Angel Invest Boston

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Our Investment Syndicates Page Building a business in education is hard but Steve Shapiro has beaten the odds several times. His latest accomplishment is as CEO of FineTune Learning which is set to grade essays from 3.6 million students taking the CollegeBoard's AP Exams starting in July of 2019. Founded by brilliant Maine educator Ogden Morse, FineTune Learning is a platform using software to facilitate human grading of essays at scale. An awesome interview with an outstanding and captivating entrepreneur. Highlights of the interview: Ogden Morse’s inspired approach made possible the use of software to evaluate answers by students to open response questions. The first product, Literature Companion, got local traction in Maine. However, selling district by district proved daunting. Steve Shapiro opted to go after large businesses that already had established relationships with schools. The danger to Steve’s strategy is that large players can string startups along and not do any business. Ogden, an AP teacher heavily involved in grading the exam, teed up this process for Steve by initiating the conversation with the CollegeBoard, which happened to be the ideal partner for FineTune. The challenge is aligning the standards of the tens of thousands of teachers who grade the AP Exam. CollegeBoard is a leader in developing technology for assessing critical thinking skills; FineTune’s approach was a natural fit. Phase I supports teachers in preparing student for the summative exam which will happen in May 2020. The platform will be used formatively throughout the year and will likely result in students being better prepared for the exam. Helping teachers assess the progress of individual students and of the class as a whole and to remedy weak spots. Phase II will be scoring the exam, a massive production. 5,000,000 exams are taken in early may and need to be graded by mid-June. Challenges: (1) how do we know the exams are being scored reliably and (2) how can the scoring be reported in a coherent way to the test takers. Sal was surprised that FineTune is also in the classroom helping teachers assess learning. FineTune also has a teacher development portal with short videos from master teachers on how they teach each particular topic. Its competency based and allows teachers to earn credit for professional accreditation. FineTune’s pedagogical approach will be used in all 36 AP Exams including the exam in calculus FineTune is collaborating with a small educational publisher to deploy its platform in support of teachers in the classroom outside the context of the AP Exam. Steve Shapiro is not big on the “individualized student journey”; like most educators he believes there’s more value in helping students learn in collaboration with their peers. Tech world is fascinated with individualized learning; educators are not. Rubrics are a set of expectations for student learning; FineTune has pioneered the digital rubrics to empower educators to be more effective at teaching. This also empowers students to understand what is expected. CFA Exam and the Bar Exam are on Steve’s prospect lists. Sal asks for your review of the podcast. The future of FineTune, AI enhancement of the human workflow in education. FineTune is integrating existing AI resources to automate the more mundane aspects of evaluation open responses to questions. Steve thinks the winner is this space will be taking a hybrid approach; using AI where it can help and having humans do the more subtle aspects of the assessment. Example: AI can now discern if there are supporting arguments for a position but will likely always struggle to understand the voice of the writer. Estimates indicate that FineTune’s platform can save teachers 40 to 50% of the time they spend correcting essays. This means teachers can assign more essays. It’s a force multiplier for teachers. Finding your calling: as a high schooler, Steve worked at a local delicatessen that made all its food from scratch and he was captivated by the idea of running a restaurant. One of his father’s students had gone on to the hotel school at Cornell. Steve and his dad went up to Cornell and visited and he loved the hotel school. In the early 1980s when Steve went to the Hotel School at Cornell, entrepreneurship was not yet cool, but there was a strong entrepreneurial spirit in the hotel program. In those days, people coming out of an Ivy League school looked for safe careers in large companies, startups were not an option for most graduates. A required summer internship exposed Steve to the risks of the restaurant business and dissuaded him from that career path as an owner. Working in the hospitality industry instilled in Steve the importance of pleasing your customer; it now informs his approach to product management. Working at a large bank as a credit analyst after business