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Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels in Our Syndicates: OPT IN HERE In this interview, repeat founder Jo Schneier addresses the problem of providing effective training to the 64 percent of the population that does not have a college degree. Drawing on Jo’s experiences and prior startups, Cognotion’s opening gambit is a training platform for Certified Nursing Assistants (CNAs) an occupation with stratospheric job turnover. Cognotion seems to be succeeding in improving retention of its client’s CNAs. Here are some of the topics addressed: Sal’s Pitch for the Angel Invest Boston Syndicate Sal’s Intro of Jo Schneier How Jo Schneier Became an Entrepreneur Jo Schneier Is Pulled into Cognotion “We looked at all of the 64 percent of Americans that don't get a college degree, a four-year college degree. And we were asking ourselves, where did they land in the workforce? And were there opportunities for them where they can move from a minimum wage job up the ladder a little bit, so they start on the pathway up for

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels Via Syndicates: Opt In Here Cambridge-based Wistia has taken the road less-traveled to success. They did not raise a lot of money but now compete with richly-funded startups. What’s their secret? Listen to the interview with the delightful founders of this popular video platform, Brendan Schwartz and Chris Savage, as they discuss the unique culture and vision that make the startup remarkable. During the interview I pondered naming the episode “They Did It Their Way”; an echo of the song made famous by Frank Sinatra. I decided against this title because Chris and Brendan are nothing like the self-absorbed crooner. Actually, they are two friends from college who built a business together and still enjoy working and socializing with each other. The beautiful story of their friendship is only one of the attractions in this bravura interview. Highlights include: Brendan Schwartz and Chris Savage Bio Wistia’s Founders Lived and Worked in a 10-Person House in Cambridge Keepi

Join Sal's Investment Syndicate. Opt In Here: Syndicates Page At age 32 Molly Lindquist was diagnosed with breast cancer. Other women in her family had also endured this terrible ordeal. She survived it and is fighting back. Consano, the crowdfunding platform she founded, funds more than 65 medical research projects at leading academic centers such as Dana-Farber and Memorial/Sloan Kettering. Her work is getting serious attention because she’s figured out how to help disease survivors channel their energies towards defeating the illnesses that beset them. I had the opportunity of interviewing this energetic and engaging founder at TEDMED. Here are some of the topics covered in this brief conversation: Sal’s Pitch for his Investment Syndicate Molly Lindquist Bio Molly Lindquist Is Diagnosed with Breast Cancer, as Both Her Grandmothers Had Been Molly Lindquist Tells Consano’s Founding Story “I mean, over 50% of their time [researcher’s time] is spent fundraising. I'm naively thinking, shouldn't you be in the l

Invest Alongside Angels Like Bob Goodof. To Join our Syndicate List Opt In Here: Link to Syndicate Sign Up Growing up in humble circumstances in Ohio, Bob Goodof discovered he had a head for numbers from playing with his baseball cards. At MIT he excelled in material science. After stints in the chemical industry and an MBA from Harvard, Bob became an investment analyst on Wall Street specializing in the oil and gas industry. He now invests as an angel with Walnut Ventures and teaches at Babson. He’s a sought-after advisor to startups and a valued colleague to other angels. Here are the highlights form this fun and engaging conversation: Sal’s Pitch for Angel Invest Boston Syndicates Bob Goodof Bio How Bob Goodof Dodged a Career in Journalism and Ended Up in Engineering Bob Goodof Is a Guy Who Does His Numbers Bob Goodof Dodges a Career in Aero & Astro, Ends Up in Material Science aka Metallurgy Bob Goodof Gets an “Industrial MBA” from Dow Chemicals in His First Job Bob Goodof Was Very Relaxed at Job Int

INVEST WITH BOSTON'S LEADING ANGELS JOIN OUR SYNDICATES: Opt In Here   Joe Meyer founded ExecThread, https://execthread.com/, to solve a pain point he felt acutely himself. Joe had sold his company to Apple and, after the obligatory stint at the acquirer, was looking for a senior executive position. He was astonished when he revealed all sorts of important things about his career profile to a recruiter and the recruiter did not take notes. That’s when it hit him that the recruiting industry was totally broken and he decided to build a solution for the problem. Two and half years later he has $7MM in VC funding and 25,000 highly selected and engaged users helping him map where the “hidden jobs” are. Among his backers is a co-founder of LinkedIn who was astonished that ExecThread could be aware of the “passive job seeker”, execs who would entertain an offer but who are not seeking a new position actively. Listen to this interview with a founder building a company that promises to be very big and very profitable

