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 with room accessories, that encourage girls to explore engineering and programming and built confidence to compete for tomorrow's tech jobs.

Since we spoke on Episode 2, Stephanie pursued and won a prestigious Phase 1 SBIR grant, only 11% are accepted -- and she won it on her first try! A second product, which is still under wraps, is being developed alongside her first product, an IoT lamp for the bedroom.

In this conversation we discuss:

- Why she's been under the radar when some of her peers have gotten loud

- Where she sees the evolution in STEM toys for boys and girls

- Who she is looking for in a co-founder

- How often doubt creeps in, and how she copes

- And how to deal with family tragedy as a startup founder

Identity. Vocabulary. Skills. Tribe. These are the four tenets underpinning every decision she makes for her company, and for the millions of young girls she serves.

Ride alongside as we dive in.

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 venture associate to partner, OpenView investment focus areas and peer differentiation strategies, ascertaining the core DNA of a startup, and his personal goals for 2018.

Enjoy today's conversation with Blake.

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 getting a call from his friend on exactly the same concept. Once the product vision and a friends-and-family round came together, Matt and his Co-Founders Steven Dobesh and David Piskovich jumped in full-time to make trackable and verifiable event ticketing a reality. Let's catch up with Matt to check in on true tickets's progress to-date.

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And, while things may be slowing down a bit in the office, the startups of Early Stage have been achieving incredible milestones.

- Digital health startup Wellist from Episode 7 just closed a $10M Series A funding round, led by Summation Health, Cedars-Sinai Health System, and .406 Ventures.

- Night Shift Brewing from Episode 31 just announced Night Shift Lovejoy, a brand spanking new brewpub on the first floor of Converse's HQ near Boston's TD Garden. Anna Jobe, called out in the podcast by Co-Founder Michael Oxton as an unsung hero, will manage the new location.

- An SEC filing from May 10 shows cybersecurity startup CYBRIC from episode 32 receiving almost $500,000 in follow-on funding.

- Vesper, the startup building miniature microphone technology from Episode 15, just picked up $23M in Series B funding, led by American Family Ventures, to help them scale the mass production of their microphones and support R&D and sales.

Congratulations to all on these incredible milestones and achievements!

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 dermatologists. The main limitation is you need to take super high quality images and match them with a strong model. 3Derm is in a unique place to take advantage of these constraints.

People used to be uncomfortable with the thought of a "robot" interfering with the physician-patient relationship, but today's patients want an algorithm to provide a second opinion affirming their physician's assessment.

Liz envisions a day when visitors to CVS Health walk into the MinuteClinic for a quick mole check with instantaneous feedback to calm the nerves and make the right recommendation to a dermotologist at the right time. The future is bright for 3Derm. Listen on to find out why.

If you're interested in the full backstory, make sure to check out Episode 10 as well.

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 Vice Cream, his new venture, from 20 stores to 4,500.

Taking a business from concept to reality means making huge personal and professional sacrifices, including raising money for Vice Cream in the dead of winter in New York City, but it’s those magic moments that keep Dan motivated to reach his dream of building an impactful company. It’s giving inspiration to others with cancer, closing big deals, and just having a beer with a good friend.

I like to think I come at life with a ton of energy, but I felt like a slug compared to Dan’s passion and enthusiasm for life, business, and helping others. Let’s dig into the interview.

Vice Cream Website - http://www.eatvicecream.com

Twitter - @EatViceCream

Early Stage Website - https://www.earlystagepodcast.com/

Early Stage Twitter - @EarlyStagePod

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 founders Gabriel Jacobs, Amadou Crookes, and Mario Gomez-Hall, but I realized that wouldn't quite do it justice. How can you measure the professional growth of Cymbal's young leadership team over the past three years, the deep connections forged on their platform over a shared passion for music, and Cymbal comments that turned into relationships and even, as you'll hear soon, marriages?

Charlie's incredible stories often left me speechless, and his beautiful answer to my final question was, without a question, the most profound 5 minutes of my year.

Enjoy listening to the life and times of this intrepid startup. Long live Cymbal.