The best measure of a founder is how much she can get done with limited resources. By this metric, Bryanne Leeming is outstanding. A couple of years ago she had a paper prototype and vague hopes for a Kickstarter program. Now she has a sleek physical product that works and is likely to get built. She has the software to make it valuable and she’s completed a successful Kickstarter campaign. 3000 kids have played with Splat, the device and software Bryanne has built to encourage physically active...
Jan 31, 2018•33 min•Season 2Ep. 3
Jay Singh co-founded ViralGains which is on Deloitte’s Fast 500 list of North America’s fastest growing tech companies. Still working on the marketing technology space, he has founded Clear Coin, a company hoping to apply distributed ledger technology to making digital advertising more accountable. He chose a token sale as a way of acquiring the resources needed to build his new company and seems to be off to a great start. Jay Singh’s is the first Founder Focus interview on Angel Invest Boston....
Jan 31, 2018•20 min•Season 2Ep. 3
The way cancer is treated is about to change. Close monitoring during treatment will become possible, telling us within days with much greater precision if a treatment is working or not. Long-term monitoring of patients in remission will also be revolutionized by making fewer biopsies necessary and detecting relapses much earlier. All these promises come from the technology developed in the lab of Çağrı [Cha-ree] Savran at Purdue University that is being commercialized in Savran Technologies. Th...
Jan 17, 2018•49 min•Season 2Ep. 2
My colleague at Walnut Ventures , Adam de Sola Pool connected me with four promising startups from Poland participating in the MIT Enterprise Forum Poland contest in Cambridge. This created an opportunity to interview four really promising young founders. Being a founder of a startup in a place like Poland where the infrastructure to support new companies is just starting is really challenging. The four young founders have all demonstrated impressive determination to bring their startup’s produc...
Jan 03, 2018•51 min•Season 2Ep. 1
A curious but orderly mind prepared to take advantage of serendipity has taken Adam de Sola Pool on a remarkable journey during his career. His father, Ithiel de Sola Pool, the brilliant political scientist (look up Six Degrees of Separation or Convergence) took young Adam to many different countries. These travels sparked in Adam an interest in geography which led to a job on Wall Street. From Salomon Brothers he went to the EBRD to restructure companies emerging from communism. This grew into ...
Dec 20, 2017•48 min•Season 1Ep. 30
iTunes Podcast Page for Review & Subscribing If you want to get rich and to pass money to your kids, listen closely to Howard Stevenson. Here’s condensed wisdom from the heart of the investing world delivered with dry humor and charm. Professor Stevenson was a co-founder of storied Baupost Group and helped hire its legendary manager Seth Klarman. He began the study of entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School and eventually became HBS’ biggest fundraiser. His book “Wealth & Families” g...
Dec 06, 2017•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 29
At the TEDMED Conference in Palm Springs, CA I had the chance to interview people from interesting startups. These brief interviews will appear in the coming months interspersed with our regular episodes. Chee-Yeun Chung, a neuroscientist from Korea, was captivated by the idea that cures for neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and ALS, could be found by doing experiments on yeast cells. Conventional approaches to neurodegenerative diseases had proved problematic. However...
Nov 29, 2017•34 min•Season 1Ep. 28
Ty Danco is an outlier in a population of outliers. His interests are varied and pursued passionately. He’s founded two fintech companies, he’s invested in a gazillion startups and he’s been a hugely generous advisor to companies, in fact the chief advisor at Techstars. Oh, I forgot to mention he’s an Olympian and also deeply involved with crypto-currencies. In this really meaty interview, Ty and I covered a wide range of topics. He explained his ideas in his affably quirky way. This was a super...
Nov 22, 2017•51 min•Season 1Ep. 28
While in prep school Matt Singer performed at a religious ceremony and became fascinated with the impact his music had on the congregants. This fascination led Matt Singer to major in music at Yale, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude, and to think of how to make a life in music. Matt hit the streets soon after graduating to start his music business. For ten years he built Dawn Treader Production with marquee names such as Paul McCartney, James Earl Jones and the New York Philharmonic. Relying on...
Nov 08, 2017•35 min•Season 1Ep. 27
Bettina Hein is the founder of Pixability, one of the fastest-growing companies in Massachusetts. She was also co-founder of SVOX, a profitable Swiss startup sold to Nuance Communications for $125MM. This record may make her success seem easier to achieve than it was. Bettina Hein overcame numerous obstacles to justify the sobriquet “Fearless Founder”. Learn from her as I did. She is an exemplar of resilience, grace under fire and plain common sense. She also has much to teach us about how a sta...
