Bay Area Decision Sciences Summit
NSF grant recipient and LAUNCH ’15 winner Ava’s three co-founders were recently named to Forbes 30 under 30 list. Ava makes a mobile tool to convert conversations into text for hearing-impaired individuals. Co-founder Skinner Cheng represent the first deaf founder to be included on the prestigious Forbes list. CEO and UC Berkeley Engineering MA graduate Thibault Duchemin grew up as the only hearing person in an all-deaf family.
More details here.
It’s been a busy year for ViaeX! After completing the Summer ’16 cohort, the team applied their new skills and learnings at SF’s IndieBio accelerator.
Earlier this month, they took 2nd place in the UCB campus round for the Hult Prize.This year’s Hult Prize challenge was focused on improving the lives of refugees. ViaeX’s water filtration system, using naturally abundant waste materials (chitin) to provide safe and clean water, was a hit. This patented bio-engineered nano-membrane can also be used for air filtration, giving it wide applicability to many problems facing our world.
Can’t wait to see what team members Vivian Qu, Rui Wang and Felix Fisher do next!
Jill Fujisaki served as the industry mentor for Waypoint Biosciences during last summer’s National NSF I-Corps Southwest Node cohort in Austin, TX.. Jill (center) is pictured above with Susan Chen, John Haliburton and Graham Heimberg. Susan was selected as the top Entrepreneurial Lead for the entire cohort. Congrats to Waypoint.
Tell us a little about Waypoint Biosciences and their journey before getting into I-Corps.
The team is comprised of three 5th year UCSF PhD candidates. Two are in Biophysics and Bioinformatics. Susan (the lead) is a “Tetrad”—her PhD program is comprised of four disciplines (Biochem/Developmental Biology/Cell Biology/Genetics).
How did you get connected with them?
Through the regional program. That was the team’s first time out of the lab and they excelled at getting interviews, so I knew they were committed entrepreneurs who would make an excellent National team.
What are some of the secrets to their success?
Fearlessness! They blocked/tackled and did whatever it took to get 106 interviews. They would even sit in waiting rooms in order to get the numbers. The team took the helpful advice of both Kevin Rodondi (Instructor) and Todd Morrill (Node Faculty Director) to frontload the interviews and really overdo it in the beginning. This allowed them to take a breather in the middle after fine-tuning their strategy.
Would you do it again?
Absolutely! I enjoyed this experience so much. It’s important to embrace the philosophy that mentorship is coaching vs. consulting–not telling others what to do, but continually asking questions and helping to keep things moving forward with whatever it takes.
What are the top three most important qualities teams need to be successful in I-Corps @ the National level?
Open mindedness, resilience, persistence
What’s the best thing you ate in Austin?
TexMex dinners @ Guerro’s Tacos, a famous dive restaurant!
What’s next for Waypoint?
Getting deeper into customer discovery—they actually found their product-market fit late in the process. Also, work on reconfirming the value of unit economics.
LAUNCH 2015 winner Ava just announced the closure of a $1.8M funding round including luminaries such as Steve Blank and Tim Draper.
Ava is aiming to bring deaf and hard-of-hearing people back into group conversations with their threaded speech-to-text application that gives people with hearing issues an easy way to stay on top of a conversation.
Read the rest of the TechCrunch piece here:
Ava gives the deaf and hard-of-hearing a more present voice in group conversations
Another month, another awesome Immersive Short!!
Instructor Whitney Hischier led a group of standouts including a Cyclotron Road accelerator participant (Polyspectra) as well as a Haas Startup Marketplace participant from UCB Energy Biosciences (Zimitech).
Teams completed 15-20 interviews during the one week course. Armed with their new skills and info, all are moving forward!
Nelumbo (condensation-resistant coating) gained some excellent insights from potential customer during the week, most notably that manufactures wanted pre-coated parts, not an aftermarket coating.
Lens.io, an augmented reality contact lens that pushes text notifications directly to a user’s field of view, also discovered some interesting learnings as they explored both military and non-uses for their technology.
