Boston Speaks Up

Yvonne Castaneda is a licensed mental health professional and part-time faculty member at Boston College School of Social Work where she teaches courses such as Basic Skills in Clinical Social Work and Social Welfare Systems.

Born in Los Angeles, Castaneda spent much of her childhood in Miami. Her parents were immigrants to the United States – her father from Cuba and her mother from Mexico. Her parents never had formal schooling, but they emphasized the importance of education and work ethic.

Castaneda has never shied away from the challenge of a new job. Throughout her life, she has worked as a waitress, bartender, schoolteacher, operations manager, personal trainer, fitness center manager, linguist and translator for the Department of Justice and DHS (DEA, USCIS and FBI), social worker, yoga teacher, and life coach.

In 2005, Castaneda began her career in fitness with Equinox Fitness in Miami Beach and within a few years, Castaneda was promoted to Personal Training Manager. In 2010, she took a leadership role with The Sports Club/LA, which ultimately brought her to New England to be the General Manager of the SCLA in Boston, one of the more high-end gyms in the city. She has also worked as a General Manager for Healthworks Fitness.

Castaneda dealt with mental challenges throughout her young adult life, and thought often about how to embrace her vulnerabilities to help others. She describes her challenges as “severe mental health issues, addiction and an eating disorder for roughly twenty years,” all of which ultimately became the driving force that brought her to the field of mental health.

In addition to her role at Boston College, Castaneda is a licensed clinician (LICSW), and the author of the book, Pork Belly Tacos with a Side of Anxiety, which chronicles the struggles she had throughout her life. She wrote this book for young adults, specifically children of immigrants who struggle with the identity conflict found at the intersection of cultural norms and white American societal expectations.

In this episode, Castaneda dives headfirst into her story, inspiration for writing her book, the many lessons she’s learned across her wide range of experiences throughout her life, and so much more. Her willingness to open up and embrace vulnerability was jaw-dropping and we are so honored to have her on the show.

Sara Mraish-Demeter is an artist, educator, mother of three, and founder/CEO of Art Resource Collaborative for Kids (ARCK), a nonprofit delivering creative programs with social justice themes in Boston Public Schools since 2012. Born in Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents, she came to the United States at age 15 and Boston was where she first experienced real support and opportunity.

In Boston, Mraish-Demeter quickly learned that none of her schooling transferred from Jordan, so she had to go back to school and get her GED. It was through this incredibly low point in her life that put her in an environment to realize that the lack of arts in school prohibited kids from expressing herself. What first seemed like a nightmare, led to her calling.

She has now made it her life’s mission to promote cross-cultural inclusion and understanding among Boston’s children. She is passionate about using art as a vehicle to reimagine education and unlock each child’s full potential. With ARCK, she has forged many partnerships with schools, businesses, institutions, and artists to bring youth voices to the wider community through projects such as “I Am, We Are,” a collaborative public art mural, and “Walls that Speak,” a showcase of immigrant students’ stories. Internationally, during the summers of 2013-14, she led art workshops for Syrian refugee children in Jordan.

Mraish-Demeter was named a 2016 EXTRAOrdinary Woman of Boston by Mayor Walsh’s Office of Women’s Advancement and selected for the Power Launch inaugural Social Change Fellows cohort. She is an active member of the Beacon Hill Circle for Charity, which supports Boston children and women, and a former board member at the Center for Arabic Culture. She holds a B.A. in Psychology with a minor in French and completed the Nonprofit Management and Leadership program at Boston University.

In this episode, Mraish-Demeter dives into her story, inspiration for founding ARCK, the many lessons she’s learned across her wide range of experiences throughout her life, and so much more.

Guest Frank Sinton is an entrepreneur, investor and innovator from Concord, Massachusetts. A Tufts University graduate, Sinton is a life-long learner and engineer by trade with several patents under his belt. He has a growing interest in adapting his deep technology background and CEO experience to actively nurture the next generation of companies working to solve important challenges facing the world today.