Invest with Boston's Leading Angels. Join Our Syndicates: Opt In to Syndicates List Roboticist Keenan Wyrobek’s first career was founding Willow Garage which created ROS (Robot Operating System) that now makes robotic components inter-operable. After creating a foundation to sustain this vital piece of open source software, Keenan went in search of new engineering challenges. He became intrigued with the idea of helping developing countries deliver crucial medical supplies to areas that are poorly served by roads. He co-founded Zipline, the VC funded venture that is improving the lives of people in rural Rwanda. Zipline is now poised for profitable growth. Listen to this inspiring and brilliant engineer speak passionately about solving major problems while building a business. Topics covered: Sal’s Pitch for Angel Invest Boston Syndicates Sal’s Introduction of Keenan Wyrobek How Keenan Wyrobek Became an Engineer Keenan Wyrobek Starts Willow Garage & Creates ROS (Robot Operating Systems) the Ubiquitous Op

Invest with Boston's Leading Angels. Click here to Opt In to Our Syndicates List => Syndicates Page In college, Diane Stokes juggled caring for a sick mother, working full-time, doing ROTC and even had time to be on U Mass Lowell’s cheer leading squad. This energy and focus served her well as she progressed in her career of helping build startup after startup. Eventually, Diane founded a startup of her own. It succeeded beyond her greatest expectations. She invested as an angel for a while but is now back at another startup, helping them grow. My conversation with her revealed a personality of impressive determination and stamina leavened by good humor and genuine caring. I really enjoyed this interview, I think you will too. Topics covered include: Diane Stokes Bio While in College, Diane Stokes Cared for Her Sick Mother, Worked Full-time, Did ROTC and Still Found Time to Be on the Cheerleading Squad How Diane Stokes Found Her Path in Work Life How Diane Stokes Juggled Her Transition from Engineering to Sal

When Sid Satish saw his first surgery he was struck by the contrast between the advanced technologies in use side by side with ancient practices such as the negotiation over how much patient blood has been lost. He saw an opportunity to apply technology to create an informed calculation of blood loss. This was in 2011, now this technology runs on iPad Pros and is in use at 30 hospitals.   Here are some highlights from this eye-opening interview:   Siddarth Satish’s Bio Got Hooked on Entrepreneurship from Business Plan Competitions at UC Berkeley Gauss’ Device & Software Scans the Operating Room to Estimate Blood Loss – Too Cool! [The Product Is Called Triton and Has Been Adopted at 30 Hospitals and Used on 100,000 patients Already] How Gauss Got Started “…we've had a few of our health systems study the delivery of the system and find that it has clinically impacted blood transfusions, made them more efficient, it has led to a significant increase in the recognition of hemorrhage, which is the problem w

Since its publication in 2011, “The Lean Startup” by Eric Ries has determined how startups are built. The idea is that little can be known up front about what customers really want, thus a series of cheap and quick experiments are in order. Minimally viable products (MVPs) are slapped together and put in front of trial audiences with the goal of having them “fail fast”. This rapid experimentation may lead the startup to change directions repeatedly. These changes in business direction have come to be called pivots. Now a team of experienced product people are challenging some aspect of the Lean Startup Method. Among those voices are Geordie Kaytes, Radhika Dutt and Nidhi Aggarwal. They have seen the problems that blind adherence to the Lean Startup Method can bring, such as aimless and unproductive pivoting. They propose a rebalancing towards a more deliberate approach. In our interview Nidhi, Geordie and Radhika tell us what drove them to fashion this new approach to product creation. Radical Product can be

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels in Our Syndicates Learn More Here: Angel Invest Boston Syndicates Shiva Kashalkar of Green Piñata Toys The toy industry is hard for new comers. Building a subscription business in the toy industry is doubly hard. Despite the obstacles, Shiva Kashalkar and her company, Green Piñata Toys, are starting to get traction. They report 50% organic growth month over month with 90% monthly retention. The secret of their growth has been the creation of an algorithm to predict from the first delivery, what toys will be of most interest to their customer’s children. Listen to this engaging conversation with a dynamic young founder who is beginning to see green shoots in her startup.

