It's 3am Monday morning, and I'm hard at work in the editing room, otherwise known as my couch. Tweaking each episode can take four to five hours, but sometimes the content is so good you finish wondering where the time went. Today's conversation with Juliette Kayyem, CEO of Zemcar, is one such episode.

With safety and security the central themes of her career, Juliette spent time post Harvard Law School as advisor to Attorney General Janet Reno, a Homeland Security leader for Massachusetts and the US government, author of the book Security Mom, and host of WGBH's "The SCIF" podcast. Most recently, she took leave from Harvard Kennedy School of Government to take the helm of Zemcar, an angel-backed startup that connects busy families with hand-picked, trusted drivers for safe rides -- all through the mobile phone. Their initial focus addresses the ride market for children who are too old for daycare but too young to drive.

In this episode, Juliette and I tackle her journey to the helm of Zemcar, evolving thoughts on company culture, her growth philosophy, and Zemcar's place in the ridesharing ecosystem. I had such a fun time learning from Juliette -- I know you will too.

Zemcar Website -https://www.zemcar.com/

Zemcar Twitter - @ZemcarInfo

Juliette's LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliettekayyem/

Juliette's Twitter -@juliettekayyem

How many times have your clients or prospects, when sharing their biggest challenges or deepest desires, given you a brilliant idea for your next big venture? How often do those great ideas go unpursued?

When today's guest Janet Comenos, Co-Founder & CEO of Spotted, kept hearing from major fashion brands how it was impossible to have a comprehensive, real-time view into the brand preferences of celebrities and influencers, she jumped at the opportunity to solve the problem. Insights gained through Spotted's data-driven platform have informed thousands of major campaigns and celebrity endorsement deals.

How is this former startup sales leader handling things at the helm of her own ship? You're about to find out.

Website: www.spotted.us

Twitter: @SpottedInc_US

Here we are in 2018, and the startup world has never been more intriguing. Early stage startups raised more money in 2017 in Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) than venture funding, and seed investment rounds have fallen for the third straight year off 2014's highs. While business formation is down, fast-growing startups are in high gear. Businesses specializing in fields like cybersecurity, big data, artificial intelligence, and frontier tech are filling up the funding news wire -- and for good reason. These core technologies make up future operating systems from which thousands of new startups will spawn.

One such frontier technology is the topic for today's conversation -- space.

Analytical Space Co-Founders Dan Nevius and Justin Oliveira made their way through the startup world, NASA, and the White House before meeting up at Harvard Business School. With mutual intentions to launch a SpaceTech startup, they wasted no time in getting Analytical Space off the ground.

While they may not have the deep pockets of Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin, Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic, and Elon Musk's SpaceX, they have given their company the best shot at success through a path that includes MassChallenge, Harvard's iLab, Space Angels, and MIT's The Engine Venture Fund.

Taking advantage of the exploding small satellite market, in particular CubeSats, Analytical Space provides satellite data relays to get more of the data being generated by satellite sensors to the ground faster and for less cost. I was fascinated by their personal journeys in the space world, decision on where to grow their startup, view on where the value will be unlocked in NewSpace, and why they make sure to do every task required at Analytical Space at least once -- including reviewing and negotiating the legal documents for their first major funding round.

Enjoy my discussion with Justin and Dan.

Today's guest is Christina Fagan, Founder and CEO of Sh*t That I Knit, a Boston-based knitwear startup. A serial knitter starting in her youth, she put up a simple e-commerce website at the beckoning of her friends, enlisted knitters from around Boston to help fill inventory for her breakout Kickstarter campaign, and networked her way to having celebrities like Kirsten Cavallari and Olympic Snowboarder Hannah Teter fall in love with her beanies and showcase them on their Instagram feeds.

All that hard work over three plus years has paid off. She boasts an expanding team, top billing on InStyle magazine's holiday magazine, and a crazy story that led to STIK being the #1 gift on the RealSimple's holiday gift guide in 2017. I had a great time learning how she knitted up her growing empire, and I'm sure you will to.