Sinton made a name for himself in the entertainment industry helping legacy businesses through digital transformation. He spent the early 2000s in Los Angeles leading innovation and technology at Sony Pictures as the studio’s strategy shifted to digital.

In 2007, Sinton founded Beachfront Media, a premium video ad tech company that he built into the leading convergent TV advertising platform delivering more than 1 billion video ad impressions per month. In late 2017, he sold a majority stake to Penny Pritzker’s PSP Capital and he now sits in a board of directors role.

For the past several years, Sinton has been investing in startups through several angel groups including TBD Angels in Boston. He also serves as a Board Member to several companies. Additionally, he sits on the board of AdLedger, a nonprofit consortium working to build rules and standards for the application of blockchain and cryptography to media and advertising.

Among his many roles, Sinton also currently serves in an advisor role as Head of Innovation at Value Creation Labs where he’s helping scale next generation technology companies.

Sinton’s interests include Web3 (NFT and Crypto), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Climate Tech, just to name a few. We get into all of that on the podcast.

Guest Zach Servideo is an entrepreneur and the founder of Value Creation Labs® (VCL), a brand studio-growth accelerator. The 15-year consulting veteran has spent time in Boston, San Francisco and Los Angeles.

Known for his boundless energy and storytelling prowess, Servideo is a sought out chief brand officer of sorts for companies looking to elevate their public presence and stoke growth. In 2021, he created VCL as a means to one day realize his vision to own and operate a venture studio. He’s currently building toward that goal helping provide flexible consulting services to a range of companies. He also has an investor network betting on those same companies.

Servideo nurtures a dynamic VCL talent consortium ranging from artists and writers to patent attorneys and bankers. He’s currently working with a group of Boston-based tech journalists on a series of custom analyst reports for Silicon Valley Bank, New England Venture Capital Association, Glasswing Ventures and Accomplice. With Servideo serving as publisher, the reports shed light on innovations from Boston that are hiding in plain sight and yet driving global economic growth. VCL recently released its latest report on cybersecurity.

Of course, he’s also the founder and host of Boston Speaks Up (BSU), an innovation podcast visiting with inspiring people from all walks of life that is sponsored by Silicon Valley Bank. Founded in 2018, BSU helped catapult Servideo back into the Boston innovation community he spent much of the 2000s and early 2010s in, before a five year stint in Los Angeles.

He began his career at Schwartz Communications in the mid 2000s before transitioning to a role at fama PR in 2009 which found him embedded in the Cambridge Innovation Center (CIC) community at One Broadway, Kendall Square. It was at fama/CIC where Servideo began honing the craft of developing brands and taking startups to market – Opower (acquired by Oracle in 2016), Suniva, TweetMyJobs, CloudLock, to name a few.

By 2012, he took the entrepreneurial plunge, created his first LLC and developed a business plan to bring his abilities to Los Angeles at a time when ‘Silicon Beach’ was just taking off. He spent 5 years between LA and San Francisco bringing companies to market and helping them reach successful exits – Klutch to eBay (2015), Epoxy to Vemba (2016), Watchwith to Comcast (2017), Beachfront Media to PSP Capital (2017), Whosay to Viacom (2018), Downstream to Jungle Scout/Summit Partners (2021) along with several more.

For those listeners less familiar with Servideo’s work behind the scenes, he’s an active business development specialist working on an array of initiatives to support first time founders. For example, he serves as entrepreneur-in-residence at Endicott College’s Angle Center for Entrepreneurship where he’s a major catalyst behind the school’s startup incubator and annual Spark Tank startup competition.

He somehow manages to play soccer a couple times a week, coach his daughter’s youth soccer team and train/compete in triathlons (with one 70.3 Ironman under his belt).

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 their peak, and uniquely live and feel better.

