Angel Invest Boston

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Check Out Our Syndicates A professor of entrepreneurship in Paris who discovered a way to use art to help business people think more creatively, Sylvain Bureau met his unlikely collaborator at a wedding. The product of this chance encounter, Art Thinking, has gained acceptance in boardrooms around the world. My sound engineer Raul Rosa really liked this episode. I did too. ESCP Europe, where Sylvain Bureau teaches, is the first business school. It was founded two centuries ago. The founder was Jean Baptiste Say of the eponymous economic law. B. Say really believed in entrepreneurship. The foundation named after him now employs twenty academics in the field of entrepreneurship in several European cities. Sylvain Burau was trying to get out of the “Velvet-Lined Rut” of tenured academia in much the same way that Howard Stevenson was when he left a tenured position at Harvard Business School to go into business. At a wedding celebration Sylvain Bureau met an artist named Pie

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels:  Click Here to Learn About Our Syndicates Still in his thirties and still working full-time, Phillip Lachman is a leader at Walnut Ventures. How this startup exec finds time to invest as an angel is a remarkable story. Clever, articulate and full of good cheer, Phillip is always a delightful interlocutor. Fun episode! Highlights: How Phillip leverages his angel network and modern means of communication to work full-time and still be an active angel. Phillip’s first angel investment was in a company called CoolChip, in which Sal also invested. The company went under but Phillip and Sal still greatly respect the founder. Will Sanchez, PhD and his co-founders provided an example of how to wind up a failed venture. Phillip and Sal would gladly invest in a future venture of Will Sanchez. He showed a sterling character in difficult circumstances. Will is actually friends with Shakeel Avadhany, CEO & co-founder of ClearMotion where Phillip works. Phillip explains his approa

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates Seasoned entrepreneur Nancy Briefs on her startup’s daring swing at Type 2 diabetes. AltrixBio is creating a pill that simulates the benefit of the best gastric bypass surgery: remission of diabetes in 80 percent of cases. With co-founders Jeff Karp and Ali Tavakoli, she is re-purposing an existing treatment with a great safety profile to address this daunting problem. Highlights include: Nancy Briefs, co-founded 7 companies and managed, or been on the board of, several others. Together with Dr. Karp and Dr. Tavakoli of Brigham & Women’s Hospital, Nancy co-founded AltrixBio to emulate the results of gastric bypass in a pill. Sal saw Nancy pitch at MIT Angels and Walnut Ventures and was impressed. Ali Tavakoli, M.D. performs the Roux-en-Y procedure which is the gastric bypass operation with the best record of success. Tavakoli and others observed that diabetic patients who experienced the procedure had their Type 2 diabetes go into remission about 80 pe

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Barely two years out of Harvard, founder Ben Pleat of Cobu has owners of premier apartment buildings excited by the community-creating activities that make their properties more desirable places to live. Owners spend heavily on making the physical spaces attractive but are frequently frustrated by tenant turnover that averages 50 per cent per annum.  Cobu helps develop a sense of belonging that increases tenant satisfaction and lowers turnover. Ben’s not doing this alone, he’s recruited an impressive team of colleagues and advisors who share his vision. He tells us the Cobu story in an accessible and engaging manner. Topics include: Introduction Sal intros the show and mentions portfolio company Vedanta Biosciences. Ben Pleat bio. Sal sees the problem Cobu is solving first-hand in his multi-family properties. Ben pitched at Walnut Ventures and Sal found his pitch compelling. Cobu Connecting residents in communities of 300 to 400 hundred residents

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates Scientist and intrapreneur Gillian Isabelle, PhD, founded Enlivity (https://enlivity.com/) to make chemotherapy more bearable for cancer patients. The first product is a supplement invented by an oncologist that helps prevent sores from forming in the mouths and digestive tracts of patients receiving chemotherapy, a problem that can delay life-saving treatment. A fun interview with an infectiously affable guest. Gillian Isabelle studied material science at UC Berkeley and received her PhD from MIT. Worked at Corning and then at PureTech Health, the remarkable promising new pharma company started in Boston. At the Broad Institute she set up and ran the business development office to bring is licensing revenue from the Broad’s research. Gillian Isabelle is the founder of Enlivity, a startup dedicated to improving the lives of patients receiving chemotherapy. Radiation and chemotherapy have serious side effects that include sores in the mouth and the digestiv

