Startup Stories: Organizing Calendars with AI

To mark the 10-year anniversary of Yale SOM’s Program on Entrepreneurship, we’re checking in with alums who benefitted from the program’s resources when launching their ventures.

Bridgette Farrer Muir ’15 came to Yale SOM knowing exactly what she wanted from her MBA education: to get the skills and experiences she needed to build a startup. As a student, she focused on entrepreneurial coursework and served as president of the Startup & Entrepreneurship Club.

But perhaps the most impactful moment of her SOM career came when Jennifer McFadden, the associate director of Yale SOM’s Program on Entrepreneurship, introduced her to Brad Hargreaves, a Yale College graduate and founder of the tech training company General Assembly, who was then launching a co-living entity called Common. Muir was the second hire and stayed for five years, helping the company become the leading designer and operator of shared apartments nationally.

It was an invaluable apprenticeship in launching a new venture. “I joined Common to shadow Brad,” she said. “You don’t get that many opportunities to work with a repeat founder.”

Muir says she learned that founders must “be so, so, so, so deeply interested in the problem they are trying to solve—or else you quit. It’s just way too hard and relentless to try to make yourself care about something you don’t care about.”

For her, that problem was planning. “I love staring at my calendar,” Muir says. “It’s the only place I can see the future.”

In 2021, Muir founded Arrange, an AI-powered assistant that reads a user's calendar and makes smart recommendations based on their existing plans. When she started the company on her own, the platform offered pre-loaded templates for special occasions. Today, she and two colleagues are incorporating ChatGPT into their product so that it make more complicated plans by breaking down an event’s component parts and adding them to a user’s calendar. The company has raised $1.2 million in funding from institutional VCs and individual angel investors—including some of Muir’s SOM classmates—and recently won a Product of the Day award from the technology review platform Product Hunt. The team foresees myriad opportunities with advertisers who could place custom ads on users’ calendars based on upcoming events.

“The calendar is the final frontier unpenetrated by brands,” she says. “We perceive our long-term opportunity to be offering marketers the ability to connect with their audiences in a new way that is extremely timely and relevant.”

Muir says she would not be in the position she is today without her time at SOM, citing courses with LaunchCapital founder Elon Boms ’07 and the late David M. Cromwell, as well as connections she made with other students. She calls her time there the “macro domino” for the career that followed.

“Had I not gone to SOM, it goes without saying I would be doing something completely different,” she says. “I knew what I wanted, and I came and got that.”