Jean Hammond "Indispensable Angel"

Zipcar’s first investor, Jean Hammond, is Boston’s indispensable angel. Her hands-on approach has been pivotal to the success of her startup and several others. She co-founded the leading accelerator for educational technology startups, LearnLaunch. The interview was great fun and hugely instructive to me. Don’t miss it!

Here are some highlights:

• Sal Introduces Jean Hammond
• From Studying Biology at Boston University to Running a Food Warehouse
• Jean Decides She Needs a Rigorous MBA – Goes to MIT Sloan
• Moved to Edinburgh & Worked at Fast-Growing Computer Networking Startup
• “By the time I left there [Spyder], I felt like I'd done all the different functions in a little startup and done it while growth was going on.”
• Jean Hammond Founds AXON
• “AXON was four years old when 3Com acquired it and had grown quite rapidly to a pretty good business, and we got a pretty good price.”
• Jean Hammond’s Second Startup, Quarry, Suffered from Bottlenecks in Telecom Infrastructure
• “We live in a magic world of technology today that just things you wouldn't have imagined could happen are happening every day.”
• “First, I wish to thank listener Phillip L. 36 for this great review on iTunes”
• Jean Hammond Becomes Zipcar’s First Investor
• “By coming back into town and talking to everybody, I found out that I was an angel investor. I didn't even know that all of that time.”
• This Is Why We Call Her the Indispensable Angel
• Jean Hammond Invests Widely with Boston’s Angel Community
• Golden Seeds & Teaching Angel Investing
• Jean Hammond Starts the Activity that Would Lead to the Founding of LearnLaunch, the Ed Tech Accelerator
• “Education is a really interesting industry. It's the last of the giant industries, well over five trillion globally, maybe six, to digitize.”
• “Qstream is based on technology that actually understands how memories are fixed.”
• “…learning science is quite clear that we need to be striving, taking a little bit harder than you took the last time.”
• “…some of our most excited investors in the LearnLaunch accelerator are coming in from India and China and Japan because they want to be a part of these changes.”
• Jean Hammond’s Thoughts on the Importance of Boards to Startups
• “Being a board member for a startup is actually quite a challenging job…”
• Jean Hammond’s Parting Thoughts