The client need.
TREEHUB is a Los Altos-based venture capital residency program investing in the next generation of innovation in healthcare startups. Moving into a new space, they faced an impossible-to-ignore, expansive blank wall. Goals were to reflect their colorful brand identity, inspire creativity without distracting from focused collaboration, unify a long architectural floor plan, and honor the local, community-rooted spirit behind their launch, in a bold, modern way.
The creative solution.
The design translates TREEHUB’s identity into abstraction. DNA-inspired shapes reference the healthcare and biotech thread of their portfolio, rendered in organic, flowing forms that feel alive rather than clinical. Upward-sweeping triangular forms, growing wider at its base, draw from the energy of a rocket at liftoff: a visual metaphor for the momentum, growth, and optimism at the heart of their teams and of early-stage investment. The circuit board motifs are painted in the same color as the ceiling and trim. These quietly dissolve into the architecture, a deliberate metaphor: innovation is everywhere and interconnected. TREEHUB’s brand colors move across the full length of the wall in bold, overlapping fields, pulling the floor plan together and making the whole corridor feel like one unified environment.
The founding activation.
When the TREEHUB team asked to incorporate the handprints of their founding investors and partners, the challenge was making it feel intentional rather than incidental.
The redwoods provided the answer. California's coastal redwoods are the living backdrop to Stanford's campus and the hills that have shaped Silicon Valley's identity for generations. For a room full of founders with deep ties to the university, painting themselves into a redwood grove wasn't a gesture, it was a homecoming.
Redwoods also survive by intertwining their root systems underground, each tree held up by the ones beside it. That's early-stage investing. That's a founding team.
At the launch party, the mural became an artifact of the evening. Mikaela facilitated the brand activation directly: guiding founders, investors and guests through pressing their hands into the paint.