Oh, and if you totally forgot to buy a give for crazy Aunt Deborah's kids from Missouri, I'm sure Christina has a couple ideas for you.

The holidays are upon us, and with that comes family gatherings, delicious food, and a ton of presents. From my vantage point, this also seems like the year artificial intelligence invades the home. Amazon Dot and Google Home are invading countertops, Jibo, the world's first social robot, is dancing up a storm, and kids are building and interacting with toys like the Meccano M.A.X. Interactive Robot. And this seems like just the beginning.

To better understand the technology behind these products and more that will debut in 2018 and beyond, I want to share with all of you a fascinating, venture-backed AI startup out of Boston University's Neuromorphics Lab called Neurala. This deep learning startup has raised $14M to build brains for autonomous cars, drones, toys, and more. Counting NASA, the U.S. Air Force, Motorola, and Teal as customers, Neurala's platform is a refreshingly innovative take on neural network training as well as building a platform for AI to learn and adapt on its own in low connectivity environments.

I hope you enjoy today's conversation with Max Versace, Co-Founder and CEO of Neurala. You can connect with Neurala at:

Website - https://www.neurala.com/

Twitter - @Neurala

Today, I have the pleasure to sit with Arun Santhebennur, Co-Founder and COO of an industrial IoT (IIoT) startup based in San Jose called PetaSense. Industrial IoT has really come to the forefront through efforts by General Electric (Predix), other large digital industrial companies, and a burgeoning cadre of entrepreneurs. Tons of data is created from manufacturing technologies that are currently not being captured, and old technology is not equipped with sensors that would allow manufacturers to understand what is actually happening with their equipment.

Petasense wants to build an experience for manufacturing similar to the FitBit for our health. By retro-fitting manufacturing equipment with sensors to measure vibration, we can capture data to analyze the health of the machines.

For every gas turbine, a $1M+ piece of equipment that is already instrumented, there are three or four hundred lower cost machines with rotating parts that aren't being tracked. With low-cost continuous monitoring technology, Petasense provides predictive maintenance to every machine with moving parts.

The biggest cost in manufacturing is not necessarily repairing broken machines, rather the lost output from unplanned downtime. Often times, problems with a machine running at 75% efficacy is undetected, which costs the company extra power and lost output. Hidden problems may even cause the machine to break more quickly.

If you are interested in the evolution of manufacturing, listen in.

This episode finds us in a unique space, retail for babies. Joining me is Melissa Gersin, Founder & CEO of Boston-based startup Tranquilo Mat. Like so may of us, Melissa kicked around her idea with colleagues and friends for years before stepping up and bringing the Tranquilo Mat, a revolutionary vibrating mat for soothing crying and colicky babies, to market.

This interview dives into the scariness and nuances of her first production run -- from having your first manufacturing partner shut down to how she felt shelling out $50,000 of her own money for the first 2,000 units. As Tranquilo Mat found success, Melissa walks us through how she managed employee growth and even turned an early worker into a co-founder.

Also, for anyone eager to learn what it's like to go through the process of being selected to audition for Shark Tank, getting approved to pitch, and even getting a deal with Robert Herjavek on the show, you'll hear a ton about it here. Melissa's "Shark Tank Bump" blew away everyone's expectations, with an entire year's worth of inventory sold in the first 24 hours after her appearance.

If it's getting noisy on the subway or in traffic, turn the volume up because this episode is a must-listen.

You can get in touch with her at [email protected] or @TranquiloMat on @Twitter.

Hello and welcome back to the Early Stage podcast, where we listen to some of the most dynamic Founders in the startup scene talk about the origins of their companies, what makes them special, and the unique challenges ahead. I'm John Valentine, resident startup nerd, and I host this humble pod.

I'm glad I was able to sneak in a few hours of editing, because I'm really excited to introduce my conversation with Vesper CEO, Matt Crowley.

