Meet Nicki Boyd of VersaMe, a Silicon Valley-based startup. We sat down to speak with her about her entrepreneurial journey and how she and her two co-founders founded VersaMe, a wearable tech company. VersaMe means talk to me and we talk to Boyd about their first product -Starling.  This is the first time Boyd is working in a tech startup and that too a hardware one, which has its own set of challenges. She shares how they started developing their Starling product out of a Sharpie pen cap before graduating to a 3D printed one and then brought in an industrail designer to finish their product.

Starling targets new-born babies and helps develop their brain. “Think of it like a Fitbit for words,” is how Boyd describes their product. 80% of a new-born baby’s brain development takes place in the first 4 years of its life points out Boyd. The way Starling works is the baby wears it and Starling counts the number of words they hear and gives feedback to the parents. Starling is the first wearable tech that tracks your word and targets the brain development of kids in their first 1,000 days is how Boyd put it.

Boyd studied phycology at Oxford University and worked in the world of private equity in London for a few years. And then she relocated to Silicon Valley to pursue her MBA at Stanford University, which is where she met her co-founders Jon and Chris Boggiano. The Boggianos studied at West Point and served in the army before they began their entrepreneurial journey.