school convinced Steve that banking was not for him. While on a hiatus from graduate school at Harvard, Steve’s wife was working for a company that taught brought in foreign students to Boston. She convinced him he could start a similar business an be really good at it with his background in hospitality. This idea became American Learning, Steve’s most successful venture. Steve emphasizes that a lot of his success was due to lucky timing; he caught the start of a wave of foreign students wanting to come to the US to study. Good timing is everything in business. Focused on four-week stays and for students mostly from Japan. Had so much business they could almost not accommodate all the students who wanted to come. Being at the right place at the right time with the right skills led to a big success. Two-sided market: American kids teaching English to Japanese kids created an inter-cultural experience for local youth while serving foreign students. American Learning generated an unexpected benefit of wonderful good-will between Americans and Japanese people, frequently bypassing negative media stereotypes. Loads of positive unexpected benefits from intentional decisions that achieved their aim and got an additional unplanned bonus. Social impact imperative. Next business was tutoring for kids in poor neighborhoods. Provided parents with formation to help parents navigate the school system for the benefit of their kids. Third business was a workforce training. Helping blue-collar workers to transition to white-collar jobs. Cornell’s hotel wine courses and beer courses; highly popular electives! Steve’s best job ever was being a teaching assistant to a multi-hundred student wine course. Had to manage wine sampling and (boo-hoo) deal with the left-overs! Steve also learned computer programming, accounting and a bunch of other practical disciplines at the Hotel School. Steve is a big believer in bootstrapping your business and raising money only if you really must. He mentioned “The Millionaire Next Door” by Thomas J. Stanley as providing the surest way to wealth. Steve is a member of Launchpad Venture Group (a leading angel group in Boston) and Red Bear Angels (Cornell’s angel group). Involved in LearnLaunch, America’s premier ed-tech accelerator in Boston. Steve is also a fan of “Never Eat Alone” by Keith Ferrazzi, the best book on business networking. If you get in the habit of helping others amazing things come back to you. Steve’s advice to first-time founders: really bone up on the competitive landscape to understand what your unique advantage your business can offer customers. He sees a lot of pitches in which not enough attention is given to the competitive matrix. Watch the Bill Gross video on startup success. Be sure to go into entrepreneurship for the right reasons; job avoidance is not a good reason. Bootstrap as much as you can; it’s easier than ever to do that. Once you have real data on your business investors will be chasing you.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates How his grandfather succeeded despite being blind inspired Shivang Dave, Ph.D. to change the world.  As an accomplished bioengineer and a founder, he aims to bring high-quality eye exams to the masses in India with a new device. The Madrid-MIT M+Visión Fellowship was crucial to building a capable and cohesive founding team for PlenOptika. Shivang was a cheery and inspiring guest; great interview! Some highlights: Shivang Dave, Ph.D. bio Shivang introduces his wonderfully multi-disciplinary co-founders: Eduardo Lage, Ph.D., Daryl Lim, Ph.D., and Nick Durr, Ph.D. Device looks like binoculars from Star Wars. Addresses a massive problem: 1.5 billion worldwide don’t have the eye glasses they need. The scarcity of trained vision professionals and the large size of optical equipment creates bottle necks outside rich countries. Market research with NGOs and other stakeholders pointed to the need for an accurate, portable and cheap autorefractor. As they spun out from MIT, they discovered that there was also a need for their device in high-resource setting such as the US. Founding story: Madrid-MIT M+Visión Fellowship, an MIT program set up with the government of Madrid to support 34 post-docs working together over 5years in identifying solutions for important problems. Daryl Lim, an optics-related Ph.D., discovered that poor vision was a major health problem. Nick Durr also had optics background. Shivang had worked on translating technology to address global health issues; Eduardo had built scanners used by GE. Plan was to create a work-saving device to multiply the capacity of trained professionals. Interplay between the perfect image and what your brain expects to see. PlenOptika and Zipline parallels. Shout-out to MIT Venture Mentoring Service (VMS). Leave a review on iTunes for Angel Invest Boston. Go to market strategy for PlenOptika. Business plan: sell the