10.12-13.22-DigitalTech-SoWork

CATARINA MADEIRA: Hi, everyone. My name is Catarina Madeira, and I'm a program director at the MIT Startup Exchange. It is truly a pleasure to be here with you today to introduce the startup lightning talks. But first I'd like to take a moment to introduce you our program, to tell you about our program.

So Startup Exchange was created about seven years ago within MIT's Office of Corporate Relations, which is home as well to the Industrial Liaison Program, or ILP. And together, ILP and Startup Exchange support a highly entrepreneurial network. While ILP primary focus are our corporate members, Startup Exchange identifies and select startups.

And together with ILP, we foster collaborations between MIT-connected startups and our members. And by MIT-connected startups, we mean startups that are founded or co-founded by MIT alumni, faculty, or staff based on technology licensed out of the institute as well as vetted by other groups affiliated to MIT, like The Engine, E14, or MIT.nano just to name a few.

Today, we support a network which includes over 1,000 companies. All these companies have access to the resources of the program that I'll mention in a moment. But within this broad network, we end up providing more customized support to a smaller group of 25 companies, to which we call STEX25.

These 25 companies are all referred to us by our MIT peers. We interview them, and we end up selecting the ones to whom we can provide particular value. We work with them throughout one year, and then we will restart the cycle of identifying and interview new ones to bring them to the group.

And these are some of our program offerings, of which I would like to highlight events and opportunities. Our office hosts over-- way over, I should say, 20 events a year, mostly hybrid conferences and webinars. Most of the conferences are typically-- they include lightning talks and a lunch exhibit like today, and they take place here in Boston.

But we do call design and host events-- regional events-- with our members. And this is one of the most valuable offerings we have for you. For corporates because the event is tailor-made to help you achieve your goals and for startups because we take you physically to new markets, to the markets that you're testing or that you're aiming to go into, and we give you visibility into new ecosystem.

When it comes to opportunities, these are mostly challenges. So when a member is looking for a particular technology or-- I'm sorry-- technology or solution, we can open a call for startups based on your criteria. These calls are posted in our Opportunities web page so all companies can see that and apply to it.

We can assist you then with the selection process as well if you'd like. So when we make an introduction between a startup and a corporate member, there's a lot of curation behind that introduction. And we do that with one goal in mind-- that is, to help you discuss a corporate partnership with the companies.

In this slide, we feature a very small sample of the successful partnerships that were established to date and that were made public. There are many more. And these include from proof of concept to larger scale pilots all through acquisitions. And to wrap up, I'd like to invite you to some of our upcoming events.

Next week, our colleague Ariadne is presenting the virtual demo day. Then early November, some of our colleagues are flying to Asia, and they're taking about 14 startups to Seoul and Tokyo where we are hosting a few showcases. And then mid November, you're all very welcome to come back to this venue to attend our R&D conference.

And now it's time to hear from our startups. And we'll start with SoWork. We have with us today Vishal Punwani, CEO and co-founder of SoWork, the workplace metaverse that has many more companies using it than Meta's Horizons. SoWork helps digital teams do better work faster.

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VISHAL PUNWANI: --the microphone. This work? Yes. I'm going to Korea and Japan as well, so this is like my practice run. Just kidding. So thank you so much for having me. I'm Vish. I'm the CEO and co-founder of SoWork, the workplace metaverse. We're a Harvard-incubated team, but my co-founder, Emma, she is a joint Harvard and MIT PhD student. So that's one of our many MIT connections.

I guess I need to somehow press something that change the thing. There we go. So right now, companies are struggling to find the right workplace experience, whether that's remote or hybrid or fully in-person. In fact, if you think about all the different teams that are remote and hybrid right now who are trying to build super high performing cultures and super high performance teams while just using Zoom and Slack, something just isn't quite working.

And so that's kind of behind the huge push for many companies to be asking employees to come back to the office. But that isn't really a solution that works very well because it turns out that 95% of employees actually want flexible work. And so having a blanket policy of return to office isn't really going to do anybody any favors.

But companies really do need to sort this workplace experience problem out. Because if they do, then that will lead to happier employees, and happier employees means better productivity, and it means less employee churn. And those two things lead to higher company happiness. And so we're solving this problem for companies and their teams at SoWork.

So in fact, over the last year, we've had thousands of companies move their offices into our metaverse. This is one of our happy customers. "The best piece of software I've used in the past two years is SoWork, and it's not even close." Now, that is high praise. So what exactly did we do? Well, we built the workplace metaverse. It's like an MMO-- like World of Warcraft if you played it. Amazing game-- but for workplace.

So we give teams the tools and the environment they need to be happy, healthy, productive, and engaged. And so we started by building an immersive world where companies can build the HQs of their dreams from the ground up just like if they're playing The Sims or Minecraft. And then their employees can pick fully customizable avatars, which is much better than being a little tile in Zoom or just a name on Slack.

We then added in all the things that businesses would need-- so that's video chat, audio chat, text, enterprise-grade security, privacy, reliability, and stability so that you can actually get great work done. So let me show you what a typical day might look like. How do I play the video? Play the video somehow.

There we go. OK. So this is me walking into our metaverse office. I'm Batman obviously in the metaverse because why wouldn't you be? So there's some colleagues sitting at a bench. I need to talk to them, so I'm going to join their meeting. We're going to do our little brainstorm together. There's another bunch of my teammates bonding over a game. That's great.

I'm going to walk up to my desk. Notice it's not quite decked out enough for Halloween. I'm going to use our mapmaker, throw down some decorations to get into the Halloween spirit. Then I'm going to check my missed connections. So these are messages and to-dos that my team has left me overnight while I was AFK. So these are sorted in terms of urgency, which is not something that happens in Slack.

I then have another meeting with two of my colleagues. I can just walk up to them, and our videos will automatically connect. There's no Zoom link. There's no calendar invite. It's just like in the real office. You see your teammates, you can go connect with them. Then I realize that I actually have a partnership meeting with a company who lives down the street from us in the metaverse.

So I walk over to their office, and I'm going to go and knock on their door, and we're going to have an awesome meeting. So in SoWork, you can get great work done no matter where in the world you are. It's faster than Zoom. It's less ambiguous than Slack. You know what I'm talking about. It's cheaper than a physical office.

Your team gets back their creativity and their spontaneity, and they keep the flexibility that they actually really care about. So we save companies time. We save companies money. We reduce employee churn. We're a competitive advantage for any business. So here's an example. We worked with Tinder's Workplace Experience team to build the metaverse version of their LA office. It's called Tinder World.

So in Tinder World, they run their one-on-ones, they have their team meetings, they do their events, they do hackathons. And my favorite is they do their new employee onboardings for all the new onboarding employees all over the world, to be onboarded into the amazing culture there in a much better way than they do-- than they did before.

Here's a bunch of testimonials including my favorite one up in the top left. "SoWork has been a game changer for our company. It's also now my favorite app. I will bleed SoWork until I die." So it's a little extreme, but I love it. So we obviously want to help everybody's companies to benefit as well. So if you want to save your team time, money, lower your churn, your employee churn, then come and open up your office in SoWork's metaverse.

Thank you so much for listening. I'm around. We have a booth over there. So if you want to learn more, just walk up and we'll connect. Thank you so much.

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