Guest Pariss Chandler is a former aesthetician turned front-end developer. She transitioned into tech in 2017 after participating in Resilient Coders, a coding bootcamp for people of color. Chandler is the creator of the hashtag and movement #BlackTechTwitter, bringing awareness and exposure to the Black community in the tech industry. She is also founder of Black Tech Pipeline, a service-based platform focused on recruitment and retention of Black technologists and connecting them to jobs. Chan...
Jun 19, 2020•1 hr 32 min
Guest AK Ikwuakor, also known as “Coach AK”, is an entrepreneur, educator, consultant, strategist, storyteller, and former Top 10 world-ranked athlete from the University of Oregon (hurdles; 400 meter). He’s founded several companies including Empower2Play, a sports diplomacy project working with the US Government; as well as ELETE Styles, a made to measure clothing provider for athletes and working professionals. He’s traveled to more than 30 countries working with students, athletes, coaches, ...
Jun 13, 2020•1 hr 10 min
Guest Christian Magel is the founder of Boston-based Venture Lane, a curated startup hub which houses up to 25 early-stage tech companies between two and 15 employees. Magel is an international startup veteran, business angel and go-to-market expert who cut his entrepreneurial teeth in Europe and Australia. He was the cofounder of amaysim, an Australian telecommunication company in which he served as CMO and Executive Director. Magel helped grow amaysim to and beyond IPO, and the company became ...
May 29, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Wafaa Arbash is a Syrian immigrant who’s determined to restore dignity to refugees globally through her Boston-based startup WorkAround. The co-founder and CEO of WorkAround is working around the barriers to employment for refugees by providing them with an online microwork platform that helps AI and machine learning companies with human intelligence tasks. Arbash started WorkAround while working on her master’s thesis in Sustainable International Development and Conflict Resolution from Brandei...
May 16, 2020•1 hr 2 min
Guest Jesse Bardo is a director in Early Stage Practice for Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in Boston, which banks upwards of 70 percent of Boston venture-backed companies. Bardo is active in the Boston innovation community and a proven entrepreneur turned angel investor and startup mentor. He was one of the founders of higher education SaaS company EverTrue (Techstars Boston 2011), which won the MassChallenge. After gaining Series A funding with Bain Capital Ventures, Bardo and his team grew EverTrue...
May 04, 2020•1 hr 17 min
Guest Bill Gianoukos is the co-founder and CEO of Goodpath, which emerged from stealth in April 2020 to launch its digital integrative TeleHealth portal. Goodpath accelerated its launch timeline to support health care practitioners (HCPs) who are struggling to manage the chronic care needs of patients during the COVID19 crisis. Goodpath can step in as an appropriate alternative to office visits by offering patients plans which include virtual meetings with a dietician, personalized physical ther...
Apr 22, 2020•47 min
Guest Ryan Light is the CEO of Pistol Lake, a clothing brand where everything is ethically made in the U.S. The Boston Speaks Up community may recognize Ryan Light from his time in Boston in prominent executive and marketing roles at Kinvey and CoachUp. After seven years in Boston, Light moved to Los Angeles in 2018 to run Pistol Lake. In March 2020, Pistol Lake stopped manufacturing clothes at its Los Angeles headquarters, in favor of making masks for hospitals and urgent care workers treating ...
Apr 09, 2020•1 hr 4 min
Guest Chris Savage is the CEO and co-founder of Wistia, a video software company based in Cambridge, MA. Wistia is the software behind original video initiatives from brands across industries. Wistia also has its own slate of original video series, which includes Brandwagon, One, Ten, One Hundred, and Low Views High Impact. Savage and his co-founder, Brendan Schwartz, started Wistia in Schwartz’s living room in 2006. Wistia has since grown into a multi-million dollar business with more than 100 ...
Mar 29, 2020•57 min
Guest Dr. Emily Reichert is CEO of Greentown Labs, the largest clean technology startup incubator in North America. As the company’s first employee, Reichert has spearheaded the rapid growth of Greentown Labs into a global hub for climatetech and cleantech innovation, attracting visitors and partners from around the world. She started her career at the international management consulting firm Arthur D. Little as a Ph.D. scientist and progressed into R&D, business development and general mana...
Mar 14, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Guest Rahkeem Morris is the cofounder and CEO of SYRG, a service for employers to hire former workers for shifts and projects on-demand. Morris’ long-term vision for SYRG is to empower a flexible, liquid, universal workforce of hourly workers where any person can work for any place at any time. Morris took an unusual journey into entrepreneurship and has unique gig economy experience having dropped out of high school at 14 years old to help support his family, working 13 jobs over nine years. He...
