In October of 2022, Hyperplane team members hosted a Founder Happy Hour meetup in Austin, Texas! Many of our portfolio companies are seeing a shift towards leveraging the vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem in Austin. Among the portfolio companies contributing to Austin’s boom are Aryeo, CoSell, Pact, Allstacks, and Relevize. As of Q3 of 2022, Austin was home to 20 unicorns, more than 117 VCs and over 3,400 companies totaling a combined enterprise value of $115.3B since August of 2022. We’re bullish on Austin, and so are our founders! We brought together founders and friends of the Austin tech community for a happy hour where the conversation started about Austin as a new hub and ended with some subtle Zillow browsing…
Category: Blog
Boston Oktomics 2022: Hosted by Hyperplane Portfolio Company, Elucidata
In October, Hyperplane and portfolio company Elucidata, provider of biomolecular data prepared for ML applications, hosted Oktomics Fest 2022 on our rooftop alongside other leading biotech companies. Industry leaders, academic professionals and members of the Boston biotech ecosystem gathered for conversations about scaling multi-omics research over food, drink, and of course, corn hole overlooking Back Bay. Although it was rainy, the conversations, games, and food provided foundation for a memorable event that brought together some of biotech’s best!
Welcoming Momentum Accelerator to MIT
On August 9th, we celebrated a summer of hard work with MIT’s Momentum Accelerator, a new MBA-run MIT startup accelerator program, and our friends at Silicon Valley Bank. We brought together an incredible group of investors, ecosystem supporters, and MIT founders for a happy hour at our rooftop on Newbury Street.
Our event was in support of the MIT student founder ecosystem and the Momentum Accelerator, which ran an extremely valuable accelerator program for MBA and graduate student founders at MIT this summer. Momentum’s summer 2022 cohort consisted of over 40 startups in the pre-seed and seed stages operating across multiple industry verticals including Fintech, Healthcare, Enterprise SaaS, Crypto, Education, and more. The team at Hyperplane was happy to pool together our network of industry experts and innovators in the Boston area to connect and integrate student founders into this strong community. We had nearly 150 people come through to attend the event and the night ended with an incredible sunset overlooking Back Bay!
CTO Lunch & Learn: Hiring technical talent with executive coach and talent advisor Tatiana Gupta
On April 28th, 2022, Hyperplane hosted a Lunch & Learn workshop session with an intimate group of portfolio companies’ CTOs to discuss the challenges of hiring technical talent and best practices recruiting sourcing, and hiring. When asking our portfolio CTOs what problems they were facing amidst a fluctuating market, the answers were shockingly homogenous: recruiting top technical talent was top of mind. We were joined by the incredibly insightful Tatiana Gupta, a seasoned executive search expert who cut her teeth headhunting at Russell Reynolds and Spencer Stuart and ran the session with our CTOs. Today, her focus is on helping startups and scale-ups to implement best practices for their talent recruiting game. At Toast, Tatiana brought her years of executive search experience to help them think through strategies for their Executive Talent Acquisition operation.
Tatiana addressed the current macro and micro-level market conditions as they relate to hiring technical talent, and explained the importance of implementing a data and process-driven approach to every step of a team’s technical talent acquisition strategy. She emphasized that at the core of successful and competitive technical talent acquisition function sits the necessity to build an attractive company. Across multiple examples, Tatiana explained that attracting talent can be streamlined by defining culture and developing leadership and core principles that are valued by every member of the team. Sourcing, building a strong talent funnel function, and closing candidates were other extremely valuable topics she discussed with us during our session. We’d like to thank Tatiana for all of her insight and guidance and our CTOs for their participation and thoughtful contributions to such a valuable conversation!
GC x Rough Draft x Hyperplane
On April 6th, 2022, the teams at General Catalyst, Rough Draft Ventures, and Hyperplane co-hosted a community happy hour event at our office on Newbury Street. The teams brought together a mix of student founders, investors, limited partners, and community members for a night of discussion amid an uncertain market shift.
By collectively bringing together the networks of Hyperplane and the teams at General Catalyst and Rough Draft Ventures, entrepreneurs and investors alike were able to meaningfully engage and connect with one another and learn from the perspectives of different stakeholders in the ecosystem. We want to thank the teams at GC and Rough Draft Ventures for co-hosting such an incredible event with us!
Office Warming, Samara’s 30th, and Welcoming Back Boston’s In-Person Events
On February 23rd, 2022, Hyperplane hosted friends for an office warming party and to celebrate Samara’s 30th birthday! Friends and portfolio companies gathered in our office for cake, drinks, pizza, and good vibes while we showed off the new office setup and broke in our new (or old?) furniture.
Climate Tech Meetup
On September 21st, 2021, Hyperplane hosted a climate tech meetup for industry stakeholders and curious community members at our office. The effort was led by Rags Gupta, President of Butlr and Venture Partner at Hyperplane. Attendees included leaders from leading institutions in climate research, including MIT and Gonzaga, and industry professionals from Google, Schneider Electric, and investors from funds such as Clean Energy Ventures and Energy Investors Fund. Conversations around what makes a technological innovation viable for venture investment, the difference in capital deployment timelines, and common problems facing founders as they look to raise funding for a climate tech startup were top of mind for attendees. With the amount of new climate venture funds launching in recent years, capital propelled into the space prompted interesting debate around what climate tech founders will need to consider as they build.
Linksquares x Tive happy hour
Hyperplane portfolio companies, Linksquares, Tive, and Tranquil Data hosted a happy hour together, bringing together the Boston tech community over drinks and some pizza. Vishal Sunak of Linksquares, Krenar Komoni of Tive, and Seth Proctor of Tranquil Data, pictured below, came together to lead the charge.
Bring on the Robots!
Hyperplane portfolio companies Dexai Robotics, Soft Robotics, and Pickle Robot Co. together are top contributors to Boston’s leading robotics ecosystem. Our robotics event brought together technologists and interested stakeholders to talk about the challenges and advantages of operating in one of the most exciting industries on the leading edge of new automation capabilities. Dexai Robotics is the inventor of Alfred, the robotic sous chef, aiming to reinvent automation in the restaurant industry. Co-founders Anthony and Dave, both of whom are familiar with the process required for optimizing hardware and software for robotics applications, spoke to the challenges startups face while navigating new market potential. Pickle Robot Co. and Soft Robotics have developed robotic solutions for supply chains, albeit very different technologies. In bringing together a diverse set of founders and industry leaders, plenty of great insights were shared amongst the attendees.
