Innova802

Byron Batres of Scrivnr.com to recount the early days of building his company, the importance for understanding your clients true needs and how these early experiences are informing his latest venture.

Byron's insights are well worth the listen and the service they offer can help those who find themselves without the resources needed to take their loved ones assets out of probate.

Part II of II

Byron Batres of Scrivnr.com to recount the early days of building his company, the importance for understanding your clients true needs and how these early experiences are informing his latest venture.

Byron's insights are well worth the listen and the service they offer can help those who find themselves without the resources needed to take their loved ones assets out of probate.

Host Ryan Munn joined founders Nathaniel Klein and Jacob Freedman of Treeline Terrains, 2025 SBA SMall Business Award winners and members of the 2023 cohort for Forest Business Accelerator.

Jacob and Nathaniel shared their origin story with Ryan and share with us multiple key factors for building and funding a successful startup, combining craft with innovative process and technology.

Also mentioned in our podcast, Northern Forest Center & Vermont Sustainable Jobs Fund

NYC-Based Drew Trombley has deep roots in Vermont tech via the borderlands. Drew grew up in Ticonderoga, NY. Depending on your perspective that might as well be Vermont. Drew's professional roots stem from the financing sector. This contributed to moments you'll want to really take in regarding how the venture space conducts its decision-making and how you can set yourself apart when fundraising in ways that create benefit for everyone involved.

Drew had very succinct things to say about fundraising strategy and building truly valuable digital products that emphasize our empathy; the empathy required to produce solutions that benefit others and that work as market responsive solutions where what folks' needs are were discovered, respected and implemented. The capital 'E' missing in tech.

Drew also had the chance to fill us in on his latest work at Pinata. You'll also want to check out the interesting stuff happening in vibecode, a truly web 3.0 experience fast making the rounds into our everyday life.

And if you're tired of the disunion and division of early gen social media, Drew recommends warpcast if you want clarity and to not entirely stop using social media.

Vermont isn't just shrinking in population, its aging. The state has 30,000 fewer working age citizens between 25-40 then it did 25 years ago. This, while modest population gains during the Covid-19 pandemic has reversed.

For those of us at the Innova802 Crew, we see the effects every day. Many citizens on fixed incomes, who represent a larger share of the population, cannot afford increases to taxes for education, infrastructure and public healthcare subsidies.

For many, the gut reaction is to say, no new Vermont citizens, no new Vermont students, no new Vermont employers taking in public investment dollars. While this may seem intuitively correct, it is in fact the path to a downward economic cycle that becomes very challenging to reverse, especially for rural states.

We hosted Kevin Chu, Executive Director of the Vermont Futures Project during season nine of the Are We Here Yet? podcast. One year later, the Innova802 crew had him back to talk about the effort to get all Vermonters on the same page, writing a book of growth in order to create a more livable Vermont bursting at the seams with opportunity and the right balance between caring for our neighbors and having the ability to pay for it.

Listen to VFP on Marketplace

This Are We Here Yet? podcast is in association with the Innova802 podcast.

This conversation on rural development is so important, we're hosting it on The Housers Podcast, too!

Listeners looking to learn how to build and survive launching your rural tech hub will relate to our latest guest, Abby Salomon's story. The central Vermont town of Randolph, host to her organization known as Cultivator is also a resilient community in a truly resilient state. We talked about the challenge to reinventing funding in the current climate of 2025 for such projects, the importance of mentorship to the programming offered and the real challenge of servicing a wide spectrum of small business while still working to build a new cluster of tech oriented, well-paying companies.

Follow Cultivator or join their program

Open Innovation has become essential to good science being completed by our institutions. Our guest this week, Steve Rader speaks with experience on how open innovation, rather crowdsourcing has and will shape good science work moving forward. Steven recently retired from NASA and is an expert in open innovation after 36 years with NASA at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, TX.

We discussed his experiences leveraging crowdsourcing and open innovation to achieve significant cost savings and accelerate technological advancements at NASA, including nearly 900 successful challenges within his career. He highlighted the importance of understanding a problem's root causes before brainstorming solutions and the four "G's" driving participation (Gold, Guts, Glory, and Good) by thousands of our neighbors passionate about the work of science.

Our listeners can connect with Steve by clicking here.

This Are We Here Yet? podcast is in association with the Innova802 podcast.

Sharing the mic with Interchain.Live and fellow Innova802 crew member Ryan Munn brought Richard Lowe to our virtual studios for a discussion regarding Rich's experience as a ghostwriter and author in his own right. The discussion quickly deepened to include his perspective on building the bionic worker: getting business to leverage tech to support workers as opposed to leveraging tech to replace them. The importance of leveraging older workers who are living longer and what experienced professionals bring to the table for companies and society.

Rich is a deep well of experience on a number of important topics that we encourage you to think more on after listening. Find our discussion on the Are We Here Yet? Podcast roster as well as Innova802 and Interchain Live.

Paul Shepherd is no stranger to the Vermont high tech community. He recently launched Rugged MicroPower to take what he's learned working for leading Vermont tech companies and applying them to build a leader in providing power management solutions to the space industry.

Our conversation touched upon the intricacies of supply-chain, too. We also offer our congrats to Paul and the other members of the 2025 cohort of LaunchVT, announced recently. Find our 2024 interview with LaunchVT's Lauren Bass.

Adam Locklin is the new executive director of the Vermont Technology Alliance(VTTA). His tenure began in January of 2025 after 20+ years with founding Executive Director Jeff Couture at the helm.

Adam filled the Innova802 crew in on what he's learned so far traveling throughout Vermont on a whirlwind tour to understand the needs of existing and prospective members of Vermont's only tech-centric membership advocacy organization. Some surprises have already come to the fore from the feedback Adam has received.

We hope to have Adam back on a regular basis to focus on a number of tech policy or advocacy issues including data privacy, venture capital, housing and economic development policy.

Full disclosure: The VTTA is a sponsor of the Innova802 podcast, produced in partnership by Interchain Live and M the Media Project of SMGraves Associates.