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Learn More About Our Syndicates Two young founders on a mission to get valuable data about complex illnesses which are not now easily captured. Nell Meosky Luo and Dan Toffling of Folia Health tell the story of how their startup came together and where it’s headed. Highlights include: Nell Meosky Luo bio. Dan Toffling bio. What Folia Health does. Patients dealing with complex or chronic illnesses possess a wealth of data that is not now transmitted via the five to ten annual interactions a patient has with a physician. Both Nell and Dan have seen the problem in their immediate families. Built an online platform that patients can use to record important information. This information can be used to guide the patient’s clinical care and, in anonymized form, can be valuable research data. Sal notes that the user experience of their platform looks very accessible. Folia has spent a lot of time on getting the right interactions with patients. How Folia Health came about. N

Repeat founder Adam Martel went to work for Babson College as a major gifts fundraiser in order to get his MBA for free. While at Babson he identified the problem Gravyty is addressing and met his co-founder Rich Palmer. Gravyty attracted early support from Christopher Mirabile’s LaunchPad Venture Group. The company just completed a $2 million plus raise to ramp up its growth. A really sparkling interview with two outstanding leaders. Adam Martel, former coach, and full-time fundraiser at a college, tried to start a couple of businesses but realized he needed a co-founder to improve his odds of success. Adam decided to quit his job and go to work at Babson College where he could get his MBA for free. Adam’s motivation was to find a co-founder at Babson. Rich Palmer, a fellow MBA student, had worked on Wall Street building quantitative models. They hit it off and have made a great founding team. From Adam’s work at Babson it was obvious that each fundraiser needed help in identifying which of their more than

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Our Syndicates To super angel Jeff Arnold the way to make money in biotech is to make few but highly researched bets and then back them to the hilt. His remarkable record is hard to argue with. The interview takes us from his student days at MIT through his various startups and investments; a tour de force. His approach has much to teach angels and founders. Sal opens by talking about how he delights in the promising companies that come from Boston’s unrivalled concentrations of universities. He mentions his investment in Gelesis which recently got FDA approval to market a new weight loss treatment. Sal introduces engineer, founder and super angel Jeff Arnold who studied electrical engineering at MIT and then spent the next seven years building and marketing medical devices at Becton Dickinson. Jeff Arnold describes his experience at Cambridge Heart which he headed through an IPO. The most salient lesson is that technologies that work in the lab do not necessarily transl

Sal's Investment Syndicates: Learn More About Our Syndicates Engineer and consultant Susan Conover’s struggle with skin cancer inspires her to apply AI to help us understand what’s going on with our skin. This determined founder has made considerable headway in building the most valuable asset an AI startup can have: a strong, proprietary data set. A fun interview with a dynamic founder. Highlights include: Sal crows about his investment in Gelesis, a company that just got FDA approval for a new weight loss treatment with broad application and good safety profile. Consider our investment syndicates if you are an accredited investor (https://www.angelinvestboston.com/our-syndicates/) Susan Conover bio. Honors grad in mechanical engineering from UT Austin, a top program, got a master’s degree in engineering management at MIT. Susan has studied or worked in France, Australia and Singapore. Susan Conover became a melanoma survivor at age 22. This made a big impression on her. Susan sees a need to “close the loop

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Investment Syndicates Two of Boston’s most active angels, Marlene Boyaner of Golden Seeds and Doug Bates of Walnut Venture, talk to Sal Daher about angel investing, fundraising, building a startup and various other topics. The panel takes challenging questions from an audience of startup founders. Highlights include: Marlene Boyaner bio. Doug Bates bio How Marlene went from intrapreneuring at CIBC & Capital One to angel investing. Golden Seeds is on the organized end of the spectrum among angel groups; Marlene likes the way it operates. Entrepreneurship was a natural for Doug Bates due to several examples of in his family. Founded a successful business with the woman to whom he was married at the time. Put his wife’s idea through a thorough MBA-type scrutiny and became convinced it would work. Golden Seeds seeks to ensure that women get their share of startup funding and invest in businesses where they can see the possibility of an exit. They are generali