device. Massive market. Competition: disrupting desktop autorefractor. Other portable technologies; complementary? Slower to market but best-developed device. Fail fast not always applicable; particularly in medical devices. Backed up by independent studies. De-risks tech for users. Launched in India a year ago, launched in the US five months ago and both are going well. In 2020 expect to be expanding globally. Influenced by poverty in India and his grandfather’s blindness, Shivang felt compelled to do something to improve the world. First thought of being a doctor but realized that biotech could have impact on a much larger scale by creating medical tools. Publishing papers was not enough; wanted to take the technology out into the world. Worked at Celera Genomics; colleagues saw Shivang’s entrepreneurial spirit and urged him to pursue it. Grandfather was an entrepreneur despite blindness. Shivang’s fundraising advice for device companies; make sure to focus only on investors that invest in hardware. Chasing the wrong investors wastes a lot of time. Surround yourself with good advisors. Getting to no faster can actually save time. Sal say to angels, don’t BS founders; if you know you won’t invest, tell the founders right away. Shivang advises founders to steel themselves and their teams to the challenges of raising money and building the product. Don’t be surprised that it’s hard.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates From studying Ancient Greek to building a business, founder Brendan Dowdall has traveled an interesting path. Construction is a staid industry but Brendan is revolutionizing it with data. Concrete Sensors’ innovative devices sit in concrete and transmit data. The payoff is already evident in time savings and improvements in quality experienced by the industry’s biggest players. As their data set grows, Concrete Sensors hopes to become the go-to source of information for contractors on concrete. I was an early investor in this company and am excited about its future. It was a fun and instructive interview with a delightful founder. Highlights include: Sal celebrates the success of portfolio company SQZ Biotech which is working on training our immune systems to fight cancers and other diseases (Interview with Armon Sharei of SQZ Biotech) Brendan Dowdall bio and introduction. Brendan Dowdall explains what Concrete Sensors does and why it matters. Hardware, software, lab & data. Producing reliable results that speed up construction jobs and save money. Co-founder Ryan Twomey and Brendan met while getting their Babson MBA in 2014. Ryan is a software engineer but his mother is an architect and his father worked in a construction company so he was familiar with the space. Ryan and Brendan hit it off and decided to start a business together; Concrete Sensors was the product of what they thought would be their most promising idea. They have now signed up five of the top ten general contractors in the country. Concrete Sensors’ clients finish weeks ahead of time. Sal asks for audience to leave a review or a rating on iTunes. Brendan already left a rating. Concrete Sensor’s big pivot was on how they went to market. Initially selling online but found it did not work; their clients don’t spend time on social media. Had to build a direct sales organization. It was expensive. Execution is 99% of success. How to be lean and still have the right sales operation? Why device businesses are so hard. 2016 McKinsey Report pointed to potential for development in construction. Autodesk has been buying companies in the construction tech space. Starting to become interesting. Selling to a contractor is totally different from selling to other types of businesses. Contractors don’t like to pay for subscriptions; prefer to buy outright. Contractors are sensitive to being left behind technologically. CS is the only player in the business that has a lab and takes a scientific approach to the data. The holy grail for data on a construction site is to know what’s going on without having to enter data. Introducing a hub that gathers data from sensors and transmits via the cellular network to allow remote monitoring. Have 8,000 sensors in place. Hard to find investors; angels don’t understand construction and construction people don’t do early-stage investing. Bolt was their first investor and a huge help. Brendan invites people who are thinking of starting a company to just jump in. he’s found it hugely rewarding.