Boston Speaks Up

Guest TJ Douglas is the founder and CEO of The Urban Grape, a wine store in Boston’s South End neighborhood known for its proprietary Progressive Scale - a system of sorting wine by its body, instead of by varietal or region. Douglas has led The Urban Grape to becoming one of the most successful independently-owned wine stores in the country as a result. Douglas’ list of accomplishments is nothing...

Enjoy this bonus episode of Boston Speaks Up host Zach Servideo appearing on the Fuel Your Fire podcast from Endicott College's Angle Center for Entrepreneurship where Zach is a visiting Entrepreneur-in-Residence. In this episode, Zach speaks on the future of tech and innovation, tells his story of packing up and moving out west to LA and "Silicon Beach", and shares the heartwarming legacy he want...

Guest Cara Shortsleeve is the CEO at The Leadership Consortium (TLC), a leadership development platform designed to accelerate high potential and diverse leaders. Shortsleeve joined TLC in 2018 to launch and scale the business which has since forged relationships with Google, IBM, HubSpot, P&G, WPP and dozens more. Under Shortleeve’s leadership, TLC has enabled more than 2,000 executives to lead s...

Guest David Chang is an entrepreneur and angel investor who has held product, marketing and operating roles at six startups and invested in 60 companies. He was most recently the CEO at student loan startup Gradifi, which was acquired by E*TRADE in December 2019. Previously, he was Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Harvard Business School and Director of the Babson Summer Venture Program. Chang has a s...

Guest Carly Chase is an Entrepreneur in Residence at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship. Her work is wide in scope and includes serving as the Founding Managing Director of the MIT NYC Startup Studio (part of the MIT delta v accelerator), running the StartMIT entrepreneurship bootcamp, overseeing the Trust Center’s Membership Program for Organizations and New Frontiers of Entrepreneu...

Guest Kiel Servideo is a former Hollywood assistant who’s always found comfort with a pen and a notebook. He moved out to Los Angeles a year after graduating from Boston University where he hustled various temp agency jobs before landing full-time gigs with Hollywood titans such as Jerry Bruckheimer and Shawn Levy. While living in LA, Servideo wrote his first novel -- The Preposterous Dreams of Tu...

Guest Neil Jacobs is the president and founder of the 3Point Foundation, a non-profit organization that offers free educational, sports and dance programming to under-served youth in Boston. Working closely with the Boston Celtics, Boston Public Schools, UMass Boston and additional partners, Jacobs and 3Point are on a mission to improve the lives of Boston’s youth through positive reinforcement in...

Guest Chris Vail is a Senior Account Executive for Political and Advocacy Partnerships at Snapchat. A former Amazon ad sales leader, Vail made the move to Snapchat to help onboard legislative, issue, and non-profit advertisers onto the Snapchat platform. His team recently launched an augmented reality lens for the Mark Kelly campaign in Arizona, which was the first Senate campaign to lean in on th...

Guest Ari Fine Glantz is the Director of Development & Strategic Initiatives at the New England Venture Capital Association (NEVCA), the regional trade association for the venture capital industry, with mission to foster a collaborative, inclusive, and prosperous innovation ecosystem. At NEVCA, Glantz leads the organization’s revenue generating activities, manages legislative strategy, and support...

Guest Veronica Armstrong is the cofounder and CEO of Isle de Nature, a Boston-based home fragrance startup that recently placed runner-up at Roxbury Pitch Night, a virtual pitch night hosted by Venture Café New England’s Roxbury Innovation Center. Isle de Nature offers a line of home fragrance products starting with candles made from beeswax and soy. Armstrong is driven by the belief that "unspoil...

Ashton Lattimore is the editor-in-chief at Prism, a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color)-led nonprofit news outlet. Prism formally launched in August 2020 with a focus on coverage of electoral justice, gender justice, workers’ rights, criminal justice, racial justice and immigration. Lattimore is a longtime editor and writer whose work focuses on race, culture, and the law. Her writing h...

Guest Rachael Rollins is the Suffolk County District Attorney, the chief law enforcement official for Boston, Chelsea, Revere, and Winthrop. She was elected by a landslide campaigning on a platform centered on criminal justice system reform. Taking office in January 2019 as Suffolk County’s 16th district attorney, Rollins is the first woman to be elected to that position in Suffolk County history,...

