At Startup Boston Week, a panel of product leaders and founders unpacked a question many startups eventually face: should you build everything yourself, or plug into someone else’s platform? Moderated by John Zilch (Product, Breakthrough Ventures), the session featured Ada Glover, Chief Product Officer of Zeus Health, Izzat Jarudi, Co-Founder and CEO of Edify, and Jennifer Bullard, Founder of Yes Yes No. Together, they explored how founders can use platforms, partnerships, a

At Startup Boston Week, one of the conference’s final sessions tackled a question founders obsess over and investors debate constantly: when there’s limited traction, incomplete data, and plenty of uncertainty, how do investors decide whether to write a check? Moderated by Lucia Maffei (Technology Reporter, Boston Business Journal), the panel brought together James Massaquoi of Glasswing Ventures, Ron Levin of Alumni Ventures, Jillian Chase of Azolla Ventures, and Andrew Bloo

At Startup Boston Week 2025, one of the most candid conversations of the week didn’t focus on fundraising tactics or growth hacks. Instead, it tackled something founders often discuss far less publicly: burnout, bias, resilience, and the support systems required to keep building. The session Real Talk from the Trenches: Female Founders on Tradeoffs, Grit and Support Systems brought together moderator Sheri Palazzo (Founder, Saplings Consulting) alongside Erin Dewicki (CEO, Ly

At some point, nearly every founder runs into the same question: When do I stop being the salesperson? That was the focus of Startup Boston Week’s panel, Passing the Sales Baton: Scaling Revenue Without Losing Control, moderated by Deborah Kurtz, founder of Magenta Search. Joining her were Jennifer Harrington, branding agency founder focused on sales storytelling; Hannah Leary, strategic accounts leader at OneScreen AI and the company’s first founding account executive; Liz G

A strong startup can still lose investor attention if the pitch deck makes the business harder to understand, evaluate, and remember. TL;DR After working on 350+ startup pitch decks, the same issues keep showing up. Not because the business lacks clarity, but because the slides aren’t designed for how investors scan and evaluate. These mistakes are subtle, but they cost attention. Here’s where they happen. Introduction A strong startup can still lose investor attention becau

Startups love a channel conversation. Should we run paid search? Should we post more on LinkedIn? Should we build a content engine? Should we hire someone to own growth? Should we test outbound? Sometimes the answer is yes. A lot of the time, though, the real problem is a page problem, not a traffic problem. More specifically, it has a decision-page problem. That matters because early teams can burn a lot of time scaling ambiguity. More traffic to a weak page does not solve m

Cold outreach is far from dead. It has simply grown up. At Startup Boston Gerry Casaletto (Director of Sales, Reveneer), Zheina Pramatarova (Senior Sales Executive, Technis), Kirk Fackre (VP Sales, iCorps Technologies) and Yawa Degboe (Campaign Manager, Global Arts Live) gathered to discuss one of the most practical growth questions facing early-stage companies today: how do you win attention in a world full of inbox fatigue, spam filters, and AI-generated noise? The answer,

Wearable health tech often gets marketed as sleek hardware, smart sensors, and futuristic dashboards. But according to founders, product leaders, designers, and medical device experts at Startup Boston Week, successful products in this space are built on something less flashy: trust, usability, and relentless customer feedback. During Startup Boston Week, Jeremy Chow (Co-founder & CEO, Tactus), Meghan Gagne (Director of Product, Perkins School for the Blind), Rich Le (Design

42% of SaaS startups fail because there's no market need. Another 14% fail from weak positioning. Everyone treats these as separate problems. They're not. The root cause is the same: a broken answer to one question. Who is this for, and why does it matter? That's positioning. When positioning is unclear, everything breaks downstream. Sales pursues deals that were never a fit. Messaging bounces off because it doesn't reshape what buyers already believe. Pricing feels arbitrary

Angel investing has long carried an air of exclusivity. You picture high-net-worth individuals writing six-figure checks into buzzy startups, getting early access to the next unicorn, and casually dropping “I invested early” into conversation. But according to founders-turned-investors and operators actively writing checks today, that narrative is outdated and, frankly, misleading. At Startup Boston’s recent webinar in partnership with the City of Boston, Chris Combs (Founder

