We're a group of students from Montessori High School, a school in Cleveland, Ohio.

We’re fascinated by technology and startups. Our goal is to visit young and old tech startups to understand what they do and how they do it. Over the past three years, we’ve independently planned and developed two successful trips to New York City, and one trip to San Francisco / Palo Alto to visit technology companies at all stages of life.

Some of the highlights from our previous trips include:

• Union Square Ventures - A venture capital firm with investments in Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare, to name a few.
• Quirky - An amazing invention company that creates products through interaction between an online global community.
• Fab- An e-commerce company that has grown exponentially in the past two years.  
• Nest Labs - Creators of the first learning thermostat
• Ness Computing Inc. - Makers of the Ness app.
• Stack Exchange - A network of Q/A sites, some of which are in the top 100 websites in the world. 
• Stanford University Law School
• Pebble - E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android.

Along the way we’ve learned a ton and met lots of great people.

This year we are trying to do it again. We'll be spending one week here in Cleveland, working on internal projects and ideas for personal business ventures, then traveling to Chicago to meet with leading professionals to help us bring our ideas to life. 

Wondering how we can do this?

At Montessori High School, every year the school has two week periods called x-terms, these are student planned, organized, and funded projects. Everything is up to the student. The idea behind it is to encourage experiential learning. So far, we have raised over $30,000 to fund these experimental learning terms. 

This project is our fourth take on an x-term, and we’re putting everything we’ve learned into it.