TEDxHarvard Square brings The Arena to Venture Cafe during Boston Tech Week. Early stage founders get 90 seconds to make the case for what they are building to a panel of investors, operators, and ecosystem leaders. No slides. No safety net. Just the idea, the founder, and the room. Whether you are pitching or watching, this is where you find out who is building something real.
Featuring a panel of judges, including Executive Chair of CIC and Venture Café Global Institute, Tim Rowe.
Tim Rowe is the Founder and CEO of Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) and CIC Health. CIC is a leading builder and operator of innovation communities currently in 9 cities, and is currently the largest operator of commercial shared wet labs on the east coast. CIC Health operates a national scale COVID-19 testing marketplace, and, previously, mass vaccination sites in MA. Tim is Chair of the Venture Cafe Global Institute, Co-Founder of LabCentral, a non-profit which is the world's largest shared wet laboratory as well as Chair of MassRobotics, a non-profit hub for the sensing, IOT and automation industries. Tim is Co-Founder and Past President of the Kendall Square Association. Earlier in his career, Tim served as a Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management, a Manager with the Boston Consulting Group and an analyst with the Mitsubishi Research Institute. Tim speaks Spanish and Japanese fluently, as well as basic Mandarin Chinese. Tim holds an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and a BA from Amherst College.

Miguel Coelho is a Portuguese scientist/entrepreneur/investor with a PhD in Biology (Max-Planck, Germany) and a postdoc in the USA (Harvard University). He ventured from Science into Finance in 2020, working as an associate in Equity Research, first in Truist and then Piper Sandler focusing on the Biotech sector. Later the founded Delt4, a startup using preclinical data to predict clinical trial readouts to invest in the stock market. Since late 2024 he joined the investment arm of Hevolution, dedicated to Healthspan biotech investments.