Invest with Boston's Top Angels: Sal's Syndicates “Their internal users will see that their access time to an instrument goes down. They can get on it sooner, which is counter-intuitive, but it is reality.” What if scientists could plan and run experiments much faster? Meenta’s software platform is making the use of high-end research equipment far more efficient. Co-Founder & CTO Stephan Smith is excited by the massive opportunity his startup is addressing. Highlights include: Sal Daher’s In...
Feb 19, 2020•53 min•Season 4Ep. 4
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Sal's Syndicates Creating new ways to experience startup events has led Oana Manolache to found Introvoke, a streaming service tailored to this growing space. Relying on her work at HP, Oana is getting strong traction from organic growth. A great interview with a compelling immigrant founder. Highlights include: Oana Manolache Bio & Introvoke Introvoke “…we take engagement a step further. So, we have an open chat where people from all over the world star...
Feb 05, 2020•53 min•Season 4Ep. 3
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates Lessons from a failed IPO led Christian Magel to great success in his own businesses. Now he’s built a shared work space applying those valuable lessons. A bravura interview recorded live at Venture Lane Startup Hub. Highlights include: Introduction to the Podcast and the Guest, Christian Magel Christian Magel Bio Sal Daher Explains How Nell Meosky Luo Connected Him to Venture Lane How Venture Lane Came About The Value of Being Mindful About t...
Jan 22, 2020•1 hr 5 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Learn About Sal's Syndicates Making the capture of high school sports video easy and affordable is the mission of Realplay. Founder Justin Real explains the business and his motivations to get into it. Fun and insightful conversation with an energetic and focused founder. Highlights include: Shoutout to Podcast Listener and Walnut Member Erik Bullen for Suggesting Justin Real as a Guest Justin Real Bio What Realplay Does “Getting the video ...
Jan 08, 2020•47 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Investment Syndicates The brilliant son of immigrants discovers a way of identifying and counting bacteria that could upend the world of diagnostics. Listen to this engrossing interview with professor and founder Ed Goluch of QSM Diagnostics. Highlights include: QSM Diagnostics Is What Jeff Behrens Calls a “Scrappy Biotech” Ed Goluch Bio QSM’s Mission: Identify & Quantify Bacteria Present in a Sample in Minutes “No one wants to be the five or ten per...
Dec 25, 2019•1 hr 1 min
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Investment Syndicates How to fund scrappy biotech startups is foremost on Jeff Behrens’ mind. He was CEO if a startup that raised $20 million in funding but not one cent from VCs. An invaluable interview for anyone thinking of starting or investing in a life science company. Highlights include: Jeff Behrens Studied Philosophy at Harvard but Stumbled Upon Entrepreneurship: Renaissance Man for the 21st Century MIT/Harvard Medical School Collaboration, HST,...
Dec 11, 2019•54 min•Season 3Ep. 29
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Tech Angels: Our Syndicates DipJar makes charitable giving fast and compelling. 8,500 devices are deployed to 4,500 clients and the business is set to scale fast. My interview with Chris Selland, CEO was an excellent opportunity to learn more about this exciting company just after I invested. Interview highlights include: Sal Introduces Chris Selland, CEO of DipJar The Story of DipJar DipJar Started Out as an Easy Way to Tip Waiters – But the Economics Did not Work ...
Nov 27, 2019•57 min•Season 3Ep. 28
Learn About Sal's Syndicates: Link to Sal's Syndicate Page Silicon Valley's angel-investing phenomenon Jason Calacanis is our guest. Hear how he turned $700K into a portfolio worth $100 million. We had an inspiring conversation about building companies and investing in them. Highlights include: Sal Daher Introduces Jason Calacanis as his Guest on Angel Invest Boston How Jason Built the Stellar Team that Makes His Success Possible Sequoia Capital Picked Jason Calacanis to Scout for Promising Vent...
Nov 13, 2019•49 min•Season 3Ep. 27
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Click to Learn More Which Founding Teams Succeed? Are Founders Born or Made? Can Innovation Be Crowdsourced? How Many Jobs Do MIT & Stanford Add to the Economy? Blockchain for the Supply Chain? Chuck Eesley, Stanford's Startup Prof Addresses These Questions and More. Highlights include: Introduction Professor Charles Eesley Bio The Traumatic Founding Experience Shivang Dave, PlenOptika & Entrepreneurs in Poor Countries How Chuck Ees...
Oct 30, 2019•1 hr 4 min•Season 3Ep. 26
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates - Get Qualified The need to re-skill is essential for workers confronting AI with obsolescent knowledge. Techstars alum Ace-Up is addressing this problem with a software platform that makes executive coaching more accessible and accountable. Founder Will Foussier opened for us a fascinating window into this important but obscure industry. Highlights include: Will Foussier a young Frenchman who studied in France and Switzerland, had stints at R...
