At some point, every founder reaches the same realization: your startup will only grow as fast as the team you build. But hiring in an early-stage startup isn't just about filling open roles - every new employee changes your culture, your speed, your burn rate, and ultimately your company's future. During Startup Boston Week, moderator Disleve Kanku (Co-Founder & CTO, Echo Labs) sat down with Pascal Kriesche (Co-Founder & CEO, smoodi), Cait Brumme (CEO, MassChallenge), Bridge

Some startup advice never gets old: Build relationships. Find the right people. Put yourself out there. But at Startup Boston Week, one panel took those ideas a step further. In You Belong in the Room: How One Question Changed Everything, moderator Derek Fieldhouse (Fidelity Private Shares) sat down with Unicorn co-founders and co-CEOs Denielle Finkelstein and Thyme Sullivan to share the moments that transformed their company - not because they had all the answers, but becaus

Let me describe a scene that every CS student or self-taught developer knows too well. It's 11pm. You're staring at a LeetCode problem. You read the solution three times. You understand it. You close the tab. Two days later, you can't recall a single thing about it. That was me. I came into software engineering from a mechanical engineering background, having taught myself Python from scratch to break into the field. I loved building things. But technical interview prep felt

Some of the biggest innovations in healthcare start with a simple question: What if there’s a better way? For CranioSense’s co-founders, Dr. Ryan Myers and Kristian DiMatteo, they wanted to find a different way to diagnose elevated brain pressure following traumatic brain injuries that’s noninvasive and can be used across a variety of care settings. CranioSense’s product, IHdetect, will be able to diagnose elevated intracranial pressure in minutes, without the need to drill a

Climate founders are solving some of the world's hardest problems. They're building new battery technologies, reinventing heating and cooling systems, launching satellites, and developing solutions that could fundamentally change how we adapt to a changing climate. But according to climate tech marketing leader Cara Hogan, one of the biggest challenges founders face isn't building the technology, it's explaining it. On a recent episode of Cents Check, Startup Boston's podcast

At Startup Boston Week, the session “Innovations in Life Sciences: From Lab to Market” explored one of the hardest challenges in biotech and health tech: how do you actually turn great science into something that reaches patients? The panel brought together leaders across biotech, healthcare systems, AI drug discovery, and startup operations, including Sheila Phicil, Rachel Salazar, David Cardoso, and Vanita Sood. And while the conversation covered everything from AI platform

After designing 700+ decks for founders, CEOs, and leadership teams, the same board deck issues keep showing up. Not because the business is weak, but because the slides aren't designed for how boards actually read them. These design gaps are easy to miss, but they cost approval. Here's where they happen and what to do instead. Board decks are getting longer. We regularly see board presentations cross 25, 40, even 60 slides. At the Fortune 500 level, the full board pack can

For many founders, startup ideas emerge from market research, brainstorming sessions, or years spent inside an industry. For Ratnam Srivastava, the idea came from paperwork. After spending years conducting medical research at institutions including Harvard Medical School, Mount Sinai, and Northwell Health, Ratnam repeatedly encountered the same challenge: research projects were being delayed not by science, but by administrative processes. Protocol approvals, compliance docum

Rock climbing includes a lot of starts and stops, all the while navigating up, down, and across to the next point. You can say it’s a similar journey for many founders. For Dr. Mengdie Wang, being an avid rock climber (in some ways) prepared her journey to launch RedPoint Oncology. Wang is the co-founder and CEO of RedPoint, which is building a new payload class for targeted oncology. The startup’s goal is to eliminate therapy-resistant solid tumors where current treatments f