Feb 23, 2020•58 min
Guest Sean Cantwell is a founding team member and Managing Partner with Boston-based Volition Capital, a technology-oriented growth equity and venture capital firm that raised $600 million in separate funds for new investments in 2019. While Volition invests in companies across America, Cantwell has distinguished himself as a growth equity professional dedicated to Boston’s startup community where he focuses on software, technology-enabled services and Internet investments. Cantwell and Volition...
Feb 08, 2020•1 hr 6 min
Guest Dave Melville, the founder and CEO of The Bowdoin Group, has built his company into one of the largest executive search firms in Massachusetts. For 25 years, local VCs and PE firms, growth-stage startups, and large enterprises have relied on The Bowdoin Group to meet their executive search and hiring needs. Melville leads The Bowdoin Group’s BioPharma practice along with overseeing general strategic initiatives, and is involved as a key resource for the firm’s growing client base. His expe...
Jan 26, 2020•1 hr
Guest Larry Gennari is general counsel for a wide range of Boston-based businesses. He has a reputation throughout New England as a trusted and beloved business advisor to public companies, venture-backed companies, early-stage ventures, entrepreneurs, investors and board members. Many in the Boston innovation community rely on Gennari for expert legal counsel on financing strategies, partnerships, and mergers and acquisitions. He is a founding partner of Gennari Aronson Law Partners, which has ...
Jan 13, 2020•57 min
Guest A.J. Marcinek co-founded CropShop while attending Endicott College and hasn’t looked back since graduating in Spring 2019. The young entrepreneur’s hot startup is already thriving at fulfilling its mission to bridge the gap between chefs and local sustainable sources of food in the Boston area. As the CEO of CropShop, Marcinek is responsible for the business and customer facing roles -- including personally picking up and delivering products from farms to kitchens -- while cofounder Cam Bl...
Dec 15, 2019•45 min
Guest Pam Erlichman is the Chief Marketing Officer at Jebbit, a first party data company that facilitates volunteered, declared data exchange between consumers and brands. She has more than 20 years of marketing experience, most recently serving as the VP of marketing at Oracle Data Cloud, a role she assumed following the Datalogix acquisition. Prior to Datalogix, Erlichman worked at Digitas, leading relationships with world class brands including Delta Air Lines, AT&T, FedEx, Ahold USA, Cel...
Dec 01, 2019•1 hr 1 min
Guest Michael Skok started his first software business as a teenager, spent 21 years as an entrepreneur and then the past 15 years as a venture investor. The Underscore VC cofounder has founded, worked with and invested in startups, and created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of value. Along the way, he also mentored and taught for 4 years at Harvard University, and created the Startup Secrets series. As an entrepreneur and an investor, Skok has focused on breakthrough technologies and...
Nov 16, 2019•58 min
Guest Justin Bingham is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Janeiro Digital. The engineering and business design savant has worked at technology companies since he was 16 years old, foregoing college in favor of pursuing a career in Boston’s innovation economy straight out of high school. Bingham’s background includes nearly two decades of experience building sophisticated technology solutions and bringing them to market. He is fluent in numerous programming languages, has extensive k...
Oct 27, 2019•1 hr 28 min
Guest Miracle Olatunji is the youngest person to appear on Boston Speaks Up, only 19 years old at the time of recording. Olatunji embodies the aspiration of Boston to nurture a more diverse, mission-driven class of social impact entrepreneurs. Currently a student at Northeastern University, Olatunji works as the Director of Innovation of the student organization Thrive, whose mission is to empower students through financial literacy programs and support student-led entrepreneurial projects and v...
Oct 19, 2019•45 min
Guest David Delmar Sentíes is the Founder and Executive Director of Resilient Coders, a highly competitive, free, nonprofit coding bootcamp that trains people of color for high growth careers as software engineers, and connects them with full-time jobs. He's a workforce equity activist, passionate about democratizing access to the high growth careers that are automation resilient. Delmar Senties looks forward to a day when Boston's innovation landscape is led, not by the smartest among the lucki...
Oct 12, 2019•48 min
Guest Katie Hall graduated from Wellesley College in 1984 as one of only five physics majors in her class. She has since spent her career championing women in technology and bringing diversity to the C-suite. Currently, she is the Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Ciprun Global, a company that makes it efficient and cost-effective for U.S. organizations to secure IP protection in the Chinese market. Simultaneously, Katie is a Distinguished Lecturer of Physics at her Alma Mater, Wellesley Co...
