Sponsored by: Purdue University entrepreneurship Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson In December of 2017 I interviewed Çağrı Savran, Ph.D. about plans for his startup in which I had just invested. Almost four years later I interviewed him again to review the progress of the company which is changing the way breast cancer is followed up after treatment. Highlights: Update on the Original Interview with Çağrı Savran, Ph.D. In December of 2017 Savran Was Operating with Essential C...
Oct 27, 2021•16 min•Season 5Ep. 43
Sal's Investment Syndicate: Click to Join Sponsored by: Purdue University entrepreneurship Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson I invested in Savran Tech back in 2017 around the time of the first part of this interview. Recently I sat down with Cagri Savran to review the progress of his remarkable biotech startup in the last four years. Listen to the original interview followed by a recent update. Here is a list of the topics discussed: Çağrı Savran Bio (Çağrı Is Pronounced Cha-...
Oct 27, 2021•1 hr 6 min•Season 5Ep. 43
Sponsored by: Purdue University Entrepreneurship Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson AI wiz, founder and angel investor Gil Syswerda on building algorithms and companies. This episode focuses on Gil’s biography and his startups. It’s the first in-studio interview since spring 2020. We had a blast! Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Gil Syswerda, Founder and Super Angel Gil Syswerda Lucked into a Great High School – Built His Own Calculator "Computer programming. What is that?" “B...
Oct 20, 2021•1 hr 24 min•Season 5Ep. 42
Sponsored by: Purdue University Entrepreneurship Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson Medical records are way less informative to doctors than patients imagine. Electronic health records (EHRs) have failed to deliver on their promise to improve health care for forty years. Ryan Hess, founder of Connective Health, means to change that. I invited digital health founder Martín Aboitiz to co-host this valuable interview with me. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Co-Host Martín Aboiti...
Oct 13, 2021•46 min•Season 5Ep. 41
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 ...
Oct 06, 2021•50 min•Season 5Ep. 40
Sal's Syndicate: Click to Join Podcast Sponsored by: Purdue University's Entrepreneurship Center Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson Greg Raiz founded app-building colossus Raizlabs and sold it in 2017. He’s now the head of Techstars Boston and has big ideas in mind. Be you founder or angel, listen to this luminous interview for practical advice and inspiration on building startups. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Greg Raiz, Founder of Raizlabs, the App-building Colossus and H...
Sep 29, 2021•51 min•Season 5Ep. 39
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” gives invaluable advice on how to make money and keep eno...
Sep 22, 2021•1 hr 3 min•Season 5Ep. 38
Sal's Investment Syndicate List: Click to Join Sponsors: Purdue University Entrepreneurship Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson Thrice-exited founder Jon Hirschtick of SolidWorks and Onshape fame, talks about the promise of cloud-based technologies and how to build successful businesses in the space. Jon’s a good sport and a fun guest. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Jon Hirschtick, Founder of SolidWorks and Onshape “...the problem we were solving with Onshape is around the us...
Sep 15, 2021•40 min•Season 5Ep. 37
Sponsors: Purdue University Entrepreneurship Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson Sal's Syndicate: Click to Join 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 r...
Sep 08, 2021•52 min•Season 5Ep. 36
Join Sal Daher's Syndicate List: Click to Join Sponsored by Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson Born out of COVID in 2020, TBD Angels is Boston’s newest angel group. In its first seventeen months it has already invested in forty startups. Members David Chang and Yael deCapo spoke about what TBD offers startups and investors. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Yael deCapo and David Chang of TBD Angels TBD Angel’s Process is Real-Time Not Batch “We try to match their velocity, whic...
Sep 01, 2021•50 min•Season 5Ep. 35
Join Sal's Investment Syndicate: Click to Join This podcast is brought to you by Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ 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...
Aug 25, 2021•36 min•Season 5Ep. 34
Join Sal Daher's Investment Syndicate: Click to Join Sponsored by Peter Fasse, patent attorney at Fish & Richardson Brad Feld and Dave Jilk bring the wisdom of modernity's most unsettling thinker to entrepreneurship. Like the ancient Stoics, Nietzsche has much to add to the thought of people disrupting existing assumptions today. Brief excerpts from Nietzsche are paired with essays from founders who grapple with the ideas in question. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Brad Feld, Co-Founder of...
Aug 18, 2021•58 min•Season 5Ep. 33
Join Sal's Investment Syndicate List: Click to Join 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 ...
Aug 11, 2021•42 min•Season 5Ep. 33
Join Sal's Investment Syndicate List: Click to Join Repeat biotech founder Todd Zion on SmartCells (acquired by Merck for $500MM) and his current venture Akston Bio which is doing cool things with proteins. Todd has valuable insights on VC funding, angel investing and founding teams. This interview’s a peach! Intro of Todd Zion, PhD Co-Founder of SmartCells (Merck) and Akston Bio Todd Zion Was Fascinated by the Potential of Polymers to Do Powerful Things Smart Drug Delivery – Making Insulin Adap...
