Harvard Innovation Labs 1o1c6f

When you set out to build a community of young innovators, sometimes magic happens. After all, nobody understands the crazy, stressful, hectic life of an entrepreneur like one of your peers. Harvard Launch Lab Rong Xia (Raiing Medical) and Will Guillaume Foussier (Ace-Up) talk about how lending a sympathetic ear to a fellow entrepreneur led to empathy, understanding, and ultimately, love.

Three brothers from Costa Rica — Serge, Rolando, and Javier Masis — are building an activity discovery app that is a bit more serendipitous than most other products on the market. Finalists for this year's Harvard President's Innovation Challenge, Serge and Javier sat down with us so that we could find out more about building their company and working together as a family. If you want to see the company (and the 11 other finalists) pitch its product as part of next week's Harvard President's Innovation Challenge Award Ceremony, you still get tickets at www.i-lab.harvard.edu. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

David Raiser is the CEO and co-founder of Aldatu Biosciences, a company that has developed drug resistance diagnostics for HIV patients. Raiser holds a Ph.D. in Genetics from Harvard Medical School, while his co-founder and Aldatu's CSO Iain MacLeod has a plethora of degrees — including a Ph.D. in Pathology from the University of Cambridge— as well as an academic appointment at the Harvard School of Public Health AIDS Initiative. Together, the pair is leading a push for better, more affordable diagnostics tools, not only for HIV-related applications but also for other infectious diseases, in order to improve the quality of patient care and the cost of healthcare.

Dino Rodriguez, Chase Davis and Christian Ondaatje thought they could build a way to get around some of the gaming and graphics deficiencies of Mac computers. As undergrads at Harvard, they built a device called The Wolfe, an external GPU that speeds up graphical applications such as those that use VR. The company definitely serves a need and is rushing to get its product to market with a little help from Intel. For our latest podcast, I sat down with Chase Davis to talk about the companies growth and some of the challenges they've faced.

Being an edtech startup isn't easy. That's why it's amazing that a company like AllHere, currently based at the Harvard Launch Lab, is about to expand its product reach ten-fold this fall. AllHere's "Chief Idea Spreader" (aka CEO)Joanna Smith sat down for our most recent Harvard Innovation Labs Story to discuss her company's growth and how AllHere had to shift its customer targeting to gain traction in schools. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

With his company Doorbell, Pleat is trying to build more connected communities for people who live in apartments and other similar complexes. Currently, Doorbell is testing its product in Downtown Worcester’s Grid District, trying to bring the up-and-coming urban area together through shared experiences rather than other means. It's quite a noble mission to focus on "in-real-life" community building at a time when other entrepreneurs are focused on growing digital communities. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

When the i-lab first opened in 2011, Vaxess Technologies, a company co-founded and led by Michael Schrader, was one of the handful of ventures that consistently showed up to work out of the new space. Last year, after a short stint at LabCentral, Schrader and Vaxess returned to Harvard's "innovation campus" on Western Avenue in Allston as part of the Pagliuca Harvard Life Lab. Vaxess, which, had received about $6M in funding, grants, and awards combined, recently announced that it had received another $6 million grant, this time from the Gates Foundation, in order to continue developing its silk biopolymer technology and to take its innovative vaccine delivery system to clinical trials. This is a Harvard Innovation Labs Story.

When Sarah de Zarraga and Quinn Fitzgerald met at the Harvard Business School, they both shared a yearning to leverage business to improve the world. Working together they have built a product to help others stay safe and prevent sexual assault and other dangerous situations. With their company, Flare Jewelry, they have developed a device to notify others of danger or a potential assault. Hidden as a piece of jewelry or other unassuming personal accessories, their device can keep people safe in a wide array of situations. What they're doing with Flare is radically trying to reinvent personal security. And they are close to doing just that.

Brandon Tseng, is a co-founder for AI defense software company Shield AI, and he also does a lot of the company's business development. He became attracted to the artificial intelligence space for two reasons. First, he understood the potential far-reaching impact of the technology to improve our lives in innumerable ways. Second, as a former member of the Navy, he understood how AI could also make life safer for military personnel on the ground. Shield AI, which currently leverages its software to guide drones through buildings, allowing military to identify individuals inside, could have a major impact on the safety of troops and civilians in conflict areas.

Day Zero Diagnostics is using a combination of genome sequencing and machine learning to try to detect disease days before it has normally been possible using the current techniques. Miriam Huntley, one of Day Zero's co-founders (along with Jong Lee, Dr. Doug Kwon, Dougal Maclaurin, and Melis Anahtar). She is also a graduate of MIT and has recently finished a Ph.D in Applied Mathematics from Harvard.