Guest Martel Metellus is the founder of Soko, a discovery network for the Black community to connect, collaborate, and find new opportunities. Founded in September 2019, Soko began as a freelance marketplace for Black skillworkers. Like many great startups, Soko was created to satisfy the founder’s own pain points. Metellus developed Soko to solve his need of wanting to hire Black people to work o...

Angela Liu is the Director of Hack. Diversity, the workforce development division of the New England Venture Capital Association. Launched in 2017, Hack. Diversity partners with Boston’s fast growing tech teams to not only increase the representation of Black and Latinx technologists in the innovation economy, but also evolve organizational practices to support retention and promotion of that tale...

Guest Pariss Chandler is a former aesthetician turned front-end developer. She transitioned into tech in 2017 after participating in Resilient Coders, a coding bootcamp for people of color. Chandler is the creator of the hashtag and movement #BlackTechTwitter, bringing awareness and exposure to the Black community in the tech industry. She is also founder of Black Tech Pipeline, a service-based pl...

Guest AK Ikwuakor, also known as “Coach AK”, is an entrepreneur, educator, consultant, strategist, storyteller, and former Top 10 world-ranked athlete from the University of Oregon (hurdles; 400 meter). He’s founded several companies including Empower2Play, a sports diplomacy project working with the US Government; as well as ELETE Styles, a made to measure clothing provider for athletes and worki...

Guest Christian Magel is the founder of Boston-based Venture Lane, a curated startup hub which houses up to 25 early-stage tech companies between two and 15 employees. Magel is an international startup veteran, business angel and go-to-market expert who cut his entrepreneurial teeth in Europe and Australia. He was the cofounder of amaysim, an Australian telecommunication company in which he served...

Wafaa Arbash is a Syrian immigrant who’s determined to restore dignity to refugees globally through her Boston-based startup WorkAround. The co-founder and CEO of WorkAround is working around the barriers to employment for refugees by providing them with an online microwork platform that helps AI and machine learning companies with human intelligence tasks. Arbash started WorkAround while working...

Guest Jesse Bardo is a director in Early Stage Practice for Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) in Boston, which banks upwards of 70 percent of Boston venture-backed companies. Bardo is active in the Boston innovation community and a proven entrepreneur turned angel investor and startup mentor. He was one of the founders of higher education SaaS company EverTrue (Techstars Boston 2011), which won the MassCh...

Guest Bill Gianoukos is the co-founder and CEO of Goodpath, which emerged from stealth in April 2020 to launch its digital integrative TeleHealth portal. Goodpath accelerated its launch timeline to support health care practitioners (HCPs) who are struggling to manage the chronic care needs of patients during the COVID19 crisis. Goodpath can step in as an appropriate alternative to office visits by...

Guest Ryan Light is the CEO of Pistol Lake, a clothing brand where everything is ethically made in the U.S. The Boston Speaks Up community may recognize Ryan Light from his time in Boston in prominent executive and marketing roles at Kinvey and CoachUp. After seven years in Boston, Light moved to Los Angeles in 2018 to run Pistol Lake. In March 2020, Pistol Lake stopped manufacturing clothes at it...

Guest Chris Savage is the CEO and co-founder of Wistia, a video software company based in Cambridge, MA. Wistia is the software behind original video initiatives from brands across industries. Wistia also has its own slate of original video series, which includes Brandwagon, One, Ten, One Hundred, and Low Views High Impact. Savage and his co-founder, Brendan Schwartz, started Wistia in Schwartz’s...

Guest Dr. Emily Reichert is CEO of Greentown Labs, the largest clean technology startup incubator in North America. As the company’s first employee, Reichert has spearheaded the rapid growth of Greentown Labs into a global hub for climatetech and cleantech innovation, attracting visitors and partners from around the world. She started her career at the international management consulting firm Arth...

Guest Rahkeem Morris is the cofounder and CEO of SYRG, a service for employers to hire former workers for shifts and projects on-demand. Morris’ long-term vision for SYRG is to empower a flexible, liquid, universal workforce of hourly workers where any person can work for any place at any time. Morris took an unusual journey into entrepreneurship and has unique gig economy experience having droppe...

Guest Sean Cantwell is a founding team member and Managing Partner with Boston-based Volition Capital, a technology-oriented growth equity and venture capital firm that raised $600 million in separate funds for new investments in 2019. While Volition invests in companies across America, Cantwell has distinguished himself as a growth equity professional dedicated to Boston’s startup community where...