helping to make the Summer program in Cambridge a success.  From reviewing & vetting applications, working closely with teams throughout the summer, getting to know them better socially (those Monopoly games will be remembered for a long time), and being involved in so many of our events & activities, he was instrumental part of the experience.  Robbie took a moment to reflect on the summer below:

"Back in April, I walked in to a meeting at Highland after watching about 100 video submissions for our Summer@Highland program. With close to 300 applicants in total, we needed to split up the batch and start narrowing down the list to a handful of teams that are going to become our office mates for Summer. Having virtually met each team for only 3 or 4 minutes in a video, I had no idea what to expect when the summer actually started. Every summer has its surprises (like last summer when I got 11 people stuck in an elevator in NYC for over an hour), highs, lows, and most of all, an amazing amount of energy injected into Highland’s offices. While we had moved into our new Cambridge office last October, this summer was our first program in the new office. And at least for me, it was an amazing one!

From Day 1, Highland was transformed by the new members of our family. Our relatively quiet office in Kendall Square was turned into a co-working space with some incredibly bright new minds. The lights of the 16th floor stayed on much later into the night than usual…  For me, I got the chance to work with almost all of the teams here in Cambridge (those Handybook guys were always on the phone when I tried to stop by). And it has been one of the best experiences I have had so far at Highland.

I would usually take a stroll to see the teams a few times a week to see how everyone was doing. Here is the usual landscape: Our London Conference room was home to three teams. From team Webcred, Nam would usually be asleep on the air mattress (with JetBlue eye mask on), Connor in a daze because he was up all night teaching his college classmates how to code so they could come work for him.  Arye and Laura would be packing up their silver briefcase with Axio headbands to go demo their concentration monitoring device, all garbed out in Axio t-shirts and hoodies. Ilya would always be stressing that the Home Care space has way too much regulation in place, and Faheem, well, who knew where the hell Faheem was! 

Walking down the hall, we would get to the usually dark office of Team Wellframe. However, the darkness was not for lack of people in the office. These guys get the award for most all-nighters. And I am sure that will not be the only award these guys ever get as Jake, Trishan, Vinnie and Archit are about to hit the hospital market by storm with their new Cardiac rehab app.

Stepping out of the darkness and walking a little further down hall we would get to MyBetterFit. Ahh MyBetterFit. These guys really liked to redecorate their office. One day, a new couch appeared! Then, a second bean bag chair! And while there was sometimes the misunderstanding of what “This food is for Highland Partners Only” signs meant, MBF was hard at work building a next gen application for women choosing birth control (and if you ever need to find the good kind of Pop Chips or Pirates Booty, they would be hidden somewhere in their office).

Finally, we get to Handybook. As I said before, they were always on the phone! So, I never got to say hi. But they have an impressive amount of sticky notes on the glass door. So they got that going for them, which is nice.

Jack Randall (second on the right in the above picture) manned our Menlo Park space throughout the the summer.  With his desk right at the door, he was a fixture in the space and the go-to person for teams in need of anything.  Jack fit right in and helped out in so many ways. It was great having him as part of the team. We thank him for all his contributions and wish him the very best as he embarks on his freshman year at Santa Clara University.

As in years past, we had Summer teams that were also concurrently participating in Y Combinator's accelerator program.  With YC's focus on product fit and Summer's on validating market & value proposition validation, it's a great combo.  This year there were three teams that were involved in both programs - Airbrite, Collections, Cycle.

Yesterday was YC's Demo Day at the Computer Science History Museum in Mountain View, CA.  Below are the TechCrunch write-ups on both Airbrite & Collections (Cycle will present at the winter Demo Day session).

AIRBRITE - ECOMMERCE SOFTWARE FOR TABLETS

70% of ecommerce stores can’t go mobile because of inflexible legacy software. That’s where Airbrite comes in. It’s attacking the middle market which have the most pain and the most outdated software. The founders say 3,000 brands are spending $500,000 per year on setup and maintenance fees alone – a $3 billion market. Airbrite now has Jennifer Lopez’s stores and 15 brands in its pilot and is onboarding 30 more. And it’s designed to work with booming world of APIs. It’s already got support from SV Angel, and is looking to close a round.

