Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

While numbers are immaterial, finally after 3 years, my dream of presenting at the MIT delta v Demo Day came true, in front of an audience of 1,000+ audience from 37 countries! I cannot thank the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and the entire delta v staff enough for their incredible support and mentorship. I hadn’t realized how deeply connected I was to this community through various programs like Paul Cheek's Venture Creative Tactics class, mentorship at MIT FUSE Accelerator by Macauley Kenney, and now delta v—all of them have been pivotal in my entrepreneurial journey. A special thanks to Jenny Larios Berlin and Ben Soltoff, whose encouragement (and shared laughter) through all the ups and downs of the past three months have shaped my leadership with both humor and humanity. I owe a great deal to my incredible team members—Dan Kim, Joy Qingru Wu, and Art Zahar, ACA, who sent me the toughest yet warmest love. Together, we faced rounds of business pivots, self-doubt, and countless obstacles, but through it all, we persevered and ultimately found clarity in our vision. As a super shy introvert who seldom steps into the limelight, it felt almost magical to take the stage. After 150+ practices in two weeks, I finally found my unique way - a design professional unafraid of downplaying his miserable design life into a hilarious and entertaining story to inspire people. What I hadn’t realized before was that the strongest power was always within me: "Yes, I can." My pleasure to share the recording of our company presentation here, an AI-powered sketch-to-3D solution: https://lnkd.in/eA8JW-kr I will always cherish the brilliant minds and kind souls whose support lifted me throughout this journey. More than anything, the biggest takeaway is to enjoy the chaos. When life is at its darkest, can you still shine bright? "Yes, I can." #AI #Entrepreneurship #MartinTrustCenter #MITdeltav #designtool #3D #AItool #teamwork #spotlight #publicspeaking #introversion #productdesigner #AIproduct

Speaker alert: Doug Williams of Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship at the Cambridge Science Festival event, on Monday Sept 23 at 6pm. An event supporting the Massachusetts AI Ecosystem to share opportunities to support the MA Applied AI Hub. Omer Mujawar -(Hairong) Helen He -Gabi Zijderveld of Blue Tulip Ventures -Glenn Wong of CSAIL MIT -Jen Stave, PhD of Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard -John Werner of Link Ventures -Joseph Wehbe of Massachusetts Artificial Intelligence Ecosystem by DAIMLAS - Judah Phillips of AI Blueprint for MA -Nico van Wijk of The AI Furnace ???? - Omer Mujawar of Harvard Undergraduate Machine Intelligence Community - Paul Baier of AI Blueprint for MA - Salil Darji of AI Tinkerers -Sebastian Barriga of milemark?capital -Serge D. of SUNDAI Hacker Club -Val Velasquez of AI Tinkerers Event space provided by - Sam Rowe of ?thos #CSF24 #CSF2024 #CambSciFest #CambridgeScienceFestival MIT Museum Register- https://lnkd.in/d87GSx-J

It's been an incredible summer for Fount. We spent 3 months in NYC going through the Massachusetts Institute of Technology delta v startup accelerator hosted by Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. 23 MIT-led teams wrapped up delta v with our demo day on Friday evening in front of a packed auditorium and online audience of thousands of startup community members. At Fount we've made massive strides over the summer in onboarding our first insurance carrier clients, building product and generating revenue. A massive thanks goes out to all the organizers, supporters and sponsors of delta v including the indomitable force of Bill Aulet, Stephanie MacConnell and Paul Cheek. We had an all-star FinTech board of advisers through Noah Breslow, Valisha Graves, Alon L., Ciaran Rogers, Gary Schall and Jonathan Schwartz. A massive thanks to you all for your time, advice and incredible resources over the summer. From here we'll be working with more property and casualty insurance carriers and MGAs in building out our offering while growing our the team with some phenomenal early hires in the media buying and AI/ML engineering space. If you're interested in partnering with us or joining our team please reach out! Links to open positions will be posted in the comments.

delta v Demo Day occurs every year on Friday of the first week in September and it is my favorite day of the year.?It embodies everything that is entrepreneurship and MIT.?It is filled with positive energy and gives one great optimism about solving the world’s greatest challenges in innovative and impactful ways.?They are heterogeneous teams who are humble, hungry and incredibly hardworking determined to apply the power of entrepreneurship with what they learn at MIT to make a real difference.?It is awesome and it happens every year with a new crop of students who started from a standstill the year before. delta v Demo Day 2024 (the 13th edition) was absolutely no different and in fact set a new bar for excellence. Here is a link to videos of all the student team’s presentations (be ready to be blown away):?https://lnkd.in/e_ZceB9A The only concerns with the day were a less than stellar leap on the stage by an OWG (Old White Guy) who barely made it this year and then that OWG imploring the students that brat summer was not over and they had one more day to bring the brat rizz before they could then shift to the demure and mindfulness of the fall. Would love to hear your thoughts on them in comments below.?Also, I implore the community to help them as they move out of MIT now to support them in their mission with leads on customers and funders.?The world needs these new ventures and even more so these entrepreneurs to be successful.?They are the future. Incredible props to the leadership of this year’s cohort, Macauley Kenney, Jenny Larios Berlin, Stephanie MacConnell (NYC) and Ben Soltoff and the amazing Trust Center Team of Greg Wymer, Amrutha Killada, Ylana Lopez, Maya Freed, Lucia Solorzano & Katherine Lukens with content support from Chris Burns.?And also a huge shout out to our EIR’s who leaned in with countless mentorship sessions Paul Cheek, Christine Hsieh, PhD, Chris Moses, Jared Ray Johnson, Susan Neal, John Xin and Emily Young plus the phalanx of others who served on the delta v boards and provided content sessions over the summer.?The is truly a herculean effort but many hands makes for much lighter work. Also huge thanks to our financial supporters listed in the program below. A full delta v Demo Day book can be found here:? https://lnkd.in/ebQKv9Zu (keep this book as you will hear from these entrepreneurs a lot in the future) We now have shows for investors and alumni in NYC (Oct 21) and NorCal (SF – Oct 23, Mountain View – Oct 24) and then we turn our attention to starting the process for developing the new delta v 2025 cohort with a whole new crop of entrepreneurs.?The process works … with everyone’s help.

“We’re not here for knowledge for knowledge’s sake; we’re here to apply that knowledge to the world’s greatest challenges.” — Bill Aulet, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship https://lnkd.in/e2k5wzTS