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During their time at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School, Cherie Chung MBA/MPP 2024 and Brendan Hellweg MBA/MPP 2024 took numerous business and government classes, and also participated in internships at the World Bank, tech startups, and venture capital firms. In the final year of the joint degree program, they decided to partner for their capstone project: writing a startup business plan.

Their initial startup idea evolved into Holly, a platform that helps public sector organizations recruit and retain employees. Holly offers AI-driven job design, compensation planning, and workforce analysis for local government hiring, helping cities and towns hire better talent, faster.

This spring marks one year since Hellweg and Chung graduated. They recently sat down with the Harvard Innovation Labs to share how they started working on Holly as students, their experience with pivoting and fundraising, and the progress they’ve made in growing their customer base and team.