Where ideas get tested

Nyck AI emerged from the school’s New Venture Discovery course, where Marc Davis ’26 MMM Program, Dániel Sütheő ’26 Two-Year MBA, Alexandre Rossi Alvares ’25 MBA and Arthur Koefender ’25 MBA interviewed more than 60 small and medium businesses to uncover a real pain point. The customer-first research approach helped spark an idea for a virtual employee designed to help operators clearly demonstrate impact and ROI.

Here, Davis shares how the entrepreneurship program has shaped his approach as one of the founders and how he’s made the most of tapping into the school’s resources for this venture.

How has the school’s curriculum, particularly the entrepreneurial pathway, shape the way you identified and validated this opportunity?

The New Venture Discovery and the New Venture Development courses were absolutely critical in Nyck AI’s development. We were fortunate to learn from fantastic professors and industry leaders including David Schonthal, Rebecca Kahnweiler and Sonali Lamba who taught us both the frameworks for how to think about startups and the practical skills for how to execute.

New Venture Discovery focuses on diving deep into a specific problem area — rather than generate ideas — to truly understand the pain points your potential customers feel from day one. Startups are ultimately a set of assumptions: “I think people have issues getting airline reimbursements from delays,” or “I think businesses would pay $1,000/month for software that automates marketing posts across social media platforms.”

The first goal of an entrepreneur is to list out these assumptions, rank them based on how unknown and risky they are and begin validating the most uncertain, high-risk assumptions first.

I also learned a powerful phrase which has also become one of my favorites: “Get out of the building.” Great design research doesn’t happen behind a screen — it happens in the real world. Go visit the manufacturing plant or the physical therapy clinic and watch how the problem actually occurs. Don’t look for confirmation of your beliefs — be genuinely curious and search for insights.

They also taught us a key principle: you must be solving an extremely painful problem, one where people’s hair is on fire. You then begin to quantify the solution you want to build by understanding the “jobs that need to be done.” — what tasks are customers trying to complete? what problems are they trying to solve? what needs are they trying to satisfy? At Nyck, we know that if we can help a COO tell the story of how they are driving $1M+ in ROI to the CEO, that matters far more than any single product feature.

Through these courses, we also learned the importance of prototyping a lot of potential solutions. Don’t build one solution and incrementally tweak it — generate 10 or even 100 solutions, then test to see which one to three might combine into the final product. The best ideas often emerge through the proliferation of ideas. And once you’re testing your prototype, put your solution in their hands, if possible. People give far better feedback when they can touch, feel and use it — not when they can only see it.

The Garage and Northwestern’s Jumpstart program have been credited with playing a major role in Nyck AI’s early traction. What specific guidance, mentorship or structure from these Kellogg resources accelerated the venture?

The Garage gave us our start — we were able to use Garage Matchmaking, a quarterly event designed to support teams incubating at The Garage in recruiting new team members, to find technical talent early on. This is how we found our first undergraduate engineers to begin building the product — and how we’ve since found our chief technical officer and designers as well.

During Jumpstart, we were also paired with Andrew Durlak, an incredible mentor who sold his procurement startup for $540 million. Getting to work with him weekly throughout the summer was incredibly cool and helpful. He gave us fantastic advice and played a huge role in helping us develop along our journey – and is still an advisor to us today.

Jumpstart also provided practical, hands-on workshops from financial modeling for the business to sessions with former founders sharing their experiences. Getting to connect with fellow entrepreneurs and learn side-by-side made it a rewarding experience.

How has exposure to programs like Zell Fellows or even the broader entrepreneurship network at Kellogg strengthened your approach to scaling Nyck AI?

It’s been incredible to take advantage of the Kellogg network to meet people — I’ve spoken with CEOs when they’ve come to visit campus, which later turned into business calls. I’ve also worked with professors who have made introductions to numerous investors and potential customers.

Through Zell, I’ve found a group of other students sprinting just as hard on their ventures as I am. When I have questions, I can go to classmates who have deep fundraising expertise and hop on a call with a long list of questions. My fellow Zell Fellows have been a huge help in building Nyck — bringing expertise from so many different angles and experiences. 

In Zell, we also run design review sessions — where we can bring anything to the other founders, from a new landing page to a sales deck, and get their honest feedback. Being able to step outside of your own business and get fresh perspectives has been incredibly helpful in developing Nyck.

How have collaboration and school resources guided your early steps with Nyck AI?

Outside of the New Venture class series — classes like Entrepreneurial Finance & Venture Capital or Launching & Scaling Startups were critical in helping us understand the world of venture.

Through these classes, we also have incredible access to professors like Carter Cast, a former CEO of Walmart.com and venture capital investor at Pritzker Group, during office hours. Professor Carter helped us with our VC deck and fundraising strategy immensely.

There are also numerous pitch competitions from VentureCat to the Kellogg Pitch Competition that provided us with funding to help accelerate our journey.

A single visit to Colectivo Coffee’s Milwaukee headquarters helped crystallize the need for a “virtual employee” for procurement. Looking back, what moments within the Kellogg entrepreneurial ecosystem have most shaped your confidence in becoming a founder?

Each touchpoint with Northwestern and Kellogg pushes you to reflect deeply and refine your journey. After our 60+ interviews, we reached a launching off point with our New Venture Discovery final presentation — which crystallized our research and the first version of our idea. 

Our VentureCat pitch forced us to reflect on what we had learned in New Venture Development and how we had actually tested and shaped our idea through forming beta partnerships and building our technical team. 

As we completed Jumpstart at the end of the summer, we began putting real numbers behind our go-to-market engine and our future plans to scale. While applying to Zell Fellows in the fall of 2025, we further refined our ideal customer profile and product demo. We leveraged the Kellogg Pitch Competition to thoroughly build out our sales pipeline and future sales projections.

Each step along the way forced us to ask the right questions: What are we learning? How are we growing? What do we still not know?

Read next: 5 entrepreneurial lessons about building a business during an MBA

The views and opinions expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the position of the Kellogg School of Management or Northwestern University.