Discover all the amazing deals and coupons in your favorites stores and redeem with one tap on Melt, an app from Piccolo Technologies, a Summer@HIGHLAND 2012 team. No more printing or cutting out coupons or spending hours online looking for a deal. Melt stores all your loyalty cards in one place and lets you find deals in stores at a convenient distance from you. Check them out at gotmelt.com.
Dave Hersh, founding CEO of Jive Software and early stage advisor & investor, visited our Menlo Park office today to talk about a “Hero’s Journey of Entrepreneurship.” We very much appreciated his time and Rebecca Hinds of Piccolo Technologies captured the essence of his discussion below:
Throughout history, humans have been drawn to stories of the heroic underdog who summons the courage to take unprecedented risks to achieve greatness. The late American mythologist Joseph Campbell famously proclaimed that such stories tend to share a similar underlying structure, which he summarized as the Hero’s Journey. According to Dave Hersh, former CEO of Jive Software and current Board Member at Crushpath, an understanding of this journey is particularly relevant and applicable to entrepreneurs. Through a sequence of anecdotes, revelations, and reflections, Hersh introduced the 2012 Highland Capital Summer Program teams to the entrepreneur’s Hero’s Journey.
The entrepreneur’s journey is akin to Campbell’s Hero’s Journey in that it, too, is instigated by a call to action. The entrepreneur is summoned, either accidentally or by force of will, to venture off from normality into an unknown domain. The entrepreneur identifies a pain point in the market and expresses an initial desire to subjugate it. This call to action tends to be followed by some manifestation of supernatural aid. The entrepreneur must successfully immerse him or herself in a network of advisors and mentors who represent the entrepreneur’s own aspirations and values.
It is important to recognize that the entrepreneur’s journey is, by no means, a carefree adventure. It necessarily entails a sequence of trials and tribulations that the entrepreneur must overcome. These trials and tribulations involve hiring decisions, budget cuts, and other strategic resolutions that are imperative to the holistic growth of the company Regardless of the challenge, the entrepreneur most adopt the mantra of a warrior and “do whatever it takes to move the company forward”.
Melt predicts the coupons you’ll love. The team has been working exceptionally hard all summer and just had version 2.0 of their app approved by the App Store. Download it now and check-out their innovative interface for easy coupon discovery and intelligent coupon recommendations.
Jack Randall (second on the right in the above picture) manned our Menlo Park space throughout the the summer. With his desk right at the door, he was a fixture in the space and the go-to person for teams in need of anything. Jack fit right in and helped out in so many ways. It was great having him as part of the team. We thank him for all his contributions and wish him the very best as he embarks on his freshman year at Santa Clara University.
“It is hard to believe today was my last day as a summer intern at Highland Capital Partners. The three months I spent working with the Summer@Highland teams were incredible. I loved watching the summer teams grow their companies, hire new employees and launch their products. I will never forget the Speaker Series, the Giants win over the Padres, morning talks with the Melt team, watching a demo for the first time with Peter Bell in Palo Alto, and touring IDEO and Square. My time at Highland made me all the more excited about becoming an entrepreneur and hopefully, a venture capitalist too one day. Thank you to everyone for making my summer awesome and I hope to see you all again soon.” - Jack Randall