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Learn About Our Syndicates Two friends from Turkey are bringing the latest advances in AI to people with visual impairments. Emre Sarbak was a consultant and a successful social entrepreneur. Çağrı Zaman was an architect but is now completing his PhD at MIT’s Media Lab in computer vision. Their startup Mediate is building practical tools to help people with reduced vision navigate the world. Topics covered include: Sal talks briefly about portfolio company SQZ Biotech. Brief bios of Çağrı (pronounced “Cha-ree”) Zaman and Emre Sarbak. Emre describes what Mediate does; visual impairment is one of the most limiting disabilities. Blindness causes the highest level of unemployment among the disabilities. Vision loss is a growing problem for an aging population. The ultimate goal is for a visually impaired person to be totally autonomous. Spinoff from Çağrı Zaman’s work at MIT on spatial artificial intelligence. Won MIT DesignX Challenge in 2017. Emre actually met Çağrı via a Turkish language podcast Emre used to do in which he interviewed Turkish technologists in the US. Çağrı explained his technology during the interview and Emre was captivated by the social impact it could have. Spatial intelligence is easy for humans but hard for machines; Moravec’s Paradox. Their startup is riding a wave of developments in object recognition. Their recognizes objects and puts them into an actionable setting for the user via their iPhone Sal asks for you to leave your review in iTunes. At trade shows for the visually impaired, most of the offerings used to be Braille tags, magnifying lenses and the like. Most of the innovation was incremental in a fragmented market. Smartphones have begun to change this; huge adoption among the blind worldwide. iPhone’s user interface is particularly suited to this use. Mediate sees a huge opportunity in this. Current apps can provide basic description of objects and the environment. Emre thinks the phone should not be describing things but rather doing a task assigned by the user. Beta user took the trash out for the first time in his life. Çağrı believes the specialized data set required to train Mediate’s AI will provide a barrier to entry against competitors. More than 400 beta testers. NSF grant will help to make the technology easier to adapt to new environments. Look forward to aural interface that instantly and intuitively tells the blind person about their environment. Their dream is that in ten years a visually impaired person will have not limitations in terms of getting an education, getting jobs and getting around. Emre worked at LaunchCode in St. Louis, Missouri, a non-profit helping entry-level people start coding, and became fascinated with the idea of unlocking people’s potential with small interventions. Helped build a coding academy for Turkish university grads.

Join Boston's Top Angels in Our Syndicates: Learn About Our Syndicates Upon graduating in the upper strata of her engineering class at MIT, Lucinda Linde was promptly accepted at Harvard Business school. She worked as an engineer in two successful tech companies, one of which was co-founded by Clayton Christensen of “Innovator’s Dilemma” fame. Her incisive intellect and practical outlook were prized by giants such as HBS’ Howard Stevenson (Link to Howard Stevenson's Interview - Our Most Downloaded Podcast) who hired her to study best practices in angel investing. Lucinda joined Walnut and entered the realm of venture investing. Along the way she took seven years off to be a full-time mother. She has now reinvented herself as a mathy marketing consultant. Sal describes his role in raising the first money for startup rocket ship SQZ Biotech. Lucinda’s undergrad summer internships helped eliminate doing research as a career. Experience running Lecture Series Committee gave her an early taste of running a business. Got into HBS with admissions deferred for two years; did two internships in those two years. Project management and operations in two successful tech companies. Ceramics Process Systems co-founded by Clayton Christiansen & Molten Metal Technologies. Consulting on best practices for business innovation and angel investing. Left consulting when her first baby came along due to travel schedule. Venture investing seemed a better life style fit with parenting. Drawn to Walnut because she wanted to get into software investing. Jean Tempel, also of Walnut Ventures, brought Lucinda into the VC fund she was raising. Jean was a fantastic mentor to Lucinda. Ken Morse and Howard Stevenson hired Lucinda to write a study on the best practices in angel investing. Study was used to teach about angel investing at MIT Sloan for a decade. Angel groups were just starting then. Band of Angels. The VC fund was fully invested so Lucinda saw this as a natural moment to take time out from her career to focus on her children. Fired by 11-year-old son as robotics coach. Wake up call to go back to her career! Parents have to be the voice that teenagers hear as an alternative to mass media and their peers. Connected with Ric Calvillo, founder of Nanigans, at Walnut Venture Dinner. In 2011 Nanigans was one of the companies Facebook was trying out as it got into advertising. Lucinda’s jaw dropped to hear they were already at cash flow break even. Helped with raising money