A technology founded in a University of Michigan lab by Bobby Littrell almost a decade ago, Vesper has built the first zero-power listen-to-wake microphone built with piezoelectric materials. This always-on technology can help an Amazon Tap run for years without being plugged in.

Matt and I talk about how voice interfaces will enable the next class of business concepts, forcing people to think more creatively about their own products. As machine learning and AI systems reduced errors in voice analysis to make the tech comfortably usable, Vesper' digital transducer could usher in the IoT revolution. Accomplice and Amazon's Alexa Fund seem to think so too, and they put money into Vesper's first big funding round.

They have truly built a full stack solution with their sensor, MEMS, mechanical devices, complex analog circuit, digital signal processing, and voice interface algorithms. This team turns sound information into digital information better than anyone else in the world.

You're all in for a special Memorial Day episode, one that almost never saw the light of day. Just a couple days after taping with Rebecca and Michael Liebman from LearnLux, I spilled green tea on my Macbook, rendering it completely unusable. The laptop teased me for a few seconds, then I couldn't click on anything, the screen flickered and went black, and I feared the worst. Roman Kern, a good friend and Senior Director of Operations at MassChallenge, rescued the hard drive and recovered the episode. Add laptop recovery to the massive list of things Roman does better than almost anyone I know. Thanks again man!

I had such a fun time bantering with Michael and Rebecca on this episode. In addition to getting their perspective on LearnLux and the future of the financial services industry, we touched on a hundred other topics: generation divides in social media, their experience as a brother-sister co-founding team, how Michael balances college schoolwork and running a startup, my tendency to finish other people's sentences, which stocks look strong for 2017, how it's increasingly difficult for large companies to attract top talent, and why you can expect Amazon, Google, or Apple to launch a FinTech product in the near future. As you can tell, this conversation ran the gamete, and it's definitely worth listening the whole way through. Enjoy!

Topics Covered:

- Who uses SnapChat and who uses Instagram -- the generational divide

- How Facebook has turned into a video platform

- Why brutal honesty is the biggest hallmark of sibling co-foundership

- Why launch a FinTech startup?

- How Michael always wanted a cash register as a child - leading to a FinTech career

- Finance is completely ubiquitous, and it is traditionally such a negative part of people's lives

- How LearnLux aims to change customer behavior by building trust amongst his user base.

- How Rebecca and Michael evaluate new technologies to add to the LearnLux product

- How Michael balances startup with college coursework, and how the four years of college are actually the best time to start a company

- My tendency to finish people's sentences

- What I would name my hypothetical venture capital firm

- Why I got out of Tesla stock too soon

- Why Amazon, Tesla, and Disney are Michael's top 3 stocks for 2017

- How Rebecca missed the opportunity to get the "Becca" Snapchat account

- The facebook vs. Snapchat rivalry

- How the financial services industry is building new products to reach new sets of people

- Why it's going to be increasingly difficult for large companies to attract top talent

- Why Michael is expecting Amazon, Apple, or Google to launch a financial services product.

- Why Credit Karma was brilliant in launching a free online tax return service

Hello and welcome back to the early stage podcast, the show that takes a deep dive into rising young startups and their founders.

For today's conversation, I brought onboard David Potere, Co-Founder and CEO of Boston-based startup TellusLabs. His startup is in the business of using satellite imaging and machine learning to, at least in the present, project corn and soy crop yields. Commodities is the oldest marketplace in the world, and a lot of the technology around forecasting is world of mouth -- people calling grain dealers and reading charts by hand.

With machine learning as their guide, they started sending out email forecasts in early 2016 before they knew their algorithms would be accurate. Their bet paid off, with their final number for soy bushels per acre landing within 1% of the actual number a full 2 months before the US government.

With $3M recently banked from Hyperplane, Founder Collective, IA Ventures, Project 11, and others, David and his growing team are building our their web app and API to improve the lives of the grower and high frequency commodities trader alike.

Enjoy the conversation.