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Our Investment Syndicates Page Building a business in education is hard but Steve Shapiro has beaten the odds several times. His latest accomplishment is as CEO of FineTune Learning which is set to grade essays from 3.6 million students taking the CollegeBoard's AP Exams starting in July of 2019. Founded by brilliant Maine educator Ogden Morse, FineTune Learning is a platform using software to facilitate human grading of essays at scale. An awesome interview with an outstanding and captivating entrepreneur. Highlights of the interview: Ogden Morse’s inspired approach made possible the use of software to evaluate answers by students to open response questions. The first product, Literature Companion, got local traction in Maine. However, selling district by district proved daunting. Steve Shapiro opted to go after large businesses that already had established relationships with schools. The danger to Steve’s strategy is that large players can string star

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates How his grandfather succeeded despite being blind inspired Shivang Dave, Ph.D. to change the world.  As an accomplished bioengineer and a founder, he aims to bring high-quality eye exams to the masses in India with a new device. The Madrid-MIT M+Visión Fellowship was crucial to building a capable and cohesive founding team for PlenOptika. Shivang was a cheery and inspiring guest; great interview! Some highlights: Shivang Dave, Ph.D. bio Shivang introduces his wonderfully multi-disciplinary co-founders: Eduardo Lage, Ph.D., Daryl Lim, Ph.D., and Nick Durr, Ph.D. Device looks like binoculars from Star Wars. Addresses a massive problem: 1.5 billion worldwide don’t have the eye glasses they need. The scarcity of trained vision professionals and the large size of optical equipment creates bottle necks outside rich countries. Market research with NGOs and other stakeholders pointed to the need for an accurate, portable and cheap autorefractor. As the

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates From studying Ancient Greek to building a business, founder Brendan Dowdall has traveled an interesting path. Construction is a staid industry but Brendan is revolutionizing it with data. Concrete Sensors’ innovative devices sit in concrete and transmit data. The payoff is already evident in time savings and improvements in quality experienced by the industry’s biggest players. As their data set grows, Concrete Sensors hopes to become the go-to source of information for contractors on concrete. I was an early investor in this company and am excited about its future. It was a fun and instructive interview with a delightful founder. Highlights include: Sal celebrates the success of portfolio company SQZ Biotech which is working on training our immune systems to fight cancers and other diseases (Interview with Armon Sharei of SQZ Biotech) Brendan Dowdall bio and introduction. Brendan Dowdall explains what Concrete Sensors does and why it matters.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates Two friends from Turkey are bringing the latest advances in AI to people with visual impairments. Emre Sarbak was a consultant and a successful social entrepreneur. Çağrı Zaman was an architect but is now completing his PhD at MIT’s Media Lab in computer vision. Their startup Mediate is building practical tools to help people with reduced vision navigate the world. Topics covered include: Sal talks briefly about portfolio company SQZ Biotech. Brief bios of Çağrı (pronounced “Cha-ree”) Zaman and Emre Sarbak. Emre describes what Mediate does; visual impairment is one of the most limiting disabilities. Blindness causes the highest level of unemployment among the disabilities. Vision loss is a growing problem for an aging population. The ultimate goal is for a visually impaired person to be totally autonomous. Spinoff from Çağrı Zaman’s work at MIT on spatial artificial intelligence. Won MIT DesignX Challenge in 2017. Emre actually met Çağrı via a

Join Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Learn About Our Syndicates Upon graduating in the upper strata of her engineering class at MIT, Lucinda Linde was promptly accepted at Harvard Business school. She worked as an engineer in two successful tech companies, one of which was co-founded by Clayton Christensen of “Innovator’s Dilemma” fame. Her incisive intellect and practical outlook were prized by giants such as HBS’ Howard Stevenson (Link to Howard Stevenson's Interview - Our Most Downloaded Podcast) who hired her to study best practices in angel investing. Lucinda joined Walnut and entered the realm of venture investing. Along the way she took seven years off to be a full-time mother. She has now reinvented herself as a mathy marketing consultant. Sal describes his role in raising the first money for startup rocket ship SQZ Biotech. Lucinda’s undergrad summer internships helped eliminate doing research as a career. Experience running Lecture Series Committee gave her an early taste of running a busine