and recruiting. Sal reads a splendid review from listener & angel investor Erik Bullen. Nanigans’ pivots. Started out managing campaigns for clients but gradually migrated to SaaS model where their platform enabled customer to run their own campaigns. Next step was to provide transparency to customers. Focus is “incrementality” rather than attribution, figuring out where spending money actually causes customers to do incremental purchases. Attribution models had failed to make the distinction. Squadle, restaurant automation startup automating. Saves time and increases reliability of data. IoT comes to the back of the restaurant house. At Squadle, Lucinda learned the importance of speaking in the language of the customer; using abstract terms like accountability and IoT got no response from restaurant operators. When she showed an image of a log book the response hit an artery of concern. Lucinda started angel investing because of father in law who is a successful repeat founder. What Lucinda looks for in startups: Are you solving a top priority of your customers? Is this a green field? Nanigans. Wayfair. Critical skills. Traction & agility. How close to product/market fit. Room enough to pivot. Easy to invest too early. Lucinda wonders if there is some application of distributed ledger technology whose time has come. Marketing advice for startups. Trial and error applied wisely is the best tool. Exposure to the customer is essential. Advice to startups: hire marketing people according to how developed your marketing program is. In marketing, there is no playbook.

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Our Syndicates Science is broken. Vast increases in people and money applied to scientific inquiry have failed to raise the rate of discovery. Among the reasons for this is that the workflow of labs is firmly stuck in the 1990s. Repeat founder Gabor Bethlendy is tackling this huge problem by creating Meenta.io, a platform to allow researchers to plan and execute their experiments via an online interface. Gabor is tenacious and energetic. He’s recruited to his effort co-founder Stephan Smith who is also very impressive and complements Gabor’s scientific background with a sophisticated understanding of the online universe. They’ve signed up their first big paying customer and have had a great stint at Techstars which has refined their go to market approach. Some highlight from the interview: Gabor Bethlendy bio. Parabase Genomics, his first startup, allowed parent of sick newborns to screen for hundreds of common genetic abnormalities that can be treated. How Gabor recruited Stephan Smith as his co-founder. 18 months in, Meenta has signed up hundreds of leading organizations with high-end equipment available for use. Creating a map of all the high-end scientific equipment in the world. Allows much easier access to this huge but highly fragmented market. Multi-million-dollar equipment sitting idle for lack of a proper connection to users. 48 percent of equipment is idle at any given time. Patrick Collison. Founder of Stripe, worried that the rate of scientific break throughs has remained constant despite the massive in crease in the number of scientists. Points to inefficiency. There’s room for improvement; we’re doing a lot of science but not making much progress. Comparison of Stripe to what Meenta is doing. Meenta takes a fee from each transaction. The challenge is to bring in users. Supply is plentiful. Pushed during Techstars to sign up supply. Decided that the first market to address is small biotech firms. Founders, go to Meenta.io and check it out before buying equipment. Case study with Albert Einstein; got it done 10X faster with much less post-doc time. Please leave a review or even a just a reting. Gabor thanks Clem Cazalot for convincing Meenta to apply. Applied the night of the deadline. With a bottle of bourbon by his side! Clem instilled the “give first” ethos. Techstars is like a micro MBA. Stellar mentors. Great story of how Gabor connected with Stephan Smith. Intend to grow user base by encompassing greater and greater portions of the lab workflow. CROs have “high-touch” onboarding. Meenta circumvents all that. Comparison to what’s happened in advertising technology; brands wanted to outsource the optimization of their campaigns to a human, now they demand a self-serve online platform. Maybe the same will happen with Meenta. Advice from Gabor’s experience: don’t ever try to build your company alone, it’s a fatal mistake. Angels have to like you as a person; you shouldn’t work so hard that you become unlikable. Gabor’s decision to become an entrepreneur was inspired by the sacrifice of his immigrant parents. He emigrated here from Hungary at eight years of age and saw how much his parents gave up to make a new life in America. Jay Batson was always “kicking” (Jay kicks while advising 😊) Gabor to make Meenta more scalable. Gabor