As part of our ongoing series on art and entrepreneurship at MIT, we spotlight new start-up Trill founded by MIT student Kathleen Stetson.
What do you do on a Friday night when the choices are endless? Enter Trill, a new tech start-up out of MIT’s Sloan School of Management that brings to your fingertips all the most current information on Boston’s performing arts events—from music to theater to dance. The goal, says founder Kathleen Stetson, “is to be the Kayak for live shows.” In other words, Trill speedily aggregates a host of information from a variety of sources—all so users are spared sifting through innumerable listings to find a fun thing to do over the weekend.
Stetson, a former opera singer and acoustical engineer, began developing the site when she realized that a single platform didn’t exist for people to find good shows of all genres in the area. “Most people have omnivorous tastes,” she says, “They’d see chamber music one weekend and Beyonce the next.” With Trill, users scroll through genres and mediums in a platform that’s both searchable and personalized. The site is currently in beta, and soon, similar to Netflix’s “If you like X, you might also like Y” algorithm, it makes recommendations based on users’ preferences on other sites such as Spotify, Facebook, and iTunes. The site, Stetson hopes, will be a resource for Boston’s diverse and vibrant art scene, banishing boring nights at home for good.