The Team

The MuseTrek team is a diverse group of entrepreneurs, students, educators, and cultural enthusiasts from four continents. Collectively, we were no longer satisfied with simply observing cultural venues or accepting the traditional wisdom on what culture is, or ought to be. Instead, we now seek a conversation; we want to participate in creating culture.

Our Story

Right after his army service in the IDF, Mishy Harman took a trip to Rome to see a free Simon and Garfunkel concert. Strolling between piazzas and churches, he got slightly dizzy from the never-ending quantities of Renaissance art. Hoping to relax, he picked up a copy of Dan Brown’s Angels and Demons and embarked on city-side trek following the unraveling mystery. And Rome came alive.

When he returned to Jerusalem, Mishy and his best friend Roee Gilron met over a Friday afternoon plate of hummus and wondered how and why Dan Brown had made Rome to fun. This was when MuseTrek was first conceived. They then birthed and nurtured the idea in Harvard University’s Idea Translation Lab in the fall of 2007 under the guidance of Harvard Professor David Edwards together with Tarik Umar, Hezzy Smith, Christophe Huguenin and Aviva Presser. David’s relentless energy and passion pushed the team to adjust the idea, reach out to museums, artists, and cultural consultants.

MuseTrek was further developed in the Idea Translation Lab Workshop at Edwards' Le Laboratoire ArtScience Space in Paris, in the summer of 2008. It greatly benefited from the participation and ongoing collaboration of design students and teachers from Strate College led by Dominique Sciamma, David Ferre, Alejandro Ratier and Juan-Pablo Naranjo. At that time MuseTrek was first tested in a preliminary experiment at the Louvre.

In the fall of 2008 Bill Jacobson of TechPoint Ventures in Boston joined MuseTrek as founding CEO to form the company and explore the business potential of MuseTrek’s concepts together with the original founders. With his expertise and prior experience with internet start-ups, Bill took a good idea, and made it into a real business. MuseTrek continued to grow through the spring of 2009 with museum partnerships formed by Noemie Tassel in France, iPhone application development by Cashman Andrus, and the Internet technology platform of Imperial Consulting, Inc. Noemie was able to secure critical partnerships, as well as grants that gave MuseTrek public visibility. Among those partners were the Louvre, the Pompidou Center, the Cite des Sciences and various other Parisian cultural institutions. The collective efforts resulted in a major public experiment at the Louvre in April 2009, in partnership with Edwards' Le Laboratoire and the Cloud Foundation in Boston.

From his home in Florianopolis, Brazil, Cashman created a wonderful iPhone application, and brought his years of experience and MIT education to supervise the entire development work of MuseTrek. Recently, MuseTrek has ventured into exciting partnerships with other institutions in both Boston and Israel.

The Cloud Foundation, led by Carrie Fitzsimmons, assumed partial ownership of MuseTrek in 2009 and invited urban teens from Boston Public Schools to participate in the company's development as part of its newly-announced ArtScience Prize. Continuing Strate College’s involvement, Michael Harboun and Manon Ely worked to design our new look during an internship in Boston. The creators of MuseTrek, including Harman, Gilron, Edwards, Tassel, Jacobson, Andrus, and the Boston teens embody the spirit of MuseTrek as a socially-engaged, grassroots, international organization aiming to put the world's cultural heritage into the creative minds that will shape and define the 21st century.