Guest Bridget Hunter-Jones is the co-founder and CEO of Impact Biosystems, a venture-backed startup in the Boston area developing adaptive hardware and software solutions in the health and fitness space. Hunter-Jones leads a small, passionate, cross-functional team that wants to create a new personalized recovery market to support the at-home fitness phenomenon that accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic. Impact Biosystems’ goal is to make athletes of all varieties prevent injuries, perform at...
Mar 26, 2022•1 hr 2 min
Allison Byers is the founder and CEO of Scroobious, which is increasing diversity in the startup ecosystem by affordably helping founders create compelling pitch material and a platform to help investors easily find those founders. Her earlier career includes over a decade of startup and tech operator roles. Prior to founding Scroobious, Byers launched and co-ran a medical device company spun out of MIT where she raised nearly $10 million and experienced first-hand the challenges that come with ...
Feb 25, 2022•1 hr 24 min
Guest Dan Rossignol is an entrepreneur, investor and lifelong learner with a proven track record as a technology generalist who can drive revenue across business verticals. He currently serves as the Chief Growth Officer at Stonehenge Technology Labs, doing business as STOPWATCH, a Bentonville, Arkansas-based unified commerce software startup that provides real-time supply chain management for global CPG brands. Rossignol is also a scout investor for Bonfire Ventures, a seed stage venture capita...
Feb 04, 2022•1 hr 20 min
Guest Gina Deschamps currently serves as the Director of the Angle Center for Entrepreneurship at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts. She’s in a fascinating position with a role focused on embedding entrepreneurship into the DNA of a college campus. Previously, Deschamps enjoyed a successful career as a senior sales and marketing leader while always remaining closely aligned with higher education. In 2020, she was the recipient of the Salem State University Alumni Association’s Elizabeth...
Jan 21, 2022•54 min
Guest Raghav “Rags” Gupta is an entrepreneur, operator, investor and author of the bestselling One to Ten: Finding Your Way from Startup to Scaleup. He currently serves as President of Butlr, a wireless motion sensing platform that generates privacy-compliant, anonymous data for physical space management. Corporate real estate, senior living and wellness facilities, and retail spaces use Butlr to detect occupancy, headcount and activity, and generate accurate, real-time and historical spatial in...
Jan 07, 2022•1 hr 12 min
Guest Rick Grinnell is the Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures, a venture capital firm that invests in pre-seed and seed-stage companies in AI and frontier software technologies. Grinnell is one of the most reputed cybersecurity investors in venture capital land. For the last 21 years, he’s been investing in the various evolutions of security, storage, and SaaS-based startups out of his home base in the Boston area. He’s become such a local staple in the Boston innovation ecosyste...
Dec 04, 2021•1 hr 19 min
Guest Russell Follansbee leads Silicon Valley Bank’s (SVB) enterprise software team in New England, which counts roughly 60 percent of VC-backed startups in the Greater Boston region as clients. He and his team help enterprise software companies, typically post-series A funding, to more efficiently achieve scale. While his experience ranges across industries, Follansbee specializes in the cybersecurity industry, a technology cluster in Boston that is driving global innovation. Since joining SVB ...
Nov 06, 2021•1 hr 18 min
Michael Caron is the founder and CEO of Get Burly, which organizes and creates custom fitness programs and team building retreats. WIth more than 40 seasons of coaching under his belt, Caron fosters a team of elite level coaches that push individuals and groups to overcome adversity. Caron is an elite coach in every sense of the concept. He is a Spartan SGX certified coach. He earned the Navy Seal Inspired Sealfit Basic Training Certification. He is also a certified Unbeatable Mind Coach and thr...
Oct 22, 2021•1 hr 24 min
Guest Jordan Staab is the CEO of SmarterTravel, an industry leader in online travel with a travel media portfolio including Airfarewatchdog, BookingBuddy, Family Vacation Critic, Oyster, SmarterTravel, and WhatToPack. As the story goes with most entrepreneurial ventures, Staab’s journey in building SmarterTravel endured various pivots, twists and turns to get to where it is today. The company is flourishing but Staab will be the first to tell you that this was not always the case. With Staab at ...
Sep 28, 2021•1 hr 28 min
Guest Cam Brown is the founder and CEO of KingFish, a Boston-based marketing agency set to celebrate its 20-year anniversary in November 2021. Brown has developed a hybrid agency model which combines a full-time staff of strategists, account executives and designers with a database of hundreds of subject matter experts (SMEs) to create custom content solutions for its clients. Perhaps most impressively, Brown personally oversees the relationships with the majority of KingFish SMEs. He brings ove...
