TestParty Named Most Disruptive MBA Startups in 2024 from Harvard Business School

TestParty was recently named one of the most disruptive MBA startups of 2024. See below for an interview between the Poets and Quants team and our CEO, Michael Bervell. For more details on the full post, view their website here

TestParty

Harvard Business School

Website Link: testparty.ai

Industry: Technology, Software

MBA Founding Student Name(s): Michael Bervell, MBA 2024

Brief Description of Solution: TestParty is a digital accessibility compliance platform that enables companies to create accessible digital experiences for people with physical and situational disabilities. Powered by AI, our platform helps businesses comply with global accessibility guidelines efficiently and effectively.

Funding Dollars: $4,000,000

What led you to launch this venture? My cofounder and I launched TestParty because of our first-hand frustrations with the digital accessibility technology market. Jason Tan (my cofounder) was at Twitch when they were sued for digital accessibility violations. He saw firsthand how organizations struggled to create inclusive online experiences, particularly after Twitch faced a lawsuit for accessibility issues. In researching solutions, we discovered that accessibility lawsuits were an industry norm, with more than $370 million paid in damages and settlements over the last five years. The Internet has grown so fast that society has blown past the guardrails that would help differently-abled people enjoy the benefits of successfully using popular digital tools. I had seen this first-hand while working as an accessibility consultant at Google before business school and at the United Nation during business school. TestParty helps companies reduce their costs and provide an additional option to achieve compliance. Instead of only hiring specialized consultants who charge upwards of $300 an hour, we believe that any existing engineer can be upskilled through AI to write accessible code.

What has been your biggest accomplishment so far with venture? My greatest business accomplishments always have to do with the end-users that our product serves. Earlier this year, we began working with a 10,000-student university in California. They had a low-vision student enter their university who required every PDF document to be screen reader compatible. Unfortunately, before us, the price for this ranged from $3-$10 per page and took weeks. For the student, this meant that if they received an assignment, they would often have to wait for two weeks to read it! Over the last three months, using our PDF-to-Accessible-HTML conversion tool, these students’ professors have been using TestParty to create accessible homework assignments, textbooks, and tests. In short, we’re building tools that allows students to go to school and participate in the classroom. Traditionally, the six-year graduation rate for students with disabilities is 50%. Our key metric for success is increasing this metric by increasing access.

What has been the most significant challenge you’ve faced in creating your company and how did you solve it? In the past, startups and technologies have entered the accessibility market by overpromising while underdelivering. Because of false positives and false advertising, many accessibility experts are skeptical of new technology that claims to “do-it-all” through automation. This is especially true because so much of digital accessibility is contextual. As we’ve grown, our biggest challenge has been to balance the AI hype with the reality of what AI can do. We’re not just trying to build a product that solves a problem, we’re trying to change a mindset and inspire a new movement: digital accessibility should be baked into the software development lifecycle from the start. Just as security has “shifted-left” earlier in development to pre-production, we’re building a case that accessibility should be the same.

How has your MBA program helped you further this startup venture? TestParty is a uniquely HBS startup. It was born in HBS dorms and incubated during the Rock summer fellowship (with HBS funding). Our first mentors were HBS alumni and even our investors came through the iLab network. More broadly, my MBA program gave me the time, freedom, and structure to explore this startup in an environment of gracious criticism and candor.

What founder or entrepreneur inspired you to start your own entrepreneurial journey? How did he or she prove motivational to you? My grandmother was the first entrepreneur in my life. One of my earliest memories of my grandmother is her tiptoeing into my bedroom while I was asleep. Startled by the figure moving in the dark, she crouched on all fours and reached under my bed to grab a handful of my old teddy bears. My jaw dropped as she slowly disappeared back into the hall. Why was my grandma taking my teddy bears!?

I later found out the motivation behind her uncharacteristic actions. Whenever my grandmother went back home to Ghana, she would take suitcases full of toys to kids in orphanages, schools, and hospitals. It was her small way of giving back. When she passed away due to preventable causes, I (along with my brother and sister) was devastated and to honor her memory we created “Hugs for Ghana,” an international student-run non-profit. It still runs to this day, 18 years later, and is the basis of what “social impact” means to me. My grandmother showed me that “social impact” is created through small and repeated actions of genuine kindness. At TestParty, we bring this to customers, end-users, and employees by practicing deep empathy and building tools to create a habit of accessibility.

Which MBA class has been most valuable in building your startup and what was the biggest lesson you gained from it? While at HBS, I took a ton of entrepreneurship classes from Jeff Bussgang’s “Launching Tech Ventures” Class to Julia Austin’s “Startup Operations Field Course.” However, most useful were the classes that I audited (i.e. I would just go to class, sit in the back, and listen/learn even though I wasn’t formally enrolled). I “took” a Field Course by John Dionne (the Senior Managing Director at Blackstone) titled “Private Equity Projects and Ecosystems.” It was a fascinating deep dive into the logic behind buying, selling, and creating value in established businesses and ecosystems using leveraged capital. Now that I’m in an industry where my largest competitors are owned by Private Equity funds, this class (and the network from it) has been invaluable in “getting into my competition’s head.” I understand their incentives and limitations in business strategy because I understand the 50+ year history of Private Equity from one of the individuals who crafted the industry. It’s been hugely helpful in developing TestParty’s positioning and growing a new technology product in the established market of digital accessibility consulting.

What professor made a significant contribution to your plans and why? I’ll have to call on one who I met at HBS before my business school experience even started: Professor Steven Rogers. As an undergraduate at Harvard, I sent him a cold email asking to be in his second-year class, “Black Business Leaders and Entrepreneurship.” Because I was running my own consulting business in college, he took a chance on me. The class was eye-opening: it was the first time I had a black professor, and it was a class focused entirely on learning the stories of black protagonists who built billion-dollar companies. This experience is what launched me on my HBS journey and even inspired me to publish a best-selling book on the stories of diverse entrepreneurs during COVID. Unfortunately, Professors Rogers retired before I started at HBS, but he’s always been a mentor and role model to me.

How has your local startup ecosystem contributed to your venture’s development and success? Now, TestParty is headquartered in New York City: running a company here has been incredibly rewarding and valuable. There are several networking events for other founders at our stage which gives a great environment for group learning and collaboration. We have investors in San Francisco and Miami as well, so we truly get a national flow of information as we build our products.

What is your long-term goal with your startup? Since graduating from business school, our company has seen immense growth. We raised a $4m seed round (with funding from the US government, Harlem Capital, the Urban Innovation Fund, and the Kennedy Family); hired 8 employees around the world; and have closed contracts with governments, schools, and F1000s. Our long-term goal is to build a centaur: a company that brings in $100m in annual recurring revenue. As we do this, we’re following the footsteps of security startups like Snyk and Coverity, taking their lessons and applying it to our accessibility business.

Looking back, what is the biggest lesson you wished you’d known before launching and scaling your venture?  One of our core values is that “business is a contact sport.” This means that to see results or growth, you must be in contact: putting things out into the world, seeking out rejection (in pursuit of success), and working like hell to ship and grow as fast as possible. We follow a principle of founder-led sales and radical transparency which means everyone on the team is selling to customers multiple times a week and reviewing each other’s sales calls in addition to building product. Overall, this contact (both internal and external) is what makes the journey rewarding. Especially since every dollar of product we sell translates directly to another life that is able to use technology in a meaningful way.