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels in Our Syndicates Learn More Here: Angel Invest Boston Syndicates Guest: Semyon Dukach, Super Angel, Founder & VC - "The Energizer" When Semyon Dukach’s family came to America as refugees from the Soviet Union, they had a hundred dollars to their name. Semyon is now one of Boston’s most consequential super angels. Along the way he founded a couple of startups himself and made some remarkable angel investments that put him in a position to be helping founders with money and time. He has a knack for encouraging founders during the tough times. He’s done some fascinating stuff, like being a member of MIT’s fabled blackjack team, more recently he headed up Techstars in Boston. Now he’s raised a venture fund, One Way Ventures, focused on working with immigrant founders. Don’t miss this inspiring interview. Topics covered include: Sal’s Announcement of the Angel Invest Boston Syndicate Sal’s Intro of Semyon Dukach Semyon Dukach Bio The Moment Semyon Dukach Figured Out W

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. This new format is a response to the growing demand from founders to be on the podcast. The interviews are shorter and done via VOIP, allowing for more immediacy while still maintaining good sound quality. These Founder Focus episodes will launch concurrent with our regular podcast to offer listeners a broader choice. I hope you enjoy them.

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 and social play focused on STEM learning. The interview with Bryanne Leeming left me inspired. Here’s some of what we talked about: Bryanne Leeming Bio How Bryanne Leeming Decided She Wanted to Be a Founder What Bryanne Leeming Got from Her Babson MBA Balancing Time Between Consulting Gigs & Working on Her Startup How Being an Athlete Affects the Work Bryanne Leeming Does Bryanne Leeming Tells the Unruly Studio Story How Bryanne Leeming Overcame Not Being a Technical Founder Sal Reads a Listener Review – Asks Lis

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. The brilliant and charming Professor Savran was my guest in this laugh-filled episode. He told how he went from a childhood in Turkey to studying in some of America’s most prominent universities. He opened my eyes to the startup-friendly climate at Purdue University and he explained how his invention came about. Don’t miss this accessible and fun report from the most consequential frontier of innovation. Read the full transcript and see the video at: Çağrı Savran Episode Page Here is a list of the topics discussed: Çağr

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 products to remarkably advanced stages. In this inspiring chat you will meet Sergejs (Sergey) who studied economics but is making the oil patch greener, Tomasz who trained in robotics but helped invent a new way to train cardiologists, Rafal whose marketing platform has been adopted by Citibank and brilliant Katarzyna (Kate) who invented a way to make counterfeiting of products nearly impossible. Sergejs Jakimous (pronounced Sergey Yakimov) CEO & Co-founder of Vortex Oil Engineering Tomasz Dziwinski, Ph.D., Co-Founder of

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 setting up Central Europe’s first cleantech fund which produced excellent results. Now Adam is an investor and advisor in the Boston area; much respected for his fresh approach to building young companies. Topics covered in this charming interview include: Adam de Sola Pool Bio From Geography Major at University of Chicago to Wall Street From Salomon Brothers to the EBRD Adam Poole Has a Chance Encounter in the Bathroom & Gets a New Job Overheated Factories in Poland Adam Pool Discovers that Local Businesses Can B

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” gives invaluable advice on how to make money and keep enough of it to hand down to the generations. My personal favorite is illustrated by this quote from the interview: “Whereas, some of my colleagues were going off consulting ... They were making a lot of money every day, and they go their XKE (Jaguar XKE, a coveted sports car of the era) quite quickly. I went off to places like Lima, Ohio, and I was paid $300 a day, but I got 1% of the company.” Howard Stevenson was forgoing high current income, and consumption, for

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, an MIT professor, the late Dr. Susan Lindquist, saw a remarkable connection between yeast cells and the human neuron that could offer a solution. This evolutionary conservation, the scientific name for the unlikely connection, might lead to a platform for finding human cures. The promise of quickly evaluating compounds on simple yeast cells opened up the possibility of testing large numbers of potential treatments. Such massive experimentation could not be done with the much more complex human neuron. Chee was thus i

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 fun conversation. Quotes: "Danco, why are you here? You're a marketing guy." And I said that I was here to see Lever Brothers and he goes, "You idiot, you signed up for Lehman Brothers." “So, I took a leave of absence from school, and Wharton let me make up my remaining credits over the summer, and so I tried doing all three things at the same time. It was a success on paper, I did make the 84 [Olympic] team, I did complete the MBA, I did work at Lehman Brothers, but in truth I was overwhelmed, I did everything badly.

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 the emotional connection possible on TV, he sold the CDs he produced by the tens of thousands on QVC. In 2007 he joined co-founder Amanda Eilian, in starting a company that is now changing the way large enterprises communicate with their customers and employees via video. Videolicious makes it easy for employees to produce polished videos personalized to particular clients that make emotional connections. The platform is now used by 4,000,000 users in 100 countries, it’s even taught at 90 schools of journalism. Backed