SAAS Summit 2025: A Celebration of Launches

By: Sarah-Mae McCullough, Editorial Content Manager

This weekend, hundreds of SAAS community members gathered around one theme: “Launch.”

At SAAS Summit and The Big Launch on Saturday, a panel of innovators—all SAAS alumni or parents—shared insights from the companies, movements, and high-impact careers they’ve launched. Then, the crowd headed into our brand-new Home of the Upper School to celebrate the launch of the new building through interactive tours across its five floors. 

If you missed the big day (or want to revisit it), keep scrolling to catch up on with highlights, photos, and videos.

SAAS Summit: Learning from our community of innovators

What does it take to really launch something—a product, a company, a movement, your career—into the future? At our latest Summit, panelists explored this question, swapping stories of entrepreneurship, risk taking, and community building. 

Colleen Echohawk, a SAAS parent, award-winning social justice advocate, and current CEO of Community Roots Housing, hopes to help younger generations “understand the value of community,” she said during the panel. “I’m a moonshot thinker every single time… Part of why I’ve been able to go for it is that I have this community backing me up.” 

“One of the things I love about SAAS is this building of friendship and community and knowing that you have people behind you that have your back,” Colleen said.

 

 

 

 

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We deeply appreciate each of our community members who came together on Saturday and our inspiring speakers who shared their time, insights, and advice: 

• Makenzie Brandon '09: panel moderator, global business strategist, and Associate Director at the consulting firm BTS
• Jamal Crawford: 20-season NBA veteran, 3x NBA Sixth Man of the Year award winner, NBC Sports Lead Analyst, and Advisory Board Member for Champions of Change Foundation
• Colleen Echohawk: award-winning social justice advocate, CEO of Community Roots Housing, Co-Founder of Headwater People Consulting, and Trustee for Seattle Foundation and Seattle Colleges
• Kris Engskov: healthcare leader, Co-Founder and CEO at Rippl, Board Director at Recuro Health, and previous aide to President Bill Clinton and President of Aegis Living
• Austen Holman '04: music artist manager of over 20 years and General Manager at Diamond West Records
• Aimee Johnson: independent C-level consultant, Marketing Advisor at Anthos Capital, Business Mentor at Endeavor, and previous business leader at Zillow and Starbucks
• Andrew Newsome '12: award-winning business leader, Director at Greater Cleveland Partnership, and Co-Founder of Parrish Street Capital
• Aravind Swaminathan: Partner and Global Co-Chair for Cybersecurity and Data Privacy at Orrick, previous Assistant United States Attorney

Learn more about each speaker and their journey here. 

The Big Launch: Experiencing our new building

At The Big Launch following Summit, we celebrated our new Home of the Upper School building and the era it ushers in for SAAS—one where our campus is united on one block, with unprecedented opportunities for students to Question, Imagine, and Create. 

Faculty and staff led interactive tours of the new building, stopping for classroom demos along the way. Beginning in the central, 11,000-square foot courtyard, SAAS parents, alumni, and other community members explored the Innovations spaces, classrooms and seminar rooms, and common areas, before arriving at “Passages,” a vibrant mural created by alum and artist Adrian Brandon ’11.

 

 

 

 

 

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Many were experiencing the building for the first time. 

“What I’ve been impressed with is the diversity of the spaces,” said SAAS parent Kirsten Koester after a tour. “It just looks like a really fun place to learn. The courtyard and the common spaces are really welcoming, and it’s nice to see places where kids can hangout and have time outside of the classroom while still being within the school.”

Tour-takers were also impressed with the expansive Innovations spaces. 

“This new building has been mind blowing for me,” said parent Garrett Bandy, describing the woodshop, metal working studio “and all the new tools in there,” the music production spaces “where you can just drop in and start recording your own music and putting it out there in the world,” and the way architecture, design, and programming students worked together in the new space to create a robot. 

“It's sort of like walking on a college campus,” he said. “If you go to any top college campus in the country, I feel like that's where I am right now.”