Oct 05, 2019•1 hr 21 min
Guest Mike Volpe is the CEO of Lola.com, the fast-growing corporate travel SaaS platform that raised $37 million earlier this year with aims to dominate the $1.6 trillion global travel market. HubSpot’s third founder and former marketing chief, Volpe was offered the position of Lola.com CEO while still the CMO at Cybereason, a cybersecurity SaaS company where he led marketing and sales development. He’s also a member of the Board of Directors at sales and marketing SaaS Validity Inc. Volpe is we...
Sep 28, 2019•1 hr 11 min
Guest Roman Jaquez is a software engineer at Philips Health Systems. He's also a Snapchat Official Lens Creator. Originally from Dominican Republic, Jaquez moved to New York when he was 17 years old, and graduated from college in The Bronx with a BA in Computer Science. Now a Methuen, MA resident, Jaquez devotes his free time to helping children in the Merrimack Valley learn computer science through tools like Snapchat's Lens Studio as a co-founder of the local organization Tech4Hood. He also pr...
Sep 21, 2019•58 min
Guest Sam Thompson is one of the founding partners of Progress Ventures, the venture capital arm of Progress Partners, a boutique M&A advisory firm in which he serves as senior managing director. His main focus is on the marketing and media technology marketplace, where he has built a strong network of contacts that can help early and growth-stage businesses. Thompson has a reputation for developing strategy for retail, digital media, and marketing technology clients. He offers unique perspe...
Sep 14, 2019•1 hr 4 min
Guest John Piermarini is a software developer, a cookie delivery entrepreneur (yes, you read that correctly) and a restauranteur. In 2017, he leaped when he opened up Fare Well, a restaurant out of a shipping container in Boston’s Seaport district. This wasn’t the first leap he took in his career. After finding out he didn’t love being a software engineer at IBM, Piermarini took his first venture into the food industry by opening Sweet Idea, a late night cookie delivery business which operated f...
Sep 07, 2019•1 hr 5 min
Guest Rowan Walrath joined BostInno in April 2019 as a staff writer covering innovation in Massachusetts, bringing a unique perspective to Boston from her time as a freelance journalist in San Francisco. Walrath has an impressive journalism background, having spent time writing and fact-checking for WIRED, Mother Jones, Eater, HuffPost and more. While known for her ability to cover an expansive range of topics, Walrath has spent dedicated time on the future of transportation beat at WIRED; and d...
Aug 31, 2019•1 hr 9 min
Guest Jason Burke is the Chief Strategy Officer of clypd, a Davis Square, Somerville-based startup providing an audience-based sales platform for television advertising. Burke possesses a unique skillset as both a product engineer and business designer. Prior to clypd, Burke built optimization products for Boston-based ScanScout which was acquired by Tremor Video in 2010. A graduate of Tufts University, Burke has also made a name for himself locally as an angel investor and startup advisor. In M...
Aug 25, 2019•1 hr 3 min
Fabric Media founder and CEO Jason Damata is difficult to describe in words. He’s a poet and a philosopher. He’s a cunning marketer and chief executive. He’s a business consultant and media analyst. He’s made Advertising Age’s prestigious '40 Under 40' list. He spent time touring the country for CSPAN educating the public about media. Damata’s unique characteristics and impressive accomplishments goes on and on. Above all else, Damata is a family man in the most altruistic sense imaginable. He’s...
Aug 19, 2019•1 hr 25 min
Guest Jon Brideau is a social impact entrepreneur currently serving as President and CEO of World T.E.A.M Sports, an organization that brings adaptive and able-bodied athletes together through inclusive athletic programs. He joined the organization in 2017 with aims of increasing sponsorship and partner support for some of World T.E.A.M’s events, which includes an Amazing Race-style competition in western Colorado. Previous to World T.E.A.M, Brideau worked for Best Buddies International, an orga...
Aug 09, 2019•1 hr 1 min
Guest Deirdre Sartorelli is the Director of the Angle Center for Entrepreneurship at Endicott College, where she also serves as Assistant Dean. In her role, Sartorelli’s focus is connecting and facilitating Endicott’s entrepreneurial network of students, alumni, and the greater North Shore community. Previously, she worked as a Managing Principal for Rogue Wave Advisors where she specialized in lean startup consulting. She was also a partner in New Ventures, a small real estate development compa...
Aug 05, 2019•56 min
Guest Josh Trautwein represents the soul of Boston, a city that looks out for its own with unconditional love and unwavering support. Trautwein was working as a health educator at the MGH Charlestown Healthcare Center when he kept hearing from his families that it was difficult to shop for healthy food. At that time, the only grocery store in the neighborhood was set to be shut down for a year-long renovation. It was this experience and some in-depth research that inspired Trautwein to cofound F...
Jul 30, 2019•1 hr 20 min
