At the 9th Annual Startup Boston Week, a packed room of founders and operators gathered for a candid conversation about one of the most underestimated growth levers in early-stage companies: customer success.  The session, Building Your CS Dream Team: Hiring and Growing for Early-Stage Success , featured a deeply experienced panel moderated by Erica Ayotte Favorito  (Founder, Slice Advisory), alongside Mary Migiano  (Head of CX, Compt), Nehal Patel  (Fractional Chief Customer

For the first time in a long time, the tech industry has no clear path forward. AI is already cooling off as we head into 2026. The low-hanging fruit has been picked, the economic realities are catching up, and the hype cycle is running out of oxygen. But what happens next? Honestly, nobody knows. In the late ’90s and early 2000s, Microsoft dominated the direction of the tech world. By the mid-2000s, they had clearly run out of ideas. As Microsoft entered its full malaise era

Building hardware is hard. Building software is fast. Building both (together) can feel like trying to align two entirely different universes. That challenge took center stage during No Meltdowns Required: Mastering Hardware–Software Integration , a Startup Boston Week session moderated by Luis Alvear Tesouro  (Founder, AINovva), which brought together operators with deep, hands-on experience building complex, integrated products: Monica Gauba , Founder and CEO of ShoreFDI, w

Scaling is where things get real. The scrappy hacks that got you to product-market fit start to crack, your calendar explodes, and suddenly everything feels important. Growth is exciting, but without the right systems, people, and leadership in place, it can get messy fast. The Road To: Scaling Smarter is your no-fluff guide to growing without breaking what you’ve built. Pulled from Startup Boston Week sessions, this series dives into the real questions founders face at scale

When early-stage founders rush to hire, sign customers, or collaborate with partners, legal paperwork rarely feels urgent. But according to startup attorneys Alicia Dorner  and Beth Lamontagne  of Foley & Lardner , those early decisions can quietly shape (or jeopardize) the long-term survival of a young company. In a conversation with Startup Boston, both attorneys pointed to a recurring pattern: founders don’t intentionally skip legal steps. They just underestimate how much

At the 9th Annual Startup Boston Week, one question quietly threaded its way through a packed room of founders, operators, and customer leaders: If your customers like your product, why do they still churn? Diane Gordon , a longtime SaaS executive and founder of Customer Growth Consulting, came with a direct answer - and a warning. Liking a product isn’t the same as understanding its value. And when renewal time arrives, that gap can cost companies everything. With more than

At Startup Boston Week, one panel challenged a piece of startup folklore that refuses to die: that the best startups are simple ones. Moderated by Suvojit Ghosh , Founder and CEO of FYELABS, Inventing the Future: Building Startups with Technically Complex Products  brought together founders who are building far beyond apps, dashboards, and lightweight software tools. Instead, they’re tackling problems rooted in healthcare, human dignity, animal health, and behavioral science

If you’re building a Seed or Series A SaaS company, your board doesn’t want a wall of numbers. They want five crisp signals that show your growth engine, your path to profitability, and your runway to keep going. The trick is not to collect more data points. It’s to ruthlessly pick the right few, define them once, and manage them every single week (at least every month). And in periods when you fall short of any of your key target thresholds, gather the data to understand why

January in Boston doesn’t ease you into the year - it hits the ground running. From deep tech and AI to founder support, community building, and capital connection, the first month of the year is packed with events worth putting on your radar if you’re building, backing, or supporting startups in Greater Boston. Startup Boston is anchoring the month with four community-powered experiences: Mentor Matching for Early-Stage Founders (Jan 12)  - An intimate, mentor-driven session

When a startup swims into enterprise waters, the rules change - and the current can turn fast.  That’s why at Startup Boston Week, we sat down with four leaders who have lived the highs and lows of working with corporate giants: Justine Jordan , Head of Strategy at Beefree; Evan Grossman , CPO at Affineon; Shankar Krishnan , Product Leader at AWS; and Melissa Appel , fractional head of product who moderated the discussion.  The full event video is embedded below if you’d like