COLLECTIONS.ME: A UNIVERSAL FINDER FOR THE CLOUD

Fresh out of Harvard Business School at the time, Matthew Prince & Michelle Zatlyn participated in the 2009 Summer@HIGHLAND program.  They were our first west coast hosted team, flying solo in our Menlo Park office. We learned a lot from that experience and subsequently hosted 6 teams out west in 2011 and 8 in 2012.

CloudFlare has always had a big vision packaged into an easy to understand message.  It's a service that does one thing: make websites better. With a single change to DNS, sites are instantly protected from a wide range of online threats, see an increase in page load speeds, and have their content dynamically optimized across the Internet. 

The above was not an uncommon sight throughout the summer on both coasts.  I'm sure the bean bags and air mattresses helped facilitate things (so glad we got them). The chair thing though is pretty amazing.  Steve Blank would also probably get a kick out of seeing that his "Startup Owner's Manual" knocked Tony out what looks to be page 8.

We’re excited that Rackspace is onboard as a supporter/partner of the Summer@HIGHLAND program.  Recognized by Gartner as a leader in both public & private cloud computing, Rackspace Hosting serves over 180,000 customers and employs over 4000 “Rackers” that strive to provide a world-class customer experience. 

As the Summer Ends, Highland Sends off 14 Companies (full article with pic of team Wellframe here)

For just over two months, 14 teams have been chipping away at their companies in Highland Capital Partners’ Kendall Square and Sand Hill Road offices. And as the Summer@HIGHLAND program begins to wind down, eight or nine of those teams can say they’re currently raising an angel round or will be starting the process within the next 45 days, while the remainder will continue working on their startup, according to Michael Gaiss, Highland’s senior vice president.

“We’ve never had as many teams as we’ve had this year,” Gaiss says, admitting they just couldn’t “make the call” after seeing so many talented applicants. Over 250 university-affiliated startups applied for consideration in this year’s program. Largely because, as Gaiss describes it, “The value proposition keeps going up.”

Not only were admitted teams offered $15,000 and complimentary office space, but they were also given access to a roster of over 40 events, including talks from Matt Lauzon, founder and CEO of Gemvara; Keith Rabois, COO of Square; Bill Clerico, founder and CEO of WePay; Bob Van Nortwick, business development manager at Amazon; Troy Brennan, executive vice president of CVS Caremark; and Victoria Ransom, founder and CEO of Wildfire.

Jacob Sattelmair, co-founder of Summer@HIGHLAND team Wellframe, said he wasn’t initially sold on the events, telling his team, “Let’s just skip them and focus on work.” After attending the first event, however, he admits he was sold and together they went to every single one. “One of the speakers is now an advisor to the team,” Sattelmair says.

Wellframe is currently organizing clinical knowledge and using human-centered design to build a technology-enabled treatment program for cardiovascular disease. Built into the Wellframe app are reminders to take medications, an accelerometer that can track steps, as well as the ability to send messages between the clinician, patient and the patient’s family, among other features.

“We’re re-engineering patient care outside of the hospital,” Sattelmair says, claiming hospitals need to find a better way to facilitate and maintain relationships with their patients in between appointments. The first patients will be entered into the Wellframe system come September.

The Wellframe team — comprised of Sattelmair, Trishan Panch, Vinayak Ramesh and Archit Bhise — come from different schools of thought, ranging from primary care to program management, as well different schools: Harvard and MIT.

When asked whether or not they feel as though they’ve created a network through the summer program, they all responded positively. “We now have connections we never would have had before,” Sattelmair says.

Nine out of last year’s 10 teams are still going strong, according to Gaiss. Just last week, he says one of the teams was in a meeting with a Highland General Partner talking funding. “Once you’re in the family, you’re in the family,” Gaiss admits.