Haas Student Creates Business Startup
Haas School of Business MBA student Kim Cabot used to think about all the ways she could improve communication at a large company. The company worked in silos, with everyone running their own email and social media campaigns.
“Things were inefficient and software tools were expensive,” Cabot says.
Cabot’s idea for Brandizi slowly began to take shape. By the time she started at Haas, Cabot had co-founded Brandizi with her husband and was a half-million lines of code in to building new software.
Cabot was accepted into the National Science Foundation Innovation Corps (I-Corps) Program overseen by the Haas School’s Lester Center for Entrepreneurship.
“We told Lester Center Director Andre Marquis, ‘We’re a little backward. We have something built and now we have to figure out if anyone wants it and for what,” she says.
During the I-Corps Program, the Brandizi team found that the product wasn’t a perfect fit with marketing managers. They told the team to take it to sales managers, who rely heavily on email and social media.
The product automates and improves email, social media, and other communication streams between a company and client.
“We’re adding customers all the time now,” Cabot says, “and learning that the customer discovery process never ends—we have I-Corps to thank for that.”
Brandizi currently has 25 customers, who typically have about 10 users each, and has raised $1 million in funding. Cabot is now working with entrepreneurship lecturer Dave Charron, MBA ’95.
“He’s been amazing,” she says. “He’s super smart. He can listen to anyone talk about their company in any industry, and he just gets the weak link.”
About the Author
Erin Purcell
Staff Writer, covering MetroMBA's news beat for New York, Philadelphia, and Boston.