When a startup survives nearly two decades, you pay attention to how.  That was the energy in the room during Startup Boston Week’s session Market-Proof Your Startup: Thriving Through Shifts and Trends .  The conversation paired David Chang , founding member of TBD Angels , with Chris Savage , co-founder and CEO of Wistia , a Boston-born company known for raising venture capital, and then purchasing the startup back from investors to scale independently. Savage and Chang unpa

“If only I had time to pause and reflect”  responded a collaborator to the idea of a reflection & goal-setting activity around the upcoming New Year. And honestly, that reaction is common. When we’re moving fast, reflection is often the first thing to slip off the calendar. But what happens when we don’t take the time to reflect on what’s working and what isn’t? We stick with unhelpful habits. We allow interpersonal friction to build and fester. And we miss out on opportuniti

Marketing isn’t “nice to have,”  it’s your engine for traction, revenue and survival. But for early-stage founders, hiring a marketer, testing channels, and building a repeatable growth motion can feel like guesswork. So we brought together the experts who’ve actually done it - from first hires to enterprise deals - and turned their lessons into your step-by-step playbook. Below are the most tactical conversations from Startup Boston Week 2025 to help you grow smarter, spend

If you had asked me two years ago whether I’d be building an AI startup focused on IRB and research compliance, I would’ve probably laughed. Like many founders, I didn’t intentionally walk into this space. I simply kept running into the exact same pain point over and over again - and eventually, the problem became too loud to ignore. I spent years in academic and medical research across Harvard Medical School, MGH, Mount Sinai, and Northwell Health. No matter the institution

Securing pre-seed funding as a first-time founder is about far more than having a great idea, it’s about telling a story investors believe in, selling a vision for what’s possible, and proving you’re the one to build it. Before traction, before revenue, and often before a finished product, founders must learn how to communicate clarity, confidence, and potential in a way that cuts through the noise. Recorded live at Startup Boston Week 2025, this session breaks down how to cr

Every startup dreams of waking up one morning and suddenly having product-market fit. But reality isn’t a clean curve up and to the right - sometimes it’s being yelled at by customers, then trying to explain their feature requests to an engineering team that definitely doesn’t want to build them. That was the brutally honest premise of this session led by Rob Zambito , a three-time customer success leader turned founder of Success Scaled Consulting, who has helped companies g

Launching a startup means making dozens of decisions with limited time, money, and knowledge. Few decisions feel as high-stakes as the legal ones. How should you form the business? Who should own what? What if you’re still working a full-time job while building your idea on nights and weekends? At Startup Boston Week 2025, Touchstone Strategic Law’s managing partners Michael Perez and Elizabeth Norman  pulled back the curtain on the legal choices that define a company’s found

A founder’s calendar can quickly become a graveyard of “great intentions.” You start the year energized by ambitious goals, but the day-to-day reality of investor meetings, customer fires, and operational demands can pull you in every direction except forward. During our recent panel on designing a founder schedule  for the year ahead, six practical frameworks surfaced as the tools founders actually rely on to stay focused, accountable and resilient. If you’re ready to trade

I’ve sat in too many leadership meetings that erupt into shouting matches. Smart, capable founders interrupt, talk over, or tear each other down. Someone storms out. Someone else shuts down, a peacekeeper tries to smooth it all over. Everyone walks away convinced they were the reasonable one. This is what unproductive conflict looks like in startups: raw emotion, high stakes, and zero recovery. It isn’t because people don’t care — it’s because communication is a learned skill

Not every startup is built with drag-and-drop tools and a pitch deck. Some require hardware, regulation, scientific rigor, and engineering that lives at the edge of what’s possible. The Road To: Building Deep Tech & Tough Tech brings together the founders, engineers, and operators tackling the hardest technical problems 0 from robotics and life sciences to regulated healthcare and hardware-software systems. This series pulls together the most practical sessions from Startup B

Inside Startup Boston & City of Boston’s year-end planning panel With just weeks left before the calendar turns over, Startup Boston and the City of Boston brought together three seasoned founders - each with wildly different entrepreneurial journeys - to tackle a deceptively simple question: How should founders actually plan their 2026 schedule? Moderated by Startup Boston  founder Stephanie Roulic , the conversation quickly moved beyond calendars and time-blocking. What unf