Giffin Daughtridge is the CEO and founder of UrSure, an HIV preventative venture. Find out how working out of the i-lab has helped the UrSure during this vital stage of growth in our new Harvard Innovation Labs Stories podcast series.

One of the more serendipitous experiences we had at the Harvard Innovation Labs in 2016 was the timing of our fall HUBWeek symposium “Exploring the Emerging Worlds of Augmented and Virtual Reality." You see, during some of our early planning for the event, Niantic and Pokémon were kind enough to unleash "Pokémon GO" on the masses. This made explaining augmented reality easier to a lot of the stakeholders involved. It also created an opportunity to show folks that there is a lot more happening in the AR space than the popular game. "Beyond Poke?mon GO: Using AR in Novel Ways" digs into this topic in a featuring Victor Gerdes of PTC, Mike Festa of Wayfair, and John Werner of Meta moderated by Dennis Keohane.

This past summer, we hosted AR, VR, and Mixed Reality industry leaders at the i-lab as part of HUBWeek for a symposium we called "Exploring the Emerging Worlds of Augmented and Virtual Reality." We are excited to share another one of our chats in podcast form from that event. We hope you enjoy this talk: "Building and Growing an AR/VR Startup," featuring Danny Belch from STRIVR, Steven Domenikos from Tactai, Amitt Mahajan from Presence Capital, and Luna Yuan, an HBS student building a VR startup in our Venture Incubation Program. Harvard Innovation Labs Managing Director Jodi Goldstein moderates this great .

This past summer, we hosted AR, VR, and Mixed Reality industry leaders at the i-lab as part of HUBWeek for symposium we called "Exploring the Emerging Worlds of Augmented and Virtual Reality." We will be releasing some of our chats in podcast form over the next couple of weeks. We hope you enjoy this first discussion: "Beyond the Classroom - AR/VR in Education" featuring Harvard Education School's Chris Dede and Lifeliqe founder Ondrej Homola talking with Harvard Innovation Labs Director Chris Colbert.

This past summer, we hosted AR, VR, and Mixed Reality industry leaders at the i-lab as part of HUBWeek for symposium we called "Exploring the Emerging Worlds of Augmented and Virtual Reality." We will be releasing some of our chats in podcast form over the next couple of weeks. We hope you enjoy this first discussion: "Beyond the Classroom - AR/VR in Education" featuring Harvard Education School's Chris Dede and Lifeliqe founder Ondrej Homola talking with Harvard Innovation Labs Director Chris Colbert.

The Harvard Innovation Labs' Neal Doyle sits down with AOL founder and current Revolution CEO, Steve Case. They talk startups, challenges faced by founders, and the next wave of the Internet, which is the focal point of Case's new book, "The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur's Vision of the Future."

Dave Balter has been involved in the founding quite a few companies, including BzzAgent, Intelligent.ly, and Smarterer. Sarah Hodges is one of the best operations folks in the Boston startup scene, working at RunKeeper, Intelligent.ly... and Smarterer...wait, these two also date? How does that work? The two ed us for another Off the Record at the i-lab to dive down that rabbit hole during a great, and candid discussion.

Brian Kalma once took a long trip across the country, during which, somewhere in the American desert, he ended up getting a job at online retailer Zappos in the company's early days. Working on its customer experience, he quickly made a name for himself and has helped countless other startups, many of them based in Boston, better reach and connect with their customers. Currently working for i-lab alum Catalant(aka Hourly Nerd), Brian ed us for a very entertaining session of our "Off the Record" series.

Katie Burke, HubSpot's VP of Culture and Experience, ed us for another great session of our "Off the Record at the i-lab" series. Burke delves into her background and how she ended up at HubSpot, the Cambridge-based marketing innovator. We talk about HubSpot's famous culture deck, how to recreate or build team culture in office across the globe, and what early-stage companies should focus on while growing. It was an insightful and, at times, humorous talk. We hope you enjoy.

Scott Miller, the CEO of Dragon Innovation and a partner at Bolt, and Thos Niles, Dragon's COO, ed us at the Harvard i-lab to give advice about navigating manufacturing and getting projects built to completion. Along the way, we dig into some of Scott's wild stories building robots in Cambridge, first at MIT and then for Disney, as well as life during the early days of iRobot. This is one of the more entertaining talks we've had as part of the this series.