This UVA Darden Student’s AI Venture Will Help Us Remember What Matters

The conversations piled up faster than Miaoxin Wang (MBA ’27) could remember them.

It was the spring of her First Year at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business. Rushing from classes to recruiting events, networking sessions and coffee chats, Wang found herself overwhelmed by the sheer volume of interactions. She was struck by how quickly the details slipped away.

“I was just overloaded with information,” says Wang. “Thirty minutes later, I’d usually forget what we discussed, but I’d still feel like there was something valuable I didn’t want to lose.”

This was precisely the kind of routine problem that Wang thought technology ought to be able to solve, yet wasn’t. “I’ve used Notes, Excel, Notion, Obsidian and the CRMs, but they didn’t work,” Wang says.

She spent several months interviewing her MBA classmates and other professionals, testing existing tools and trying to understand why they fell short. What began as a problem she experienced herself proved much broader: People genuinely wanted to stay connected, but context faded, follow-ups slipped and reconnecting grew harder over time. The problem gradually became the foundation for the business she would begin building at Darden.

The result became TendCo Inc., a private AI for professionals that captures, organizes and resurfaces the context people need to reconnect with the right person at the right time. The problem, Wang realized, was rarely remembering a person’s name. It was remembering what mattered about the conversation, why a relationship might matter now and how to continue it naturally. A passing remark during a coffee chat, a shared interest or an offer of help could easily disappear amid dozens of new conversations.

Entrepreneurship in Her Blood

The roots of Wang’s entrepreneurial journey stretch back much further than Darden. Growing up in China, Wang moved frequently as her parents travelled the country building their own business from scratch. Entrepreneurship, you could say, is in her blood.

“The experience of moving,” says Wang, “made me look for that sense of belonging, building community, building really strong relationships with others that can extend across time and geography. That is always top of my mind.”

Wang describes herself as deeply introverted, something that would later make parts of her entrepreneurial journey—particularly selling and pitching—feel far less natural than building products.

But starting a business always felt inevitable. Her father was highly strategic, building an international trading business without speaking any English. Her mother worked alongside him, running operations and communications.

Wang, however, didn’t mean to follow the same path. “I used to think that I wouldn’t be as successful in sales as my father was,” she says. “At the same time, though, I do really enjoy building things in engineering, computer science and human-centered design. So I figured that perhaps I could find my own way.”

Her path eventually took Wang to the United States, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in computer science from the University of Michigan. After graduating, she worked as a software engineer at the deals site Groupon.

Wang’s experience led her to ask larger questions regarding the products she was building: What real problems were they addressing and why should those products exist at all? As she puts it, “Product managers and designers would give me the specifications, and I was just really curious, thinking why?”

Her curiosity led her to obtain a master’s degree in human-centered design and engineering from the University of Washington and then to take up a position in user research at Google in Seattle.

By then, Wang had developed both technical and human-centered perspectives on products, but she wanted to obtain the business and strategic skills needed to take an idea from product to company. A conversation with her Google manager eventually nudged her toward an MBA.

Wang wasn’t convinced she belonged in business school—at least, not at first. “I was extremely socially anxious,” she says. “I just thought, ‘I’m not an extrovert, can I survive?’ I realized, OK, I can try, especially at Darden, where the case method can help me practice on the spot.”

The attraction of the case method was the chance to hear the same problem considered from dozens of different perspectives, something Wang believed would make her a better founder.

“With the same concept or statement, people with different backgrounds will interpret it differently, so I want to hear how others digest the same thing,” she says.

Rather than stay on the West Coast, Wang enrolled at Darden, hoping to step outside what she saw as a tech bubble.

Darden’s Draw for an Aspiring Founder

Darden’s Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, together with its flagship i.Lab Incubator, a 10-week summer program that helps founders turn ideas into market-ready businesses, also helped set the school apart from other top MBA programs that she was considering.

“Darden was a one-stop shop for everything I wanted,” says Wang. “This is the perfect place for me to branch out of my tech bubble.”

Wang plans to pursue entrepreneurship full-time after graduating from Darden, considering advances in AI as an opportunity for small teams to build products and tackle problems in ways which were not possible before.

In the summer after her First Year, Wang joined the i.Lab, a rigorous, experiential-learning program that pushed her to confront the part of entrepreneurship she had always avoided: selling. “I knew I needed to learn how to sell, but at the same time, the introvert part of me just kept pulling me back,” she says.

One lesson, delivered by Entrepreneur-in-Residence Jacki Thompson (MBA ’10), stuck: “If you are not selling, you are just playing entrepreneurship.”

Wang wrote the line on a sticker and pinned it to her wall.

Building the Skills for Success

While her father built a business through sales and negotiation; Wang initially doubted she possessed either skill. The note challenged a long-held assumption that she wasn’t cut out for sales.

“I thought I wouldn’t be an entrepreneur like my father,” she says, “but I guess this summer’s experience at the i.Lab changed me a little bit. I’m trying to learn all this.”

Watching classmates and mentors also changed Wang’s perspective on what it takes to become a confident communicator. “I initially thought, ‘Oh, they’re just good at it.’ But once I talked to them, they always tell me, ‘Just practice. You don’t know how much effort I’ve put into it.’”

Wang threw herself into the practice. “I was basically practicing right after I woke up, while eating lunch, driving and before going to bed. I know once I get anxious, my mind will go blank, so I keep practicing until I feel confident about it.”

Over time, Wang says, she also reframed failure itself. “I treat every interaction as a chance to learn and then set failure as a goal. That framing can help me relieve my anxiety a little bit.”

Wang’s background in software engineering and user research now shapes her approach to AI as a founder. Rather than replace human judgment, she believes AI can strengthen it when designed properly.

Creating More Value From Conversations

For Wang, forgotten conversations are not simply a productivity problem. They are missed opportunities to nurture relationships, build trust and support other people.

That belief sits at the heart of TendCo. As the company has taken shape, Wang has also looked beyond computer science, seeking expertise from a range of fields.

She sought input from Adrienne Wood, a psychology professor who leads the Emotion and Behavior Lab at UVA. She also spoke with researchers across psychology, decision science and organizational science to shape the system’s design.

“I was trying to figure out how I can design this system in a way that can offer value instead of destroying the human judgment,” she says.

Rather than treating relationships as contacts to be managed, Wang hopes TendCo will help professionals preserve the context that so often disappears between conversations, while keeping people in control of what that context means.

She says the system separates facts from personal interpretations and from what the AI believes would be helpful, allowing users to return to the original evidence as their judgments evolve over time.

“That human side, along with critical thinking and judgment, is so important,” she says.