For student founders, balancing the demands of coursework, exams, and campus life during the academic year can make accelerating a business feel like a constant juggling act. Summer offers a critical shift: dedicated, uninterrupted time to focus full-time on turning concepts into viable businesses. For newly graduating seniors, this bridge is especially vital, providing a structured, supported launchpad as they transition into working on their ventures full-time after leaving vlog.
Addressing that need, vlog’s Thought Into Action (TIA) program hosted the 2026 TIA Summer Accelerator. Led by Weiner Family Entrepreneur in Residence Jen Martin, this year’s reframed program evolved to provide intensive, summer-long momentum for advanced TIA Incubator ventures.
The program kicked off on May 11 with an intensive, four-day on-campus bootcamp before transitioning to a remote format through August 7. Equipped with $8,000 non-dilutive grant funding, structured weekly checkpoints, and tailored alumni mentorship, three standout ventures spent three months weeks testing assumptions, growing networks, and driving tangible business outcomes.
Here is how three of vlog’s student-led ventures turned ambition into action this summer.
PLNT: Precision Agricultural Analytics for Commercial Nurseries
Founder: Porter Comstock ’26
For commercial tree and plant nurseries managing vast acreage, accurately tracking inventory and plant health is a complex operational challenge. PLNT provides a precision solution using aerial drone imagery combined with custom machine learning models to automate plant counting and species identification.
- Summer Highlights and Milestones: Over the course of the accelerator, PLNT successfully validated its technical models at active test sites, achieving high precision in both large-scale automated plant counting and species identification across extensive commercial acreage. To support this technical momentum and streamline model training workflows, Porter brought on new team members with expertise in data science and machine learning.
- Key Business Progress: Porter drafted and presented commercial contract terms to early partner operations, establishing dynamic monthly and seasonal pricing tiers. To support scaling, PLNT brought on dedicated engineering talent to accelerate model training workflows.
- Looking Ahead: PLNT is embarking on an ambitious 90-day expansion targeting 13 key commercial nursery clients across California and the Central Valley, leveraging industry trade shows to build a strong sales funnel.
Startups are ultimately a matter of allocating labor, time, and capital. Moving fast and setting clear expectations with both customers and engineers made all the difference this summer.”
— Porter Comstock ’26
Oasis Running: Performance Apparel for the Next Generation of Runners
Founder: Andrew Sullivan ’26
Oasis Running is a performance athletic apparel brand dedicated to elevating the run experience through high-quality speedsuits, tights, shorts, and custom team gear.
- Summer Highlights and Milestones: Andrew strengthened the brand’s business foundation for long-term durability, establishing a new LLC, dedicated corporate banking, QuickBooks tracking, and streamlined payment processing.
- Sales and Marketing Traction: Through targeted outreach to track clubs and an active content creation campaign, Oasis Running tripled its monthly sales baseline, pushing toward a $10,000+ revenue milestone in August. Andrew executed an action-packed trip to New York City to capture content for a professional marketing campaign.
- Key Learnings: The summer provided a hands-on crash course in supply chain economics, gross margin management, direct-to-consumer content strategy, and raw supplier negotiation, including direct conversations with major athletic brand corporate reps.
- Looking Ahead: Oasis is gearing up for a complete website overhaul, expanding its product line into an all-in-one wardrobe arsenal, and planning a sourcing trip to China, ahead of long-term goals surrounding the 2028 Olympic trials.
Running a business is the most rewarding work I’ve ever done. This summer helped me move past the fear of putting content out there and showed me that athletes aren’t just buying clothes, they’re buying an identity.”
— Andrew Sullivan ’26
Circulate (formerly SoundSync): Socializing Music Discovery
Founder: Sophie Martin ’27
Music discovery is often fragmented across streaming platforms and social media apps. Circulate (rebranded from SoundSync during the summer) is a dedicated social music app designed for close friend circles to share track recommendations, convey moods, and react instantly.
- Summer Highlights and Milestones: After conducting more than 50 deep user interviews to map music discovery pain points, Sophie built and launched a functional demo product, then rapidly grew the initial user base to 181 active target users.
- Iterative Product Development: By carefully studying user drop-off, Sophie optimized onboarding flow, introducing a forced core posting action, a web preview feature, dynamic five-day re-engagement triggers, and a viral “Sonic Twins” feature that automatically notifies friends when they share identical songs.
- Distribution Pivot: Sophie learned firsthand the pitfalls of digital channel spamming (such as link dropping on Reddit and Discord). Pivoting strategy, she shifted toward high-intent, real-world music activations, partnering with local event promoters and organizing outreach at live concerts and music festivals.
- Looking Ahead: Backed by their official brand identity, Circulate is rolling out localized campus promotional campaigns, utilizing flyer drops, custom stickers, and first-year orientation outreach to expand its user base.
I learned to start looking at user data and patterns rather than evaluating the app based solely on intuition. Learning to adapt on the fly when acquisition channels don’t work was one of my biggest takeaways.”
— Sophie Martin ’27
Empowering the Next Generation of Entrepreneurial Leaders
The strides made by PLNT, Oasis Running, and Circulate illustrate the impact of providing young founders with resources, structure, and direct access to alumni advice.
“Watching these founders translate raw ambition into viable, scalable ventures over the course of three months has been extraordinarily inspiring,” Jen Martin said. “When you combine dedicated capital and structured guidance with the deep expertise of our alumni network, the rate at which student entrepreneurs adapt, execute, and achieve real-world traction is truly remarkable. This cohort proved that with the right ecosystem behind them, young leaders don't just test ideas — they build lasting momentum.”
Whether student entrepreneurs are building precision AI software, building supply chains, or launching consumer platforms, the TIA Summer Accelerator provides a transformative space to take real risks, learn from real outcomes, and accelerate professional growth.
Thank You to Our Alumni Mentors and Supporters
The growth achieved by our student founders this summer would not be possible without the generous support, time, and insights provided by our dedicated network of vlog alumni mentors. We would particularly like to thank Andres Echenique ’83, Brian Horey ’82, Kim Schafer ’92, and Per Sekse ’78 for their unwavering commitment, as well as the many others who shared their time and expertise with our teams.