Oct 16, 2019•47 min•Season 3Ep. 25
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Check Out Our Syndicates A professor of entrepreneurship in Paris who discovered a way to use art to help business people think more creatively, Sylvain Bureau met his unlikely collaborator at a wedding. The product of this chance encounter, Art Thinking, has gained acceptance in boardrooms around the world. My sound engineer Raul Rosa really liked this episode. I did too. ESCP Europe, where Sylvain Bureau teaches, is the first business school. It was founde...
Oct 02, 2019•56 min•Season 3Ep. 24
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Click Here to Learn About Our Syndicates Still in his thirties and still working full-time, Phillip Lachman is a leader at Walnut Ventures. How this startup exec finds time to invest as an angel is a remarkable story. Clever, articulate and full of good cheer, Phillip is always a delightful interlocutor. Fun episode! Highlights: How Phillip leverages his angel network and modern means of communication to work full-time and still be an active angel. Phillip’s...
Sep 18, 2019•44 min•Season 3Ep. 23
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates Seasoned entrepreneur Nancy Briefs on her startup’s daring swing at Type 2 diabetes. AltrixBio is creating a pill that simulates the benefit of the best gastric bypass surgery: remission of diabetes in 80 percent of cases. With co-founders Jeff Karp and Ali Tavakoli, she is re-purposing an existing treatment with a great safety profile to address this daunting problem. Highlights include: Nancy Briefs, co-founded 7 companies and managed, or be...
Sep 04, 2019•53 min•Season 3Ep. 22
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Barely two years out of Harvard, founder Ben Pleat of Cobu has owners of premier apartment buildings excited by the community-creating activities that make their properties more desirable places to live. Owners spend heavily on making the physical spaces attractive but are frequently frustrated by tenant turnover that averages 50 per cent per annum. Cobu helps develop a sense of belonging that increases tenant satisfaction and lowers t...
Aug 21, 2019•37 min•Season 3Ep. 21
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates Scientist and intrapreneur Gillian Isabelle, PhD, founded Enlivity ( https://enlivity.com/ ) to make chemotherapy more bearable for cancer patients. The first product is a supplement invented by an oncologist that helps prevent sores from forming in the mouths and digestive tracts of patients receiving chemotherapy, a problem that can delay life-saving treatment. A fun interview with an infectiously affable guest. Gillian Isabelle studied mate...
Aug 07, 2019•48 min•Season 3Ep. 20
Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Learn More About Our Syndicates Two young founders on a mission to get valuable data about complex illnesses which are not now easily captured. Nell Meosky Luo and Dan Toffling of Folia Health tell the story of how their startup came together and where it’s headed. Highlights include: Nell Meosky Luo bio. Dan Toffling bio. What Folia Health does. Patients dealing with complex or chronic illnesses possess a wealth of data that is not now transmitted via t...
Jul 24, 2019•43 min•Season 3Ep. 19
Repeat founder Adam Martel went to work for Babson College as a major gifts fundraiser in order to get his MBA for free. While at Babson he identified the problem Gravyty is addressing and met his co-founder Rich Palmer. Gravyty attracted early support from Christopher Mirabile’s LaunchPad Venture Group. The company just completed a $2 million plus raise to ramp up its growth. A really sparkling interview with two outstanding leaders. Adam Martel, former coach, and full-time fundraiser at a coll...
Jul 10, 2019•46 min•Season 3Ep. 18
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates To super angel Jeff Arnold the way to make money in biotech is to make few but highly researched bets and then back them to the hilt. His remarkable record is hard to argue with. The interview takes us from his student days at MIT through his various startups and investments; a tour de force. His approach has much to teach angels and founders. Sal opens by talking about how he delights in the promising companies that come from Boston’s unrival...
Jun 26, 2019•59 min•Season 3Ep. 17
Sal's Investment Syndicates: Learn More About Our Syndicates Engineer and consultant Susan Conover’s struggle with skin cancer inspires her to apply AI to help us understand what’s going on with our skin. This determined founder has made considerable headway in building the most valuable asset an AI startup can have: a strong, proprietary data set. A fun interview with a dynamic founder. Highlights include: Sal crows about his investment in Gelesis, a company that just got FDA approval for a new...
Jun 12, 2019•43 min•Season 3Ep. 16
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Investment Syndicates Two of Boston’s most active angels, Marlene Boyaner of Golden Seeds and Doug Bates of Walnut Venture, talk to Sal Daher about angel investing, fundraising, building a startup and various other topics. The panel takes challenging questions from an audience of startup founders. Highlights include: Marlene Boyaner bio. Doug Bates bio How Marlene went from intrapreneuring at CIBC & Capital One to angel investing. Golden Seed...
