The Early Stage Podcast

The Early Stage Podcast pushes forward with a women in digital health takeover! Nell Meosky Luo, Founder & CEO of Folia Health, is today's guest, and my former colleague and MassChallenge HealthTech Director of Operations, Nina Kandilian, is my co-host. The oldest of seven children and older sister to a brother with Common Variable Immune Deficiency, Nell is no stranger to supporting another with their complex disease state. It took a block of ice literally falling on her head on a New York City sidewalk for her to realize she needed to follow her passion as opposed to dying a consultant. She thought back to her experience with her brother and how difficult it was to match specific treatments to specific patients for complex diseases like CVID or Cystic Fibrosis. After over a year of working on the project nights and weekends (it can be done, 9-to-5ers!), Nell launched Folia Health to monitor patient-reported outcomes in a structured way, elevating appointments with clinicians and leading to better health outcomes. Listen in to hear more about how she's making it happen. Folia Health Website - https://www.foliahealth.com/ Early Stage Podcast Website - https://www.earlystagepodcast.com/

When you're not at home, and not in the office...what are you doing? From setting up family dinners with his friends in college to launching the Back Bay location of his startup Hall, Albert Nichols has always had a passion for bringing people together. At Hall, Albert and his team (thanks for setting this up, Phil!) have built a comfortable lifestyle space that feels like home but is also a space for grabbing dinner, catching up on emails, and meeting new people. Listen in to learn about Hall's journey towards defining a new "place" for the 21st century. Website - https://hallboston.com/ Albert's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/albertnichols/ Albert's Twitter - @albertcnichols

Today, we hear from Maher Damak, Co-Founder at MIT-spawned startup Infinite Cooling. For a first time founder, Maher comes across as thoughtful and in control. He and his co-founders have set Infinite Cooling on an amazing run: winning the MIT 100k and a grant by the state of Massachusetts, gaining acceptance and winning the top prize at MassChallenge, and most recently being named to the Forbes "30 Under 30" list for 2019. Combining fluid dynamics with mechanical engineering for social good, Maer first worked on creating electrically-charged meshes to capture water from fog to produce drinking water in remote areas of the world that have lots of fog but no rain. The technology worked, and they found a massive commercial application capturing water from cooling tower plumes with electrically-charged domes. Maher and his team are piloting the technology with MIT's cooling tower and are looking at raising funding from early stage investors to build the team and launch more projects. I see a ton of deal flow from running this podcast, and in my opinion, Infinite Cooling is something special. While profit is certainly important, he also has an eye towards the developing world, with hopes to turn high cost power plants into low cost desalinization plants to provide clean water globally. Infinite Cooling Website: https://www.infinite-cooling.com/ Maher's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/maher-damak-phd-2217b35b/

Why hello startup nation, the Early Stage Podcast rolls onwards! It's great to be back in the saddle for a whole new set of episodes. It's been a while since I hosted panels, I was invited to moderate the Pre-Traction Fundraising panel at Startup Boston at 1:30pm on September 12th at CIC Boston. If you ever wanted to say hi or give me a hug in person, well, this is your opportunity. I usually edit most of my episodes to around 30 minutes, but I had such a hard time figuring out what to cut here that I just left most of it in. This interview with Zac Sheffer, Founder & CEO of Elsen, is a little longer than most episodes, but a full listen is definitely worth it. Zac's started his career in entrepreneurship making $40/day hawking candy bars from his lock in middle school. After writing an iPad app that overlaid technical indicators on top of real-time Yahoo Finance data, he fell in love with the financial services space. Our convo shifts from finding market validation for Elsen to riffing on value proposition, tips on working with large companies, having an obsessive customer focus, and the 20+ hour cooking challenges with his friends that have become his zen. Listen in to learn how Elsen is enabling anyone to harness vast amounts of data to make better decisions and solve the worlds most complex problems.

When I started the pod, one of the things I was super excited about was tracking entrepreneurs closely as they went on the rollercoaster journey that is startup life. The 1-year lookback podcast with RateGravity was so great I decided to do it again. Stephanie Rowe has been hard at work as Founder & CEO of Boston-based IoT startup Joulez, which is reimagining STEM for every girl by designing experiences that inspire them. The company was founded to build fun, fashionable products, starting...

Today I bring to you an awesome conversation with Blake Bartlett from OpenView Venture Partners. Born and bred in Southern California with a penchant for warm weather and analyzing businesses from a holistic perspective, opportunities at Battery Ventures and now OpenView have led him to meticulously maintain a beard, stock up on winter parkas, and make a number of exciting investments in expansion-stage B2B startups. In our wide-ranging chat, we discuss the keys to making the leap from...

The sun is finally out in Boston, the weather is getting warmer, and the scent of burgers can be detected around the neighborhood. Summer is officially here! Today's conversation with true tickets Co-Founder and CEO Matt Zarracina gives us insight into running with a strong early application of a burgeoning technology, in this case blockchain. The idea for leading the ticketing world onto the blockchain came when white-boarding blockchain applications with a subject-matter expert and later...