Other teams, such as Care Byte, had substantial pivots. Their original focus was to use their anti-fraud software for phones to detect, alert and deter telescams for seniors. After a number of interviews, though, they pivoted to focusing on an entirely different customer segment.
Such is the beauty of the Immersive Short Course—high intensity insights that happen in days, not months!
Stay tuned for a report on our upcoming cohort starting September 26. We’ll open up applications for the late October cohort on 10/1.
To learn more about both the NSF I-Corps Immersive Short course as well as full Lean Startup instruction (along with a $50k grant) via the National NSF I-Corps program, click here.
LymeDot formed and won the UC Berkeley Lyme Hack before accelerating a month later with the Bay Area I-Corps Node’s Immersive Short Course. They went on to win $5k seed funding during the semi-finals of the national Lyme Innovation competition at MIT. This weekend, they took 2nd place in the final competition and will receive grant funding as well as a formal award at the White House later this month!
I-Corps got extended air time during their final preso as they used their BMC to communicate how they’re developing their mobile symptom tracking solution (see the video on Lyme Innovation‘s FB page). They also effectively referenced interview results in answering multiple questions during an extended Q&A.
So proud of this multi-disciplinary team comprised of Berkeley Haas Evening Weekend MBAs, a UCB EECS Alum, UCSF PhD and a joint MIT/Harvard PhD student.
Amazing work and we can’t wait to meet our next Immersive Short cohort next Monday!
Read more about Team LymeDot:
http://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/article/evening-weekend-students-fight-lyme-one-hackathon-time
One of the highlights of our first I-Corps Immersive Short Course in May was the energy and passion brought by the three founders of Peer Play. All are current EMBA students at Berkeley Haas and all share a passion for helping children and young people succeed.
Cristy Johnston-Limon was recently profiled for her “day job” as Executive Director of Oakland’s Destiny Arts Center where she is already applying I-Corps lessons learned to improve the lives of children and their families. Read on and get inspired!
Civil Maps founder Sravan Puttagunta has put his I-Corps training to good use!
Find out how he and his team are using crowdsourced data collection to change the way we’ll all get around in the future.
Read the Fortune article here.
Learn more about our next Immersive Short course in September, here.
Just like Simone Biles and the rest of the US Gymnastics team, powerful things come in small packages!
Our one week July Immersive Short course featured a number of faculty and student teams, including a Dean’s Seed Fund winner (Mules4Schools) and hackathon winners (LymeDot) now competing to present at the White House.
Led by instructor Chris DeNoia, each team completed 15-20 interviews during the one week course and all are moving forward, although there were some substantial pivots.
One team of two EECS grad students reported that their biggest insight was to, “Stop talking about what we want to sell and start listening to our customer’s pain points.” This insight led them to pivot away from their original idea of providing remote video assistance to ship builders and find other industries with a more acute problem.
Another team, Organos, lead by Kevin Healy, UCB Professor of Bioengineering and Materials Science & Engineering, targeted and interviewed potential customers for their organ-on-a-chip technology.
The team started out knowing that there was general interest for their organ-on-a-chip to help with a drug development pipeline that’s clearly broken. One of the deeper insights they found through initial interviews, though, is the extent to which accurate preclinical screening and disease models impacts drug development. Professor Healy reports that, “Potential customers told us that even a small change (.1) can equal a 10x gain in efficiency.” Given this clear value proposition, the team is now focused on picking a clinical indication where there are poor/weak animal models, since even a modest change would provide an efficiency win.
One of the best “pro tips” on final presentation night came from SmartPhage, exploring phage-based products for treating acne. These two male grad students know a lot about the microbiome, but don’t wear a lot of makeup. So, they “hung out in the skin care aisle at Target” to interview potential customers with the problem they sought to solve. Armed with new insights, they’ve established that their target market consists of “skin care addicts”. They’ve just been accepted into the National NSF I-Corps Lean Startup training and look forward to spending more time in cosmetic aisles interviewing potential customers.
To learn more about both the NSF I-Corps Immersive Short course as well as full Lean Startup instruction (along with a $50k grant) via the National NSF I-Corps program, click here.