Oct 25, 2017•41 min•Season 1Ep. 26
Quotes from the podcast: “Every startup investment is folly, but not every folly should be a startup investment…” "How can I eliminate the real follies?" “Banks are dominated by all these rules, and they're extremely risk averse. It's sort of like belt and suspenders, and yet, periodically, their pants fall down.” “Someone who's selling is steeling herself for failure in every phone call…” Sal Daher got a person who knows him really well, his brother in law Martin Aboitiz, to interview him in th...
Oct 11, 2017•52 min•Season 1Ep. 25
Epilogue to the Interview: Martin Aboitiz asked me to add this to the notes: "...I do have a regret though, that I did not mention four names during the interview: Juan Manuel Garcia Carral, my CTO in Intermedia who suggested Healthcare as an industry worthy of application and data integration, Dr. Richard Low of PraxisEMR, who first gave me a picture of the lack of data integration in Healthcare Juan Manuel's suggestion, and my two other founders in Healthjump, Mark Ribeiro (our original CFO) a...
Sep 27, 2017•55 min•Season 1Ep. 24
Super angel Michael Mark and marketing wiz Kathryn Roy take questions on the topic of angel investing. This was recorded before a live audience at gorgeous Babson College, a university dedicated to teaching entrepreneurship. Sal, as usual, finds it hard to keep his opinions to himself! Topics covered include: Recorded on the Beautiful Campus of Babson College, Thanks to Margaret Jones & Nina Block Michael Mark Mini Bio Kathryn Roy Mini Bio Michael Mark on What Angel Investing Is Not – Not th...
Sep 13, 2017•49 min•Season 1Ep. 23
Ed Roberts started the scholarly study of startups. Learn from this brilliant academic pioneer and seasoned investor in Sohu.com and HubSpot about the keys to success in founding a tech company. Along the way you will be entertained and charmed by his most engaging narrative style. He grew up in working-class Chelsea, Massachusetts. At Chelsea High, he received preparation that would allow him to explore the academic delights offered by MIT’s curriculum. Four MIT degrees later he was on the facu...
Aug 30, 2017•1 hr 30 min•Season 1Ep. 22
The collaboration of Ham Lord and Christopher Mirabile, two of Boston’s most consequential super angels, is widely admired. Its most visible fruit is the success of Launchpad Venture Group, which they manage together. In this revealing interview, they let us in on how this winning collaboration came to be and what keeps it productive as it approaches the end of its first decade. Christopher Mirabile and Ham Lord are already familiar to our listeners. Each has been interviewed individually on ear...
Aug 16, 2017•55 min•Season 1Ep. 21
Writing software never seemed like work to young Ham Lord. In high school and then in college, coding is what got him rolling with his other courses; he loved it. This passion, and the happy coincidence of being at the right place (Brown University) at the right time (early 1980s) led to a brilliantly productive career in computing and entrepreneurship. Ham’s early work in computer graphics would eventually lead to innovation in applying 3D imaging to the creation of new molecules. Later he help...
Aug 02, 2017•46 min•Season 1Ep. 20
The family of Wan Li Zhu did not see a future in China. His parents, persecuted by the one-party state, came to America when Wan Li was ten years old. China’s great loss became America’s brilliant gain. Wan Li benefited from high-quality public education at Bronx High School of Science and went on to a perfect grade-point average at MIT. He studied under renowned quant wiz Andrew Lo and was poised for a career on Wall Street but was lured away by the prospect of hands-on responsibility for produ...
Jul 19, 2017•37 min
Two brilliant scholarship kids became friends at Georgia Tech and went on to found a company that could change the world. This is the story of Matthew Stellmaker and Keith Hearon and of the good chemistry manifested in their friendship and in the creation of new polymers friendly to people and nature. The idea came to Matthew when he was working at a large company that produces 50,000 tons of citrus waste per year. His friend Keith thought that he could do something interesting with the citrus r...
Jul 05, 2017•39 min
Tivan Amour is reinventing how urban bikes are designed and sold. This is a tall order. The competition is ferocious. Wise counsel is justifiably skeptical of the possibility of success in this endeavor. Yet, Tivan is gaining traction with his approach. He may be defying the odds. This young repeat founder bristles with energy but is also capable of contemplation. He is a growth hacker familiar with the Socratic Dialogue. He is hugely ambitious yet generous with the less fortunate. It was great ...