is thankful that he did. Jay Batson, “Open Source Dude” was interviewed on this podcast and was really incisive as usual:  Jay's Interview on Angel Invest Boston Biggest struggle was to find a lead investor; stuck between biotech investors and tech investors. Thanks to Jay Batson, Meenta pivoted from being just a booking platform to being a workflow and e-commerce solution for science. Have figured out the LTV (life time value) of customers but are still trying to figure out the cost of acquiring them, Gabor thinks the sweet spot for Meenta now is with startups that can derive great value from quick access to experiments. For now, they just do booking on sequencers, but are building out their first full workflow for the CRO (contract research organization) Harker Bio on biophysics equipment. Gabor’s vision for Meenta is for it to be the “internet” of science. Sal speculates that Meenta could improve the rate of scientific discovery.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Action Jack Barker move over! Chainsaw Jack Huntress is the real deal. CEOs don’t get more dynamic than this geologist turned founder. Jack's startup, HomeBinder offers invaluable tools to help homeowners manage and record work done on their most valuable asset. It’s getting real traction via home inspectors eager to help home buyers. Breaking News: HomeBinder is in Techstars! Special mention in this episode:  Ed Hosepian and Dean Kahr. Thanks for your generous help in the purchase of the big, dilapidated house in Cambridge. Guys, you were right! Jack Huntress trained as a geologist and geophysicist then worked as a consultant for decades. Acted as an intrapreneur in building a new practice at an existing firm. No Conjoined Triangles of Success for this Jack – he’s a truly action-prone CEO. How “Chainsaw Jack” got his name. Story told by super angel and CEO whisperer Joe Caruso (Link to Joe Caruso Episode Page) Jack’s owned a bunch of homes including one built in the 1700s. Having been orphaned at an early age he had to come up to speed fast on home maintenance. Homeowner is more like a home steward. Lack of continuity on home maintenance information. HomeBinder solves that problem. Jack bought a house from an owner who had a binder with loads of details about the house including paint colors, receipts for work done, warranties and manuals. This gave Jack the idea for HomeBinder. We homeowners did not have a good way to keep information about the home before HomeBinder. Proactive home maintenance rather than reactive. For the most valuable asset homeowners own, their house. Home inspectors create binder for homeowner, making their life easier. Integrated into home inspection software. Someday, you won’t buy a house without a HomeBinder report. Sal thanks Jack for helping in a crucial moment in the purchase of big dilapidated house in Cambridge. Thank you, Ed and Dean! Getting tens of thousands of HomeBinders set up by home inspectors. Need to enlist other players in the home buying process to grow even faster. Building valuable data on the home. Can tell you about the electricians and plumbers who will show up. Really important! Biggest complaint for plumbers & electricians is that they don’t call you back. Career advice for your kid who’s handy but not a great student. Get the kid into the trades; they’re not going away! HomeBinder is like a drip campaign for the home inspectors in helping inspectors stay in touch with home owners. Sal reads inspiring review from listener Andy_C_B. He points out an underappreciated objective of the podcast, to inspire young people to take on big challenges. Please leave a review on iTunes. Jack’s pivot. Thought real estate brokers were the best initial channel for HomeBinder. Discovered they were not. Real estate agents actually do few transactions per year compared to home inspectors. Average home inspector does 250 to 300 home per year. Home inspectors are ideally positioned to create the HomeBinder. Jack used to dodge managing people; he’s now embraced people management in his startup. Jack Huntress thinks people management can be greatly improved to the huge benefit of our economy. When you get a high-performing team it’s glorious. We should want to go to work. HomeBinder will be in Techstars Boston this year. Inspired by Clem Cazalot of Techstars to apply. Ideas are easy, getting it right is far more valuable than being the first to do something. There was Friendster, then there was My Space and then there was Facebook. Instant success that’s taken seven years. TED Talk by Bill Gross, a very useful way for angels and founders to spend seven minutes: (https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_gross_the_single_biggest_reason_why_startups_succeed?language=en) CORRECTION: during the interview I mentioned Bill Gross, the bond genius. The Bill Gross I should have mentioned is the startup genius with the TED Talk linked above. The biggest factor for startup success is market timing, i.e. Lots of companies throw in the towel and a year later their market takes off. Why Jack decided to start a company. Jack was not a good fit at a large company; too impatient with things not being done right. First run at it was as an intrapreneur. Starting a company is like an itch. Like Jack’s need to build potato canons, trebuchets and the like. If you find yourself spending too much time on your hobby and too little time at work, you should take the hint that you’re in the wrong job. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the telephone was a ditherer but his future father in law was not. Filed patent on the telephone just hours prior to another person. Jack’s story about Arthur D. Little & Co. Invented synthetic penicillin, color contact lenses, inkjet printing etc. Sold at a fire sale. Biggest obstacle was raising money. Bootstrapped for four years. Jack read his family into the business he was founding, yet being a startup CEO has been a very lonely experience. Techstars is a great place to find peers to talk to. Sal recommends finding a board member/investor that you can open up to. Jack Huntress’ parting thoughts: founders need to take care of themselves. Eat well, exercise and get enough sleep. Brings to mind wisdom of Brendan Schwartz that you can’t out hustle the competition, you can only out think them. How are you going to out think the competition if you’re exhausted from working twenty-hour days? Link to the Wistia Episode

Invest Alongside Boston's Leading Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Esportudo.com is creating new ways for sports fans in Latin America to engage with their sport. Founder Marcos Araújo, whose parents came to the Boston area from Brazil, is leveraging his background in digital media to address a huge unmet need. His website now gets 20 million visits a month and is growing. Brands love the opportunity to engage with the Latin community in an effective way. Marcos Araújo’s parents immigrated here from Brazil Marcos went to UMass Amherst Worked at Goji.com and HubSpot Esportudo entertains sports fans Make money by creating branded content and getting paid by brands Example GoPro More than 100 content creators. Video, audio and text. Reach 20 million people per month, daily users: 50,000 to 100,000 Last year was about putting out the Esportudo brand, this year is about becoming the number one site for sports in Latin America. Launching in Spanish in 2019. Starting to target content based on location. Colombia is second biggest. Mini pivot: from addressing local problem to dealing with global problem. US fans have a wealth of channels to enjoy their sport, in Latin America and many other countries there’s only TV, radio and print. There’s a huge opportunity to build these alternative channels. Co-founder Gabriela “Gabi” Silva is Marco’s cousin. Studied at Northeastern. Shared a house with her and others after college. Started as Bleacher Report for Brazil. She worked in marketing at Staples. HubSpot encouraged Marcos. His ex-boss is an investor in Esportudo. Gabi is the operations manager. Sal reads a great review in iTunes. Please leave your review or rating on iTunes. Pivot: started out as an aggregator of content but found that creating original content was what really moved the needle in terms of traffic. Still moonlighting at HubSpot, Marcos was writing two articles per week then built team of content creators. Through trial and error have built engagement: time spent on site now averages 6 minutes vs. 90 seconds in typical website. Bounce rate is only 6%. Marcos grew up in Marlborough, Massachusetts. How sports bridges over cultural difference in the different Latin populations. Esportudo’s competitors are old companies. When users see that Esportudo content creators skew young it creates a natural connection. 90% of users are under 30 years old. Users love the digital sports brands like Bleacher Report, not so engaged with traditional sports media. Workshop for writers in Brazil 20X oversubscribed! Fundraising was hard due to lack of a network. Bootstrapped in first two years. Finally got lead investors from the industry. Adam de Sola Pool is a great mentor. Marcos and Gabi connected with Adam at Northeastern accelerator. Impressed with progress. Report often. Look for thought leaders in your industry. Marcos thinks that immigrants are prone to starting businesses because they cannot access attractive job opportunities so they have to create their own by starting a company. Established companies in Brazil don’t offer a great environment for workers, Esportudo wants to change that. Marcos’ parting words: (1) believe in yourself, (2) be open to the need to change course, and (3) be persistent, don’t give up. CORRECTION: I said Esportudo reaches 20 million in a year, the correct stat is 20 million people in a month.

Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Click Here to Learn More Sam Bogoch’s company, axle.ai, helps clients with massive video files make sense of the content they have. The accumulation of video content is going way beyond the traditional broadcast networks and includes universities, large enterprises not in the entertainment industry, churches, sports venues etc. Video has yet to migrate to the cloud. It still sits in hard drives. The conversation with this brilliant interlocutor expanded my understanding of significant trends in video. Here are some highlights: Some content owners have a petabyte of video in storage, that’s 1000 X what my laptop’s hard drive holds. Video files are too big to move to the cloud; cloud storage used only for distributing final product so raw footage is still stored in big hard drives. Footage captured in one night in Madison Square Garden could take weeks to upload. Amazon actually has 18-wheelers that drive to sites of customers with particularly large amounts of data and receive the data via a 10-gigabyte connection, rather than sending the data over the web. Then they drive the data to Seattle! Amazon now storing data closer to client sites. Sam helped Avid rescue a product as a consultant and then signed on as a manager. Tripled business. Sam was an intrapreneur for half his tenure at Avid. Sam Bogoch’s work at Avid led him to discover the need that axle.ai now addresses. Avid confronted innovator’s dilemma. Go after low-end business while cannibalizing its mainstay product. Sam decided to leave Avid to pursue the low-end opportunity. Joined co-founder Patrice Gouttebel with whom he had collaborated in an earlier venture. Founders went to trade show with resume in hands just in case things did not work out; ended up winning award for best of show and getting validation of their product. Pivot that axle.ai executed. Small players such as wedding videographers have little need for axle.ai due to the nature of their work. Company then focused on larger players who really had a problem with video content. Customers came to axle.ai. Solution included creating a low-resolution browser version of the video which could be easily scanned with AI object recognition. Revamped the architecture of the software to accommodate the new type of client. Availability of storage gives videographer permission to shoot indiscriminately; contrast with film days: Monty Python and the Holy Grail ended when they ran out of film. Basic functions for searching on laptops don’t exist on network devices used for video storage. Customer found lost movie master using axle.ai; instant sale! Big stadium staff searching through duffle bags of disk drives looking a valuable scene. Thousands of churches across the country are in axle.ai target market because they shoot so many videos. Universities taking videos of classes are big users. The U.S. Senate is a client. Going after state legislatures. Company doing $1 million in revenue a year but growing fast. Has raised a bit of angel money plus some VC money. It’s a hundreds-of-millions opportunity in the near future; not a unicorn. Will spend money on user interface to make it simpler to operate for a broader range of users. Clients are leery of sending content to the cloud due to fear of breaches; another advantage for axle.ai; it’s air-gapped. Sam Bogoch’s parting thought: reach product/market fit and everything else, like funding, will fall into place.

Accredited Investors, Invest Alongside Boston's Top Angels: Link to Our Syndicates Page Star founder Bryanne Leeming is back to update us on all the exciting stuff Unruly Studios has been doing. Alexa Accelerator, Inc. Magazine feature, adoption by the City of Somerville and more. Listen to this scrappy young founder who’s done a lot with very little. Topics include: What they learned at Amazon’s Alexa Accelerator that is run by Techstars. How they came to be featured in Inc. Magazine. UPS/Inc. Magazine Prize. Amon Milner & crucial early pivot that really made Unruly Studios. Dealing with rejection while fundraising or selling. AT&T sponsored pilot turned into a live deal with the City of Somerville’s school system that has adopted Splats! The “STEM Toy Burn” and how to avoid it. Find out about cool new things in the Unruly Studios product roadmap.