It was a cold Saturday morning in Connecticut. I was playing the second round of a Level 4 tournament - one of those matches where nothing was working. I was losing points I should be winning easily. My return game was breaking down. Double faults at the worst moments. I had a sense something was off, but no way to pinpoint what. My coach wasn't there. No one was tracking point by point. After my loss and during the long car ride back, I found myself trying to piece together

At Startup Boston Week, founders packed into a session with one big question hanging in the air: How do you know if your startup is truly healthy or just good at looking impressive online? Anthony Franklin , Managing Principal at Spearhead Revenue Consulting and former startup revenue leader, offered a blunt warning: too many founders are chasing metrics that look exciting in pitch decks, LinkedIn posts, or casual investor conversations, but don’t actually reflect whether th

May is shaping up to be a massive month in Boston’s startup ecosystem, with a packed calendar of events bringing together founders, operators, investors, students, and ecosystem builders. From Boston Tech Week and Robotics Tech Week to climate gatherings, venture capital dinners, product showcases, and founder-focused networking, this month is all about momentum, collaboration, and building what’s next. Startup Boston is helping anchor the month with a series of community-pow

While Botox gets most of the attention in our modern culture of dermal aesthetic procedures, filler injections are incredibly common as well. There are an estimated 7.8 million filler injections performed annually, according to a 2024 report by the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. What many don’t realize is that patients are at risk of blindness or a stroke if a blood vessel is poked while giving the injection. It’s enough to keep any aesthetic injector up at night. Kare

Everyone is busy; prospects decide fast. You see the traffic hitting your site, but the calendar stays empty. It is a frustrating reality for founders. You deal with missed demos, stalled trials, and those agonizing "we are interested but..." emails that go nowhere. Usually, the instinct is to blame the product or pivot the marketing strategy. But the actual problem hides in plain sight. Your pipeline is not breaking because of missing features. It breaks during tiny, invisib

Being a successful founder is rewarding and challenging. Now imagine taking on this role and responsibility again. Joanna Shu did just that. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Cartwheel Health , a medical device startup developing an innovative, non-toxic treatment for head lice. In this conversation with Startup Boston, Shu discusses why creating Cartwheel Health was personal for her, how humor is important in their branding, lessons learned from her first startup, and more.

At Startup Boston Week, Christina Luconi (People Innovator, People Innovations) delivered a clear message founders often overlook: startups do not fail because they ignore culture, instead, they fail because they assume culture can wait. For many early-stage companies, survival mode takes over. Founders are chasing product-market fit, fundraising, hiring, customer growth, and solving a dozen urgent problems before lunch. In that environment, culture can feel like a luxury it

Despite recent price pressure, crypto continues to gain adoption as the technology moves deeper into mainstream finance and market infrastructure. That shift is central to the thesis behind tmr Ventures, an early-stage venture firm based in Boston and founded by Lucas He to back crypto companies building practical, durable businesses at the intersection of blockchain and capital markets. He brings more than a decade of experience in blockchain, dating back to 2012, along wit

At Startup Boston Week, Michael Goldenberg (VP Sales and Customer Success, SquareWorks) delivered a practical session on one of the most misunderstood parts of building a startup: pricing. Founders often obsess over product, hiring, fundraising, and go-to-market strategy. Pricing gets pushed to the bottom of the list. But according to Goldenberg, that’s a mistake. “Pricing shouldn’t be an afterthought,” he told the room. “It should be part of your overall strategy.” Drawing

Boston City Hall became a stage for the next generation of builders this week. Startup Boston teamed up with the City of Boston to host the Built in Boston: Student Founder Pitch Showcase, bringing together student entrepreneurs from across the region who aren’t just exploring ideas, they’re actively building companies while still in school. Each team had five minutes to pitch, followed by live Q&A with judges, competing for a growing prize pool designed to help them move fas

Healthcare is one of the hardest industries to build in, not because there’s a lack of opportunity, but because everything that should be simple rarely is. At Startup Boston Week, Amber Nigam (Co-Founder & CEO, basys.ai ), Ali Hyatt (Chief Customer & Growth Officer, Henry Schein One), Kristen Nuckols (Co-Founder & Chief Clinical Officer, Imago Rehab) and Yu-Jen Chang (Investment Associate, Taiwan Global Angels) didn’t just scratch the surface. It got into the messy middl