Hussam Ayyad Joins Highline Beta as Chief Accelerator Officer
We’re excited to announce that Hussam Ayyad has joined Highline Beta as Chief Accelerator Officer. Hussam brings considerable executive-level experience designing, launching and running startup accelerator programs and strategic partnerships for organizations such as the DMZ and Communitech, in addition to various other work in the tech ecosystem. He’s dedicated much of his professional career to helping founders build and scale their startups, while also bringing in the corporate connectivity.
An entrepreneur himself, Hussam understands what it takes to build a new startup, find product-market fit and grow. His network extends across North America and globally, with founders and entrepreneurs, investors and corporate partners. At the DMZ, Hussam built its full-suite of programs and ran over 20 Accelerator cohorts. Those cohorts included the DMZ’s flagship growth accelerator program as well as different corporate accelerators, which helped hundreds of early stage startups build scalable business models, become investible and raise considerable capital.
Highline Beta’s accelerator business continues to grow and have meaningful impact. We’ve worked with companies including Anheuser-Busch InBev (case study), RBC, Intuit (case study) and Aviva to help them develop a comprehensive and successful startup partnership strategy through our Pilot Program Accelerators. We’ve launched programs such as Station FinTech Accelerator to work in specific verticals (FinTech / InsurTech) with a group of corporate partners and are exploring additional accelerators in areas such as 5G. Our approach focuses on executing pilots, which is one of the hardest things for big companies and startups to do.
“As a rapidly growing company with a solid track record in seed stage investing and helping the Fortune 1000 discover new growth horizons, Highline Beta is uniquely positioned to offer transformative accelerators that can unlock immense value to startups and corporations at a global scale and across myriad industries. I’m excited for the opportunity to work with an incredible and accomplished team, as well as our corporate partners who entrusted us with their growth innovation endeavors.”
Hussam Ayyad
In his new role, Hussam will take on a leadership position in growing our accelerator business. He will bring his deep experience into developing our pilot program accelerator model and making sure we deliver the right results to our corporate clients and the startups we work with. His years of advising startups on numerous topics and his penchant for connecting dots will bring our accelerator program execution to the next level.
“I’m passionate about helping founders build and scale their companies globally. And I believe many of the world’s next generation companies and innovations will grow and come to existence with corporate support and partnerships. There are extraordinary entrepreneurs who are creating commercializable cutting-edge technologies who are seeking the best avenues for such partnerships; and Highline Beta is ideally placed to deliver on that.”
Our accelerator business is a key component of Highline Beta’s overall strategy to help corporations innovate more quickly and successfully. We fundamentally believe in the importance of growth beyond the core, and the need for big companies to take a portfolio approach to how they innovate. Hussam’s addition to the team means we will be able to double down on our pilot program accelerator model and create more value for our corporate clients and startups.