Jun 21, 2017•52 min
Armon Sharei wants to train our immune system to fight cancer. We hear a lot of claims like this, however when a mega-pharmaceutical company like Roche inks a $500 million deal to work on it, we pay attention. At age 29, Armon convinced not only Roche but gimlet-eyed VCs to back him. How did he do this? How did he go from a boy living in Iran to being one of the stars of MIT’s storied Langer Lab? Part of Armon’s secret is the ability to explain thickly complex ideas in accessible language that d...
Jun 07, 2017•45 min
Still in his forties, David Chang seems to have a lifetime of achievement behind him. Six startup exits, stints with TripAdvisor, PayPal and Goldman Sachs as well as close connections in the world of VCs give David a most informed perspective on startups. In this candid and instructive interview, David highlights the dos and don’ts of tech startups in clear and engaging prose. He provides a wealth of suggestions on how to approach markets and technologies. He immigrated to America from Taiwan as...
May 24, 2017•47 min
It is rare that we hear reports from the frontiers of technology expressed so lucidly and accessibly by a real insider. This gem of an interview rewards the listener with Jay Batson’s sensible and eloquently expressed explanations of the pitfalls of building products and companies. Jay recounts how angel investing taught him things he wishes he had known as a founder. He closes with wise words to recent college grads thinking of founding a startup. Jay Batson started out as a land man helping oi...
May 10, 2017•44 min
Growing up in Northern Italy, Arrigo Bodda dreamed of becoming an architect. He chose instead to study law, a handy pre-requisite for a career in human resources in a country where staffing involves a lot of legal work. His corporate career neatly coincided with the emergence of the European Union, a phenomenon that deeply influenced his work and life. After much success in the executive suites of global enterprises, Arrigo now has the opportunity to pursue his passion for design and architectur...
Apr 26, 2017•51 min
Christopher Mirabile is an angel with a plan. This super angel wants to make angel investing more professional and methodical. He comes to this aspiration by way of being a consultant, a corporate lawyer and a CFO of a successful tech company. He is co-managing director of Launchpad Venture Group and sits on numerous boards. He has co-founded Seraf, a platform for tracking angel investments and helping angels become better informed. He is an engaging and thought-provoking interlocutor. Do not mi...
Apr 12, 2017•46 min
Peter Fasse has patents in his blood. He comes from a family of patent attorneys. He is a highly respected partner at Fish & Richardson, the storied Boston-based (now global) firm that represented Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers. Peter’s work continues that tradition by representing some of the leading technological innovators of today. Peter also invests as an angel in technology companies. In this practical and accessible conversation he revealed valuable insig...
Mar 29, 2017•55 min
Gong Ke came to America at age 13 with little English. Yet, barely a decade later she had graduated in computer science from MIT and was working at one of America’s iconic startups. Later she started her own consumer company which achieved impressive growth. While doing all this she also married and had three children. Google and Harvard Business School followed. She now works full time at Trip Advisor while sharing her business building experience with others at Mass Challenge, the Wily Network...
Mar 13, 2017•55 min
Whenever I speak with Kathryn Roy I learn something. I learned a lot when I spent an hour talking to this remarkably incisive thinker. Kathryn has advised some of the most dynamic technology companies of our time including Lotus, Kronos, Phase Forward, IBM, Computer Associates, Avid and Constant Contact. The qualities that make her ideas prized in so many executive suites were in full display during this delightful interview. Here are some quotes from our conversation. “The hardest thing about m...
Mar 01, 2017•1 hr 3 min
As an undergrad at Harvard, Ed Belove hung out with people at the campus radio station that liked to play with computers. This eventually led to a brilliant career that included building software products with the visionary Mitch Kapor at Lotus Development. Ed co-founded a company that greatly expanded the Apple II’s ability to communicate. The company would eventually pivot to supplying the hardware for early Internet services such as CompuServe and AOL. This successful trajectory allowed Ed to...
Feb 15, 2017•1 hr 11 min
How does one go from cleaning chicken droppings in Iowa to being a videographer in Iran to heading one of America’s iconic technology companies? That question only addresses half of Frank Ferguson’s adventurous career; he would eventually co-found and build a remarkably successful business in one of the toughest markets, educational publishing. I spent a bit over an hour in conversation with this idealistic yet intensely practical doer; I could have used another two hours! In Episode 7 of the An...
Feb 08, 2017•1 hr 9 min
Family considerations drove several of Patrick Rivelli’s career choices but did not prevent him from having brilliant triumphs. Success as a consultant was followed by success as an executive. This led him to found his first company and to fund another startup. The most eloquent evidence of his achievements was exiting two biotech startups in eleven years. If you are a seasoned biotech investor, I’m sure that grabbed your attention. Patrick was also instrumental in founding MIT Angels of the Bay...
Feb 01, 2017•1 hr 12 min
