Stephanie Golik remembers questioning whether she would succeed. Today, she tells her mentees to pursue what feels “truly energizing” and give themselves “permission to figure it out.”
Golik, who graduated from Northeastern University in 2015, has since pivoted her career from architecture to product design and serial entrepreneurship. She previously led a product design team at Cruise, a self-driving car company, and raised $3.5 million for her own startup, Huddle, which she sold in 2024.
Recently, Golik won first prize in the “AI and Technology” category at the 2025 Women Who Empower Innovator Awards for her latest venture, Frontflip — an AI companion for real estate investors.
“We’ve spent the past six or so months really building this product that we’re super proud of,” Golik says. “We’re really trying to build a solid business and product on our own, so getting visibility and a grant is kind of the dream. It helps us get off the ground. It helps us through this next phase without having to get distracted with trying to fundraise right now.”
The Innovator Awards recognize Northeastern students, graduates and affiliated entrepreneurs seeking to make an impact in fields such as health, technology, sustainability and social innovation. Over the past five years, Women Who Empower has invested more than $1.8 million in the winners as they build and grow their ventures.
Frontflip is designed for individual investors, Golik says, interested in the real estate market. Users can search properties by address across the U.S. and instantly see an at-a-glance report on value creation opportunities.
The AI component pulls unstructured data from multiple sources, Golik says, and turns it into a digestible summary of investment scenarios, including investment advice based on home details and neighborhood trends.
“There’s a million stock tools,” Golik says. “There’s a lot of real estate apps that just help you think about finding properties. But there is none when it comes to accessing the potential return as an investor, without digging for a lot of information.”
Currently available through a website and iOS app, Frontflip offers a free version for checking a limited number of properties and a low-fee subscription that unlocks unlimited reports. Golik says the platform is ideal for investors with between zero and about 50 properties.
Golik’s entrepreneurial spirit has roots in her upbringing. She grew up in Miami in a highly entrepreneurial family — her father founded businesses, she says, and her siblings started ventures from their home.
“I loved all of the creative energy of starting things, but never felt like I was a business person,” Golik says about herself. “I had this disconnect because I was always creative. I was always designing and painting, and felt that my identity was creative, and it took me some time to merge those two things.”
In 2010, she came to Northeastern to study architecture.
“Architecture helped me navigate that also, because architecture is such a creative profession that meets a lot of business constraints,” Golik says. “That’s the intersection that I really enjoy.”
However, doing co-ops in architectural firms revealed she didn’t enjoy the work.
“I found myself not really loving it,” she says. “The Northeastern co-op program helped me figure out for myself that I wasn’t on the exact right career path while I was still in school.”
After graduating, Golik moved to New York City and gave herself six months to either start her own architecture firm or pursue entrepreneurship, which she felt more excited about.
“Part of having the confidence to go and change paths was me coming around to who I am and what I actually like and being confident in that this is what I like, and it’s also what I’m best at,” Golik says. “I’m not the best building designer, but I think I’m really good at figuring out a solution with creative constraints. So that reflection helped me take those six months really seriously.”
She decided she could work at startups to gain experience before starting a company of her own. She found internships and entered her idea into the NYC BigApps contest, a web and mobile applications competition sponsored by the New York City Economic Development Corp. Through the contest, she met a developer who helped her build her first app and launch it in the App store.
“I had to create my own portfolio, because no one was going to pay me to design something for them [because] I had no experience,” Golik says.
By the end of the six months, she had landed her first job as a product designer at a startup studio.
Over the next several years, she rose to leadership roles in product and design at companies including Mapfit, a mapping technology firm, and moved to San Francisco in 2018.
In 2021, Golik left her role as product design manager for fleet at Cruise to start Huddle, a fractional talent marketplace connecting companies with part-time or project-based creative and product leaders. She grew the company from the ground up, raising more than $3.5 million in capital before selling it in 2024.
Ten years after graduation, she is still building design-driven businesses and sharing her journey with others. She even developed an online course, “Go from Designer to Founder,” to help aspiring entrepreneurs make the leap from design roles to company building.
“When you find something that’s actually, truly energizing, — you’re excited to go to work, excited to work on it — you should just figure out how to do that,” she says.
Looking back, Golik sees her Northeastern experience as a turning point.
“During my time in Northeastern I was very unsure if I was going to be successful,” she says. “And so to have it [come] full circle, where Northeastern is telling me, ‘You’re successful,’ was really cool.”