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Our Syndicates Science is broken. Vast increases in people and money applied to scientific inquiry have failed to raise the rate of discovery. Among the reasons for this is that the workflow of labs is firmly stuck in the 1990s. Repeat founder Gabor Bethlendy is tackling this huge problem by creating Meenta.io, a platform to allow researchers to plan and execute their experiments via an online interface. Gabor is tenacious and energetic. He’s recruited to his effort co-founder Stephan Smith who is also very impressive and complements Gabor’s scientific background with a sophisticated understanding of the online universe. They’ve signed up their first big paying customer and have had a great stint at Techstars which has refined their go to market approach. Some highlight from the interview: Gabor Bethlendy bio. Parabase Genomics, his first startup, allowed parent of sick newborns to screen for hundreds of common genetic abnormalities that can be treated. How Gabor rec

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Action Jack Barker move over! Chainsaw Jack Huntress is the real deal. CEOs don’t get more dynamic than this geologist turned founder. Jack's startup, HomeBinder offers invaluable tools to help homeowners manage and record work done on their most valuable asset. It’s getting real traction via home inspectors eager to help home buyers. Breaking News: HomeBinder is in Techstars! Special mention in this episode:  Ed Hosepian and Dean Kahr. Thanks for your generous help in the purchase of the big, dilapidated house in Cambridge. Guys, you were right! Jack Huntress trained as a geologist and geophysicist then worked as a consultant for decades. Acted as an intrapreneur in building a new practice at an existing firm. No Conjoined Triangles of Success for this Jack – he’s a truly action-prone CEO. How “Chainsaw Jack” got his name. Story told by super angel and CEO whisperer Joe Caruso (Link to Joe Caruso Episode Page) Jack’s owned a bunch of homes in

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Esportudo.com is creating new ways for sports fans in Latin America to engage with their sport. Founder Marcos Araújo, whose parents came to the Boston area from Brazil, is leveraging his background in digital media to address a huge unmet need. His website now gets 20 million visits a month and is growing. Brands love the opportunity to engage with the Latin community in an effective way. Marcos Araújo’s parents immigrated here from Brazil Marcos went to UMass Amherst Worked at Goji.com and HubSpot Esportudo entertains sports fans Make money by creating branded content and getting paid by brands Example GoPro More than 100 content creators. Video, audio and text. Reach 20 million people per month, daily users: 50,000 to 100,000 Last year was about putting out the Esportudo brand, this year is about becoming the number one site for sports in Latin America. Launching in Spanish in 2019. Starting to target content based on location. Colombia

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Click Here to Learn More Sam Bogoch’s company, axle.ai, helps clients with massive video files make sense of the content they have. The accumulation of video content is going way beyond the traditional broadcast networks and includes universities, large enterprises not in the entertainment industry, churches, sports venues etc. Video has yet to migrate to the cloud. It still sits in hard drives. The conversation with this brilliant interlocutor expanded my understanding of significant trends in video. Here are some highlights: Some content owners have a petabyte of video in storage, that’s 1000 X what my laptop’s hard drive holds. Video files are too big to move to the cloud; cloud storage used only for distributing final product so raw footage is still stored in big hard drives. Footage captured in one night in Madison Square Garden could take weeks to upload. Amazon actually has 18-wheelers that drive to sites of customers with particularly large amounts of data and re

Accredited Investors, Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Star founder Bryanne Leeming is back to update us on all the exciting stuff Unruly Studios has been doing. Alexa Accelerator, Inc. Magazine feature, adoption by the City of Somerville and more. Listen to this scrappy young founder who’s done a lot with very little. Topics include: What they learned at Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator that is run by Techstars. How they came to be featured in Inc. Magazine. UPS/Inc. Magazine Prize. Amon Milner & crucial early pivot that really made Unruly Studios. Dealing with rejection while fundraising or selling. AT&T sponsored pilot turned into a live deal with the City of Somerville’s school system that has adopted Splats! The “STEM Toy Burn” and how to avoid it. Find out about cool new things in the Unruly Studios product roadmap.