The company’s soon-to-launch Pact, which aims to compete with the likes of Theragun and other at-home massage products, promises to be the world's first full-feedback interactive percussive massager that provides a personalized recovery solution with muscle scanning technology. The Pact measures people’s muscle tightness and provides personalized recovery guidance, creating an experience that adapts to them.

An engineer at heart, Hunter-Jones got her first patent at age 16, and went on to MIT to get a degree in Mechanical Engineering. Her career began at SONOS, where she started in product development and then moved into project management. It wasn’t until starting Impact Biosystems for Hunter-Jones to finally get the chance to combine her skills in engineering, product vision, and management with her passions for running, yoga, and overall health and wellness.

Family is at the root of what drives Hunter-Jones. She gave birth to her son nine days before closing the company’s latest round of funding (they’ve closed $6.5 million to date). On the podcast, we discuss Hunter-Jones’ devotion to her family and her business, as well as her relationship with her father Ian Hunter, a PhD and the Hatsopoulos Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He also serves as Chief Inventor of Impact Biosystems. Hunter-Jones describes her father’s lab at the barn of her childhood home as “Tony Stark’s lab” where she and her father would work on inventions together throughout her childhood. The barn now serves as the headquarters for Impact Biosystems.

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 fundraising as a female founder.

Byers is also an angel investor, frequent startup mentor and advisor, speaker, and works with dozens of diversity-focused accelerators, non-profit organizations, and university programs. She received her MBA from Boston University, is a mom of two young children, and is a vocal proponent of parent entrepreneurs.

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 capital firm that leads Seed rounds for business software solutions company founders.

Prior to his current roles at STOPWATCH and Bonfire Ventures, Rossignol was in multiple leadership positions from co-founding Ad On Feet, an experiential guerilla marketing company, to serving as the Head of Partnerships at UserTesting ($USER), where he built and ran the company’s first channel sales and strategic partnership playbook across all of their strategic consulting and digital agency partnership networks.

Having led business development, product marketing, and operation teams across the globe, Rossignol has a unique humanity-first approach to operating and investing. From startups to scale ups, he leverages several years of operating experiences to help underestimated teams build a better future for tomorrow, today.

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 Williams Wade award for her years of dedicated service to her alma mater.

She has also served in leadership roles with organizations such as Montserrat College of Art Board of Trustees, AIGA Boston, Girls, Inc. of Lynn, and the Printing and Publishing Council of New England.

A life-long learner, Deschamps is currently working to complete a Professional Development program in Entrepreneurial Studies at Stanford University.

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 insights.

Gupta is also a venture partner at Hyperplane.vc, and board member at Dvinci, in addition to being an active angel investor with TBD Angels.

Prior to Butlr, Gupta worked with dozens of VC-backed companies which achieved multiple exits. He was part of the founding management team at Brightcove, helping it grow to IPO; Chief Commercial Officer at Videoplaza, acquired by Telstra; GM EMEA at Ooyala; and COO at Humatics, the breakthrough microlocation startup.

Readers with seed or pre-seed startups are encouraged to reach out to Gupta at [email protected].

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 ecosystem that if you’re in venture capital and ever make your way to Boston, it’s an absolute must that you meet him--not simply out of business reasons but out of the plain fact that he’s one of the most interesting, multifaceted characters you could ever meet in venture capital.

Grinnell is someone who defies categorization. If you get to know him a little more, you’ll learn that he’s a phenom on the pipe organ and skilled at enough instruments to form a one-man band if he really wanted. Check out his LinkedIn page, and you’ll see not just the standard listing of past roles and accomplishments, but a bio populated with his current music playlist: Twenty One Pilots, Alan Walker, Michael Franti, Sharon Jones, and the Dap-Kings. In fact, it was his passion for music--specifically a fascination with the creation of digital sounds through electronics--that prompted him to study electrical engineering and computer science at MIT. While Grinnell is a venture capitalist by title and reputation nowadays, he very much remains the same essential spirit as before: a lover of great music, a self-described tech “nerd” and a gravitational center for those around him.