Sep 03, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Guest Guy Hudson is a marketing programs manager in the Boston office of ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: ZI), a global go-to-market enterprise SaaS leader. Hudson caught our attention on LinkedIn where he’s posted several inspiring messages, including an official ZoomInfo corporate video he recorded for Juneteenth. Unsurprisingly, ZoomInfo CEO Henry Schuck recently came in at number eight on Business Insider's list of the best CEOs of large companies ranked by BIPOC employees. Hudson’s story is fascinating, a...
Aug 06, 2021•1 hr 35 min
Guest Aisha Chottani is a former McKinsey consultant turned thriving entrepreneur. After a stint at Harvard Business School, and amidst a pandemic, Chottani founded her company Moment, a natural botanical and adaptogen beverage that aims to bottle the feeling of meditation in a can. Chottani is a heart-driven leader on a mission to help people more easily achieve mindfulness. At no additional cost to consumers, Moment provides content and interactive programming to help people meditate more, gai...
Jul 23, 2021•48 min
Guest Mike Salguero is the founder and CEO of ButcherBox, a Boston-based meat brand that delivers high quality, humanely raised meat to consumers across the country. He founded ButcherBox in 2015 as a hobby, but quickly solved the need to increase access to high-quality, humanely raised protein. Prior to ButcherBox, Salguero founded CustomMade, a marketplace for consumers to commission custom made items such as furniture and jewelry. His serial entrepreneurship gives him an interesting perspecti...
Jul 08, 2021•1 hr 26 min
Guest Jennifer Neundorfer is cofounder and managing partner at January Ventures, an investment firm that is trying to address the unique challenges and biases faced by entrepreneurs often under-represented in business, including women and people of color. Neundorfer believes the next generation of startup investment returns will be driven by a much broader and more diverse set of founders, and she co-founded January Ventures to be the fund of choice for these traditionally underrepresented found...
May 01, 2021•1 hr 9 min
Guest Ryan Durkin is a serial entrepreneur, operator and product guy who’s interwoven himself into the fabric of Boston’s elite tech talent. Following his latest successful stint serving as head of product at Drizly (sold to Uber for 1.1B), Durkin is now busy building a sports agency for tech professionals in Boston -- The Operators. Durkin’s goal is to represent the top percent of tech talent, and offer them everything that agents provide to professional athletes -- from opening doors and closi...
Apr 19, 2021•1 hr 36 min
Guest Dominique Aubry is the founder of Aubry, an influencer-driven shopping app that uses computer vision, augmented reality and AI to help women build personalized wardrobes. This isn’t Aubry’s first foray into retail innovation. She previously founded All Yoga Pants to give curvy women better clothing options. With more than 15 years of experience working within the government, non-profit, for-profit, and startup community, Aubry has enjoyed a fascinating journey from Philadelphia to Boston. ...
Apr 04, 2021•1 hr 13 min
Guest TJ Douglas is the founder and CEO of The Urban Grape, a wine store in Boston’s South End neighborhood known for its proprietary Progressive Scale - a system of sorting wine by its body, instead of by varietal or region. Douglas has led The Urban Grape to becoming one of the most successful independently-owned wine stores in the country as a result. Douglas’ list of accomplishments is nothing short of astonishing. The Urban Grape has won multiple accolades as Boston’s Best Wine store from b...
Mar 22, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Enjoy this bonus episode of Boston Speaks Up host Zach Servideo appearing on the Fuel Your Fire podcast from Endicott College's Angle Center for Entrepreneurship where Zach is a visiting Entrepreneur-in-Residence. In this episode, Zach speaks on the future of tech and innovation, tells his story of packing up and moving out west to LA and "Silicon Beach", and shares the heartwarming legacy he wants to leave behind for his daughter.
Mar 15, 2021•45 min
Guest Cara Shortsleeve is the CEO at The Leadership Consortium (TLC), a leadership development platform designed to accelerate high potential and diverse leaders. Shortsleeve joined TLC in 2018 to launch and scale the business which has since forged relationships with Google, IBM, HubSpot, P&G, WPP and dozens more. Under Shortleeve’s leadership, TLC has enabled more than 2,000 executives to lead stronger teams and bring broader strategic mindsets to their business. Prior to joining TLC, Shor...
Mar 08, 2021•1 hr 10 min
Guest David Chang is an entrepreneur and angel investor who has held product, marketing and operating roles at six startups and invested in 60 companies. He was most recently the CEO at student loan startup Gradifi, which was acquired by E*TRADE in December 2019. Previously, he was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School and Director of the Babson Summer Venture Program. Chang has a successful track record in hands-on roles at both direct-to-consumer and enterprise companies, six of...
