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

Boston doesn’t just build robots - it builds entire industries. From ocean-cleaning fleets to surgical intelligence, solar-farm builders, soft-material manipulators and AI-powered science factories, the region’s robotics talent is rewriting what machines can do. With founders spinning out of MIT, MassRobotics, Harvard, Northeastern, Greentown Labs and some of the world’s top research labs, Boston has become the place where advanced automation leaves the prototype stage and st

Massachusetts isn’t just leading in climatetech - it’s building the playbook for how innovation and policy can work together to solve the planet’s hardest problems. Here, cutting-edge research meets forward-thinking legislation, and founders have access to an unparalleled network of universities, accelerators and investors that know what it takes to bring climate solutions from lab to market. With more climatetech startups per capita than any other state and a coordinated str

Boston’s wrapping up the year with momentum and the startup community is showing up strong. December is packed with events that bring founders, investors, students, and ecosystem builders together for everything from intentional planning to real, relationship-driven connection. Startup Boston is kicking off the month with two community-powered experiences: From Chaos to Cadence: Building a Founder Schedule That Actually Works (Dec 3)  – A practical, no-fluff panel where found

Did you know that 82% of consumers are more likely to follow a micro-influencer’s recommendation than a big-name celebrity’s? For startups, that statistic represents a massive opportunity - a way to build trust, reach new audiences, and grow brand awareness without breaking the bank. Recorded live at Startup Boston Week 2025, this panel brings together leaders from across the influencer ecosystem to unpack how startups can tap into the power of micro-influencers for real, mea

Building a company with purpose isn’t just about doing good, it’s about doing business differently. Today’s founders and investors are rethinking what success looks like, shifting from pure growth to sustainable impact, thoughtful capital, and intentional partnerships. The Road To: Purpose-Driven Entrepreneurship  brings together the voices shaping this evolution - from fund managers redefining venture models to founders and investors building ecosystems grounded in collabora