BUILD617 Pod

Mike Salguero is the founder and CEO of ButcherBox, and one of the best founder stories in Boston. After building CustomMade, raising venture capital, and going through a brutal startup failure, Mike started over and built ButcherBox in a totally different way. No default playbook. No permission. Just real customers, real revenue, discipline, mission, and a company built to last. In this episode,...

Natan Linder has built two of the most important Boston area companies at the intersection of software and the physical world. He cofounded Formlabs, helped define the desktop 3D printing category, and is now cofounder and CEO of Tulip, the frontline operations platform helping manufacturers bring AI, data, and modern software to the factory floor. In this episode of BUILD617, we talk about why Bo...

In this episode of BUILD617, we sit down with Ben Katz and Mats Terwiesch, cofounders of HYBRD, a YC backed company building adaptive AI coaching for hybrid athletes. Coming out of WHOOP, Ben and Mats saw the power of performance data. With HYBRD, they are building the next layer: software that shows you the data, and helps change the plan. We talk about AI coaching, hybrid training, YC, founder s...

Benj Cohen is the founder and CEO of Proton.ai, one of Boston’s breakout vertical AI companies. He started Proton while studying applied math and data science at Harvard, inspired by a problem he saw firsthand through his family’s distribution business, Benco Dental: distributors have massive amounts of customer, product, and order data, but most of it is still underused. Proton.ai is building the...

Helen Greiner didn’t just study robotics at MIT, she helped invent the category. The Roomba is one of the most recognized robots of all time. As co-founder of iRobot, she took robots from research labs in Massachusetts to millions of homes, battlefields, and disaster zones. Long before AI was hype, she was building systems that had to work in the real world. This episode is about physical AI. Not...

Eric Paley has seen every layer of the startup ecosystem. He built and exited a deep tech company, backed world changing startups at Founder Collective, and now leads economic development efforts for Massachusetts. In this episode of #BUILD617, we go deep on what actually drives venture scale outcomes in Boston and across Massachusetts and why the region is more competitive than most people think....

Jason Kelly shares the story behind building Ginkgo from MIT into one of the most important synthetic biology companies in the world. In this episode of the BUILD617 Podcast we talk aboutHow Ginkgo became the breakout syn bio company of a generationWhat it took to pitch directly into Y Combinator and Sam AltmanWhy Jason is still all in on building in BostonThe rise of deep tech robotics autonomous...

David Chang has been building companies in Boston for over 25 years. Multiple startups. Multiple cycles. Wins. Failures. Resets. And he is still building. In this BUILD617 Podcast episode, we sit down with one of the most experienced operators in the Boston tech ecosystem to talk about what only time can teach you. This is not theory. It is lived experience. David has seen hype cycles come and go....

Episode 1 of the BUILD617 podcast kicks off with a simple but urgent question: how do we make Boston a place where world changing companies are not just funded but actually built. This episode sets the foundation for BUILD617 by exploring what is working, what is broken, and why real progress comes from founder led conversations, trust, and showing up in person to rebuild the connective tissue of...