May 29, 2019•1 hr 12 min•Season 3Ep. 15
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Our Investment Syndicates Page Building a business in education is hard but Steve Shapiro has beaten the odds several times. His latest accomplishment is as CEO of FineTune Learning which is set to grade essays from 3.6 million students taking the CollegeBoard's AP Exams starting in July of 2019. Founded by brilliant Maine educator Ogden Morse, FineTune Learning is a platform using software to facilitate human grading of essays at scale. An...
May 15, 2019•57 min•Season 3Ep. 14
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates How his grandfather succeeded despite being blind inspired Shivang Dave, Ph.D. to change the world. As an accomplished bioengineer and a founder, he aims to bring high-quality eye exams to the masses in India with a new device. The Madrid-MIT M+Visión Fellowship was crucial to building a capable and cohesive founding team for PlenOptika. Shivang was a cheery and inspiring guest; great interview! Some highlights: Shivang Dave, Ph.D....
May 01, 2019•43 min•Season 3Ep. 13
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates From studying Ancient Greek to building a business, founder Brendan Dowdall has traveled an interesting path. Construction is a staid industry but Brendan is revolutionizing it with data. Concrete Sensors’ innovative devices sit in concrete and transmit data. The payoff is already evident in time savings and improvements in quality experienced by the industry’s biggest players. As their data set grows, Concrete Sensors hopes to bec...
Apr 17, 2019•41 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates Two friends from Turkey are bringing the latest advances in AI to people with visual impairments. Emre Sarbak was a consultant and a successful social entrepreneur. Çağrı Zaman was an architect but is now completing his PhD at MIT’s Media Lab in computer vision. Their startup Mediate is building practical tools to help people with reduced vision navigate the world. Topics covered include: Sal talks briefly about portfolio company S...
Apr 03, 2019•40 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Join Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Learn About Our Syndicates Upon graduating in the upper strata of her engineering class at MIT, Lucinda Linde was promptly accepted at Harvard Business school. She worked as an engineer in two successful tech companies, one of which was co-founded by Clayton Christensen of “Innovator’s Dilemma” fame. Her incisive intellect and practical outlook were prized by giants such as HBS’ Howard Stevenson ( Link to Howard Stevenson's Interview - Our Most Downloa...
Mar 20, 2019•53 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Our Syndicates Science is broken. Vast increases in people and money applied to scientific inquiry have failed to raise the rate of discovery. Among the reasons for this is that the workflow of labs is firmly stuck in the 1990s. Repeat founder Gabor Bethlendy is tackling this huge problem by creating Meenta.io, a platform to allow researchers to plan and execute their experiments via an online interface. Gabor is tenacious and energetic. He’s recruited t...
Mar 06, 2019•41 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Action Jack Barker move over! Chainsaw Jack Huntress is the real deal. CEOs don’t get more dynamic than this geologist turned founder. Jack's startup, HomeBinder offers invaluable tools to help homeowners manage and record work done on their most valuable asset. It’s getting real traction via home inspectors eager to help home buyers. Breaking News: HomeBinder is in Techstars! Special mention in this episode: Ed Hosepian and Dean ...
Feb 20, 2019•45 min•Season 3Ep. 8
Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Esportudo.com is creating new ways for sports fans in Latin America to engage with their sport. Founder Marcos Araújo, whose parents came to the Boston area from Brazil, is leveraging his background in digital media to address a huge unmet need. His website now gets 20 million visits a month and is growing. Brands love the opportunity to engage with the Latin community in an effective way. Marcos Araújo’s parents immigrated he...
Feb 13, 2019•50 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Click Here to Learn Mor e Sam Bogoch’s company, axle.ai, helps clients with massive video files make sense of the content they have. The accumulation of video content is going way beyond the traditional broadcast networks and includes universities, large enterprises not in the entertainment industry, churches, sports venues etc. Video has yet to migrate to the cloud. It still sits in hard drives. The conversation with this brilliant interlocutor expanded my ...
Feb 06, 2019•52 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Accredited Investors, Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Star founder Bryanne Leeming is back to update us on all the exciting stuff Unruly Studios has been doing. Alexa Accelerator, Inc. Magazine feature, adoption by the City of Somerville and more. Listen to this scrappy young founder who’s done a lot with very little. Topics include: What they learned at Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator that is run by Techstars. How they came to be featured in Inc. Magazine. UPS/Inc. ...
Jan 30, 2019•36 min•Season 3Ep. 5