Aug 04, 2021•47 min•Season 5Ep. 31
Everything you never wnated to kn
Jul 28, 2021•53 min•Season 5Ep. 30
Sal's Investment Syndicate List: Click to Join Sponsored by Peter fasse, patent attorney: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ Angel investor Paul Silva has an idea about how to help startups after they exit accelerators. Launch413 is taking the friction out of getting and giving advice to founders. Great chat with a fun guest who is also a listener. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Angel Investor Paul Silva “…because they're a first-time founder, so they're going to make all the first-timer m...
Jul 21, 2021•46 min•Season 5Ep. 29
Join Sal's Investment Syndicate List: Click to Join In 2013*, my brother-in-law Martin Aboitiz sat in my dining room and sketched out a business he planned to start. I thought “majnun” which is Arabic for crazy! How would this guy who had built software companies in Argentina found a startup to help Americans have better access to their healthcare data? But I underestimated his resourcefulness and titanic tenacity. Four years later, Healthjump is at cashflow break even and has 7.5 million patien...
Jul 14, 2021•56 min•Season 5Ep. 28
Join Sal's Investment Syndicate List: Click to Join Purdue is going all out to be Innovation U. Professor Wayne Chen and I spoke of the various initiatives to that end including evaluating faculty on the patents they get and what startups they found. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Professor Wayne Chen Who Leads Innovation at Purdue’s School of Engineering Initiatives Afoot at Purdue to Get Technology Out of the Lab and Into Society Sal Talks About How Çağrı Savran, a Purdue Professor Was Helpe...
Jul 07, 2021•39 min•Season 5Ep. 27
Join Sal's Investment Syndicate: Click to Join Federico Cismondi, co-founder of Sal’s portfolio company doDoc, is back on the podcast to talk about the company’s acquisition and the lessons he learned from the initial raise to the exit. A charming and instructive conversation with a thoughtful founder. Why Getting the Best Patent Advice is Indispensable Sal Daher Introduces Federico Cismondi, Co-Founder of doDoc Which Was Recently Acquired The Problem that doDoc Solves “This is the platform for ...
Jun 23, 2021•36 min•Season 5Ep. 25
Sponsored by Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ Join Sal's Syndicate: Click Here 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 c...
Jun 16, 2021•41 min•Season 5Ep. 24
Sponsored by Peter Fasse of Fish & Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ To Join Sal's Syndicate: Click Here A terrible error in a lab led Tim Spong to start a company to improve the reliability and efficiency of pathology labs; big industry players are noticing. This interview was part of my due diligence on Tim’s startup, VistaPath Bio. Subsequently, I invested in the company. Highlights include: Sal Daher Introduces Tim Spong, Co-Founder of VistaPath Bio “Fast forward a hundr...
Jun 09, 2021•33 min•Season 5Ep. 23
Sponsored by Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ Sal's Syndicate List: Click to Join 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. H...
Jun 02, 2021•47 min•Season 5Ep. 22
Sponsored by Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ Sal's Syndicate List: Click to Join 4,000 people per year die in the US from uncontrolled epilepsy, many of them young. Vivek Ganesh and Jay Shah started Neurava to build sensors and algorithms to prevent such deaths. Here’s my chat with these doctoral candidates from Purdue trying to bring their tech from the lab to the market. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Vivek Ganesh and Jay Shah of ...
May 26, 2021•31 min•Season 5Ep. 22
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...
May 19, 2021•1 hr 31 min•Season 5Ep. 20
Sponsored by Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ Italy, an advanced country of 60 million people, gets 20 times less startup money than Boston. My angel investing buddy Arrigo Bodda thinks there’s ample room for growth. He is working with 42N, a consultancy focused on bringing Italian startups to the US. At the junction of design and cleantech, Italy has intriguing things to offer. Highlights: Sal Daher Introduces Arrigo Bodda, Angel Inve...
May 12, 2021•44 min•Season 5Ep. 19
The family of Wan Li Zhu emigrated to America seeking new opportunities. 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 product features at Microsoft. After a prodigiously successful stint, during which he was involved in building and marketing Dynamics C...
May 05, 2021•38 min•Season 5Ep. 18
Sponsored by Peter Fasse of Fish & Richardson, Patent Attorney: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ Austin-based super angel Hall Martin has an intriguing approach to investing in technology startups that can benefit investors and founders. He’s also done quite a bit of equity crowdfunding. This interview was rich in lessons for me. I recommend you listen. “… my conclusion after looking at it 20 years, it's not that I'm investing in the wrong deals. I'm investing with the wrong deal struc...
Apr 28, 2021•35 min•Season 5Ep. 17
Sponsored by Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish & Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ Tivan Amour, 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 fun interviewing him and he taught me a bunch of things. Among these were the real value of Techstars to founders and some pointers on growing a customer base. Here is a li...
Apr 21, 2021•52 min•Season 5Ep. 16
Bill Arnold of Purdue University’s innovation center asked me to put together a panel discussion about what makes Boston’s startup ecosystem so strong and how these lessons might translate to other places. Naturally I invited my angel investing buddy Ben Littauer to participate and we had a productive chat which gives founders, and prospective angels, a valuable glimpse into how angel investing works.
Apr 14, 2021•46 min•Season 5Ep. 15
Sponsored by Peter Fasse, Patent Attorney at Fish and Richardson: https://www.fr.com/team/j-peter-fasse/ 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 o...
Apr 07, 2021•48 min•Season 5Ep. 14
