In the late ’90s, Antje Danielson’s son Max and Robin Chase’s daughter Linnea often played together on a tire swing in Cambridge’s Dana Park. As Danielson, a Harvard geochemist, and Chase, an MIT business school graduate turned stay-at-home mom, kept chatting, their casual park encounters grew more profound. Chase started telling Danielson about wanting to put her business degree to good use, about her entrepreneurial ambitions. Danielson spoke of wanting to branch out of academia, a desire that had her, too, mulling entrepreneurship.