harvard-innovation-labs
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Startup Secrets: How to Build a Winning Value Proposition with Michael Skok
In this Harvard Innovation Labs 'Startup Secrets' workshop, veteran venture capitalist and Underscore VC founding partner Michael Skok walks a room of founders through how to define, evaluate, and build a compelling value proposition. Arguing that the number-one reason companies fail is not solving a valuable enough problem, Skok lays out a practical toolkit: nailing the 'for who,' finding a minimum viable segment, testing pain with the 'Four Us' (Unworkable, Unavoidable, Urgent, Underserved), distinguishing latent/aspirational needs from blatant/critical ones, replacing 'faster, better, cheaper' with the '3Ds' (Disruptive, Discontinuous, Defensible), and measuring the 'gain/pain ratio.' Real founders from Kazakhstan, Kenya, South Africa, and beyond pressure-test their ideas live as Skok returns again and again to one refrain: stop pitching, and go ask your users.
Neru Health
Neru Health is a Boston-based vertical AI company automating patient support and resupply for durable medical equipment (DME) providers and sleep clinics. Its platform centers on Nora, an AI 'active sleep coach' that texts, calls, and emails patients to troubleshoot CPAP devices, coach therapy adherence, and coordinate supply reorders, backed by a digital-phenotyping engine that personalizes each interaction. Spun out of Harvard's Blavatnik Fellowship in 2023 after co-founder Morgan Moncada struggled to get care for his own sleep apnea, Neru says it now serves 30,000+ patients and cuts provider labor costs by up to 60%.
Alicia Tulsee
Alicia Tulsee is the founder and CEO of Moxie Scrubs, the direct-to-consumer apparel brand for nurses she built out of the Harvard Innovation Labs, and now Moxie360, an AI workforce platform aimed at nurse burnout and retention. A daughter of Trinidadian immigrants raised in Queens, she sold costume jewelry at a flea market at 19, talked her way into marketing jobs in India, and stitched together an unconventional path that ended in an economics degree from Harvard. She is not a nurse herself; she built a brand for them because nurses cared for her dying father, and she designed Moxie 'for nurses, by nurses' by collaborating with the people who wear the clothes. She raised about $2.4M in pre-seed funding in 2022 and was named to the Forbes Next 1000.
Vishal Punwani
Vishal Punwani is the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, a generative-AI virtual workplace platform born at Harvard's Innovation Labs. A medical doctor turned founder, he traded clinical medicine and a stint at the World Health Organization for the question of how distributed teams keep a culture alive when nobody shares a hallway. He and his two co-founders, who first met playing World of Warcraft as teenagers, set out to borrow what video games solved decades ago - presence, spontaneity, belonging - and bring it to remote work. In October 2021 the company raised a $15M seed round led by Talis Capital, counting Tinder among its early customers.
Andrew Le
Andrew Le is the co-founder and CEO of Buoy Health, an AI-driven health navigation platform he started out of Harvard Innovation Labs in 2014 after taking three years off from Harvard Medical School. A physician by training who once researched brain cancer, Le built Buoy to answer one deceptively simple question for people who reach for Google first: when do I actually need to see a doctor? Under his leadership Buoy has raised more than $66 million and reached millions of users, drawing backing from major insurers including Optum, Cigna and Humana.
Will Foussier
Will Guillaume Foussier is the co-founder and CEO of AceUp, a Boston-based AI-powered team-transformation and leadership-coaching platform he launched out of the Harvard Innovation Labs. A former financial analyst who credits an executive coach with rerouting his own career, he set out to democratize coaching - turning a once-exclusive C-suite perk into a data-driven service deployed across more than 100 enterprises including LVMH, L'Oreal, IBM, BNP Paribas and John Deere. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and EHL, Harvard and Techstars alumnus, he raised a $22.5M Series A in 2024 and runs the company on the conviction that everybody deserves a coach.