The Hardest Easy Problem: How Helen Knight '20 Built ALCOVE

The problem seemed simple enough: Helen Knight needed a quiet place to work. As a consultant at McKinsey handling confidential client matters, she was stuck between an open-plan office and a studio apartment she shared with her husband. Coffee shops felt inappropriate for sensitive calls. So she did what entrepreneurs do – she started asking questions.

“I wanted to solve that problem for myself,” she says. “Or at least understand why it couldn’t be solved.”

That instinct – to interrogate a problem before reaching for a solution – traces directly back to her time at SOM. “The customer is pretty much the only thing that matters,” she says, describing what she took from the Innovator course during the first year of her MBA. “You need to be solving a real problem. If you are building a solution in search of a problem, you are already starting from the wrong place.”

Knight’s solution is ALCOVE: a network of soundproofed, on-demand phone pods that users can reserve by the hour. Each ALCOVE pod is a compact 4x7 feet and outfitted with a sit-stand desk, leather chair, monitors, and gold-standard acoustic insulation. With locations in Brooklyn and expanding across the country, ALCOVE offers something increasingly rare: guaranteed quiet.

Knight spent years working in nonprofits and politics before a stint at Bridgewater and eventual matriculation to SOM in 2018. She didn’t arrive chasing an MBA so much as chasing SOM specifically: drawn in after meeting three alumnae in DC who became mentors, Knight felt pulled toward SOM as a place where she could grow as a leader. “The more time that I spent in nonprofits and politics, the more I realized I really wanted that rigorous education in management,” she reflects. “And at SOM, there were programs that could be a fit for someone who had a cross-sector background and maybe wanted a cross-sector career in the future.”

During her MBA she worked on an earlier venture – a nonprofit focused on diversity in elected office – through three semesters in Startup Founder Practicum. She also TA’d for Kate Cooney’s Urban Poverty and Economic Development course, an experience that continues to shape how she thinks about ALCOVE’s role in its communities. “We are a brick-and-mortar business in people’s neighborhoods,” she says. Today, ALCOVE actively supports public schools near its locations, builds relationships with local families and small businesses, and collaborates with nonprofits serving the communities where it operates.

When she graduated in 2020, Knight made the choice many SOM students wrestle with: she went into consulting before launching. She is unequivocal that it was the right call: “I still had more to learn, more skills I wanted to develop.” She spent several years at McKinsey before leaving to pursue ALCOVE full-time.

Armed with startup experience, leadership skills, and community knowledge, Knight’s foray into the new business was still rife with challenges. “How hard can it be to make a phone booth available to the public to book and charge some money for it?” she laughs. “As it turns out, incredibly difficult.” Among the biggest surprises: access control – the seemingly simple challenge of securely and easily unlocking a pod for a confirmed reservation. After discovering that no existing solution met their needs, Knight’s team built a proprietary software platform from scratch. They now consult other businesses on it.

“Every time we run into a really hard problem to solve, I feel grateful,” she says. “Really: it’s one more thing that no one else has figured out yet that we are going to figure out. It adds to our stack.”

For Knight, the through-line from nonprofit work to management school to McKinsey to ALCOVE is a stack of skills, relationships, and hard problems solved. Her varied experiences have helped her develop a specific vision for the kind of company she wants to build: a cross-sector model that serves its community as much as its customers.

For students navigating the leap from business school to startup life, Knight offers hard-won perspective: “You will not feel the confidence that you expect to feel early on, and especially when you’re fundraising” she says. “Not feeling it is not a signal that something is wrong.” Her advice: stay curious, do the customer work, and – she says this with genuine conviction – go to therapy.

Knight continues to document startup lessons learned on her Substack, Notes from Seventh Avenue (ALCOVE’s first location). “I try to write down everything I wish I’d known earlier,” she explains. “Building a startup is a personal risk, it's a financial risk, and it's a reputational risk. But if you have the certainty that you will add value to people’s lives if you do it right, that can sustain you during the toughest moments.”

Learn more at reservealcove.com.