Wow, what a difference a year makes. For Liz Asai and her startup 3Derm, the last twelve months welcomed a bigger team, bigger markets, and more strategic partners. Artificial intelligence, just a gleam in their eye back then, has now come to the forefront. A few important AI papers came out since my last conversation with Liz showing how a few researchers using open source neural nets trained on skin photos from the internet were more accurate diagnosing skin cancer than board certified...

Imagine the utter joy and promise of taking a food brand from a regional player to a national powerhouse, meeting the woman of your dreams, getting married, buying your first house, and running 5 New York City marathons…only to find out that you have 12 weeks to live. Such was the devastating news received by Dan Schorr a couple years ago. Not to be deterred, Dan dove into his battles with lymphoma and the ice cream world with equal vigor. 20 months later, he had beaten cancer and expanded...

I record each episode of Early Stage with the hope of discovering someTHING special: a tip for raising capital, a secret strategy for growth hacking or closing big deals, or the even the best way to manage a growing staff. Today, I present to you someONE special. It's not easy to share a narrative that led to your startup shutting down, but that's exactly what Charlie Kaplan joined me to do. I was going to use the word failure to describe Cymbal, the "Instagram for music" startup he led with...

Today's guest, Ernesto DiGiambattista, Founder and CEO of CYBRIC, is helping define a new industry term: DevSecOps. Ernesto and Co-Founder & CTO Mike Kail have been obsessed with figuring out how to bring the security process into development without slowing it down, and CYRBIC is their answer. CYBRIC's security orchestration platform helps developers, DevOps, and security teams apply commercial security testing tools throughout the software development lifecycle. Their platform...

Have you ever tried to brew beer in one of those cheap Mr. Beer plastic barrels? How did the batch turn out? Michael Oxton, Co-Founder of Night Shift Brewing out of Everett, MA, started his foray into the beer world in exactly the same manner. For the record, his first batch turned out horrible -- it tasted like rotten cider! Michael and his fellow conspirators wouldn't be deterred, and soon their house was overrun with beer-making equipment and hundreds of friends more than willing to taste...

After interviewing Janet Comenos, CEO of Spotted, for Episode 21, I asked her to introduce me to one of her favorite people in the startup world. That night, she connected me with Sarah Hodges, Partner at Pillar VC. Literally 10 seconds into our coffee meeting I realized that A.) she's an absolute force of nature, and B.) I had to figure out a way to share her insights with all of you. After spending years as a a business, strategy, and marketing leader at a number of successful startups,...

As I sit here and look around my apartment, it's likely that every single item has been shipped here from across the state, country, or even the world. Supply chain is an essential cog of the global economy, albeit one of the least sexy industries out there. Tive Chief Revenue Officer Rob Stevens and his team have cracked the code on tracking these shipments in real-time.Their combination of always-connected sensors and cloud-based software gives companies visibility on shipments over sea,...

Why hello Startup Nation, and welcome to Episode 28 of the Early Stage Podcast, the weekly show that gives you a deep dive into startup life right from the source, the founders themselves. I'm @JohnnyStartup, your host. At the top of today's show you're being treated to the final #InnoSprint with Bostinno Tech Writer Dylan Martin, in which he shares some interesting personal news. We touch on his favorite interviewees, why it benefits a startup to be transparent to their customers and the...

Why hello startup nation, and welcome to Episode 26 of the Early Stage Podcast. If you're tired of listening to shows full of wildly successful entrepreneurs telling tales of grandeur and more interested in hearing early stage entrepreneurs share their war stories, milestones, fundraises, and pivots, then you've found a home. My name is John Valentine, or @JohnnyStartup on Twitter, and I'm your host. By day I'm scouting aerospace, space, defense, security, and transportation startups for...

I have an incredible interview coming at you with Ethan Bernstein, Co-Founder & CEO of Freebird, who, with his growing team, is trying to solve a $60 billion pain point. Flight disruptions cause a huge amount of economic loss, and business trips can cost upwards of 10% to 15% more than their original price tags because of the extra costs associated with accommodating unplanned interruptions. Travel managers at big companies can activate Freebird for their most important travelers so when...

If you listen back to the first few episodes, you'll hear me ask founders where they think they'll be in twelve months. One year seems like a long time in startupland, but it actually goes by in a flash. Patrick Boyaggi and Mike Tassone, Founders of RateGravity and guests on our first episode ever, discovered just that. In this inaugural 1-year lookback, we discussed their $2M funding round with Listen Ventures, Accomplice's BOSS Syndicate, and others, examined how other players in the...

Navigating the healthcare system in America is so exhausting it could make you sick. The average wait to see a primary care doctor in Boston is 49 days. 49 days of being scared. 49 days of potentially getting even more ill. New technologies in the medical field like telemedicine have focused on increasing the number of patients doctors can see, and useful tools like minute clinics are popping up everywhere. These new solutions will help, but a new approach is needed considering our country...

I'm super excited to publish today's founder interview. A group of curious material science students at MIT, while working on a project to help commercial buildings save on energy costs by heating people directly, developed a very low-powered thermal heating and cooling device for the wrist called the Embr Wave. Their startup journey took a winding course through Greentown Labs to the MIT Skills Accelerator and later the MassChallenge accelerator. Along the way, they picked up an NSF grant,...