Feb 22, 2021•1 hr 20 min
Guest Carly Chase is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Her work is wide in scope and includes serving as the Founding Managing Director of the MIT NYC Startup Studio (part of the MIT delta v accelerator), running the StartMIT entrepreneurship bootcamp, overseeing the Trust Center’s Membership Program for Organizations and New Frontiers of Entrepreneurship Symposium, coaching students, in addition to serving as a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at MIT’...
Feb 07, 2021•1 hr 12 min
Guest Kiel Servideo is a former Hollywood assistant who’s always found comfort with a pen and a notebook. He moved out to Los Angeles a year after graduating from Boston University where he hustled various temp agency jobs before landing full-time gigs with Hollywood titans such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Shawn Levy. While living in LA, Servideo wrote his first novel -- The Preposterous Dreams of Tucker Adams -- a fiction documenting a modern tale of the pursuit of Manifest Destiny. In the Fall of...
Jan 22, 2021•2 hr 23 min
Guest Neil Jacobs is the president and founder of the 3Point Foundation, a non-profit organization that offers free educational, sports and dance programming to under-served youth in Boston. Working closely with the Boston Celtics, Boston Public Schools, UMass Boston and additional partners, Jacobs and 3Point are on a mission to improve the lives of Boston’s youth through positive reinforcement in the classroom and through group athletics. Prior to 3Point Foundation, Jacobs served as outside tea...
Oct 11, 2020•1 hr 8 min
Guest Chris Vail is a Senior Account Executive for Political and Advocacy Partnerships at Snapchat. A former Amazon ad sales leader, Vail made the move to Snapchat to help onboard legislative, issue, and non-profit advertisers onto the Snapchat platform. His team recently launched an augmented reality lens for the Mark Kelly campaign in Arizona, which was the first Senate campaign to lean in on this new, experiential way of engaging voters. Snapchat has also made news waves recently for signing ...
Oct 02, 2020•1 hr 16 min
Guest Ari Fine Glantz is the Director of Development & Strategic Initiatives at the New England Venture Capital Association (NEVCA), the regional trade association for the venture capital industry, with mission to foster a collaborative, inclusive, and prosperous innovation ecosystem. At NEVCA, Glantz leads the organization’s revenue generating activities, manages legislative strategy, and supports president Jody Rose on new program development. He has served as a coach and judge for a varie...
Sep 18, 2020•1 hr 5 min
Guest Veronica Armstrong is the cofounder and CEO of Isle de Nature, a Boston-based home fragrance startup that recently placed runner-up at Roxbury Pitch Night, a virtual pitch night hosted by Venture Café New England’s Roxbury Innovation Center. Isle de Nature offers a line of home fragrance products starting with candles made from beeswax and soy. Armstrong is driven by the belief that "unspoiled nature is a luxury" as climate change threatens the islands she draws inspiration from. Isle de N...
Sep 12, 2020•1 hr 26 min
Ashton Lattimore is the editor-in-chief at Prism, a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color)-led nonprofit news outlet. Prism formally launched in August 2020 with a focus on coverage of electoral justice, gender justice, workers’ rights, criminal justice, racial justice and immigration. Lattimore is a longtime editor and writer whose work focuses on race, culture, and the law. Her writing has been published by the Washington Post, Slate, CNN, Essence, and other outlets. Prior to joining P...
Aug 15, 2020•59 min
Guest Rachael Rollins is the Suffolk County District Attorney, the chief law enforcement official for Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop. She was elected by a landslide campaigning on a platform centered on criminal justice system reform. Taking office in January 2019 as Suffolk County’s 16th district attorney, Rollins is the first woman to be elected to that position in Suffolk County history, and the first woman of color ever to serve as a Massachusetts district attorney. District Attorney ...
Aug 01, 2020•58 min
Guest Martel Metellus is the founder of Soko, a discovery network for the Black community to connect, collaborate, and find new opportunities. Founded in September 2019, Soko began as a freelance marketplace for Black skillworkers. Like many great startups, Soko was created to satisfy the founder’s own pain points. Metellus developed Soko to solve his need of wanting to hire Black people to work on his various entrepreneurial ventures, including several fitness endeavors. Metellus moved from Ari...
Jul 26, 2020•1 hr 8 min
Angela Liu is the Director of Hack.Diversity, the workforce development division of the New England Venture Capital Association. Launched in 2017, Hack.Diversity partners with Boston’s fast growing tech teams to not only increase the representation of Black and Latinx technologists in the innovation economy, but also evolve organizational practices to support retention and promotion of that talent. By the end of 2020, Liu will have scaled operations, community, and curriculum to support a networ...
Jul 11, 2020•1 hr 22 min
