Boston Speaks Up

Guest Dave Melville, the founder and CEO of The Bowdoin Group, has built his company into one of the largest executive search firms in Massachusetts. For 25 years, local VCs and PE firms, growth-stage startups, and large enterprises have relied on The Bowdoin Group to meet their executive search and hiring needs. Melville leads The Bowdoin Group’s BioPharma practice along with overseeing general s...

Guest Larry Gennari is general counsel for a wide range of Boston-based businesses. He has a reputation throughout New England as a trusted and beloved business advisor to public companies, venture-backed companies, early-stage ventures, entrepreneurs, investors and board members. Many in the Boston innovation community rely on Gennari for expert legal counsel on financing strategies, partnerships...

Guest A.J. Marcinek co-founded CropShop while attending Endicott College and hasn’t looked back since graduating in Spring 2019. The young entrepreneur’s hot startup is already thriving at fulfilling its mission to bridge the gap between chefs and local sustainable sources of food in the Boston area. As the CEO of CropShop, Marcinek is responsible for the business and customer facing roles -- incl...

Guest Pam Erlichman is the Chief Marketing Officer at Jebbit, a first party data company that facilitates volunteered, declared data exchange between consumers and brands. She has more than 20 years of marketing experience, most recently serving as the VP of marketing at Oracle Data Cloud, a role she assumed following the Datalogix acquisition. Prior to Datalogix, Erlichman worked at Digitas, lead...

Guest Michael Skok started his first software business as a teenager, spent 21 years as an entrepreneur and then the past 15 years as a venture investor. The Underscore VC cofounder has founded, worked with and invested in startups, and created thousands of jobs and billions of dollars of value. Along the way, he also mentored and taught for 4 years at Harvard University, and created the Startup S...

Guest Justin Bingham is the co-founder and chief technology officer at Janeiro Digital. The engineering and business design savant has worked at technology companies since he was 16 years old, foregoing college in favor of pursuing a career in Boston’s innovation economy straight out of high school. Bingham’s background includes nearly two decades of experience building sophisticated technology so...

Guest Miracle Olatunji is the youngest person to appear on Boston Speaks Up, only 19 years old at the time of recording. Olatunji embodies the aspiration of Boston to nurture a more diverse, mission-driven class of social impact entrepreneurs. Currently a student at Northeastern University, Olatunji works as the Director of Innovation of the student organization Thrive, whose mission is to empower...

Guest David Delmar Sentíes is the Founder and Executive Director of Resilient Coders, a highly competitive, free, nonprofit coding bootcamp that trains people of color for high growth careers as software engineers, and connects them with full-time jobs. He's a workforce equity activist, passionate about democratizing access to the high growth careers that are automation resilient. Delmar Senties l...

Guest Katie Hall graduated from Wellesley College in 1984 as one of only five physics majors in her class. She has since spent her career championing women in technology and bringing diversity to the C-suite. Currently, she is the Chief Intellectual Property Officer at Ciprun Global, a company that makes it efficient and cost-effective for U.S. organizations to secure IP protection in the Chinese...

Guest Mike Volpe is the CEO of Lola.com, the fast-growing corporate travel SaaS platform that raised $37 million earlier this year with aims to dominate the $1.6 trillion global travel market. HubSpot’s third founder and former marketing chief, Volpe was offered the position of Lola.com CEO while still the CMO at Cybereason, a cybersecurity SaaS company where he led marketing and sales development...

Guest Roman Jaquez is a software engineer at Philips Health Systems. He's also a Snapchat Official Lens Creator. Originally from Dominican Republic, Jaquez moved to New York when he was 17 years old, and graduated from college in The Bronx with a BA in Computer Science. Now a Methuen, MA resident, Jaquez devotes his free time to helping children in the Merrimack Valley learn computer science throu...

Guest Sam Thompson is one of the founding partners of Progress Ventures, the venture capital arm of Progress Partners, a boutique M&A advisory firm in which he serves as senior managing director. His main focus is on the marketing and media technology marketplace, where he has built a strong network of contacts that can help early and growth-stage businesses. Thompson has a reputation for developi...

Guest John Piermarini is a software developer, a cookie delivery entrepreneur (yes, you read that correctly) and a restauranteur. In 2017, he leaped when he opened up Fare Well, a restaurant out of a shipping container in Boston’s Seaport district. This wasn’t the first leap he took in his career. After finding out he didn’t love being a software engineer at IBM, Piermarini took his first venture...

Guest Rowan Walrath joined BostInno in April 2019 as a staff writer covering innovation in Massachusetts, bringing a unique perspective to Boston from her time as a freelance journalist in San Francisco. Walrath has an impressive journalism background, having spent time writing and fact-checking for WIRED, Mother Jones, Eater, HuffPost and more. While known for her ability to cover an expansive ra...

Guest Jason Burke is the Chief Strategy Officer of clypd, a Davis Square, Somerville-based startup providing an audience-based sales platform for television advertising. Burke possesses a unique skillset as both a product engineer and business designer. Prior to clypd, Burke built optimization products for Boston-based ScanScout which was acquired by Tremor Video in 2010. A graduate of Tufts Unive...

Fabric Media founder and CEO Jason Damata is difficult to describe in words. He’s a poet and a philosopher. He’s a cunning marketer and chief executive. He’s a business consultant and media analyst. He’s made Advertising Age’s prestigious '40 Under 40' list. He spent time touring the country for CSPAN educating the public about media. Damata’s unique characteristics and impressive accomplishments...

Guest Jon Brideau is a social impact entrepreneur currently serving as President and CEO of World T.E.A.M Sports, an organization that brings adaptive and able-bodied athletes together through inclusive athletic programs. He joined the organization in 2017 with aims of increasing sponsorship and partner support for some of World T.E.A.M’s events, which includes an Amazing Race-style competition in...

Guest Deirdre Sartorelli is the Director of the Angle Center for Entrepreneurship at Endicott College, where she also serves as Assistant Dean. In her role, Sartorelli’s focus is connecting and facilitating Endicott’s entrepreneurial network of students, alumni, and the greater North Shore community. Previously, she worked as a Managing Principal for Rogue Wave Advisors where she specialized in le...

Guest Josh Trautwein represents the soul of Boston, a city that looks out for its own with unconditional love and unwavering support. Trautwein was working as a health educator at the MGH Charlestown Healthcare Center when he kept hearing from his families that it was difficult to shop for healthy food. At that time, the only grocery store in the neighborhood was set to be shut down for a year-lon...

Guest Wade Roush has been covering technology and science for almost 25 years. BostInno readers may recognize Roush from his time serving as staff editor at Xconomy (2007-2014). He’s also written a lot for print magazines, notably Scientific American, MIT Technology Review, and Science. In 2014-15, Roush was acting director of MIT's Knight Science Journalism fellowship program and the producer of...

Guest Clement Cazalot is a serial entrepreneur and angel investor, now Managing Director of Techstars Boston, which is the #1 Global Tech Accelerator with $80 Billion in value created. His latest company, docTrackr, recognized as one of the most innovative cybersecurity players, was acquired by Intralinks (NYSE:IL), and deployed to 99% of the Fortune 1000 within a couple of years, securing some of...

Guest Chris Ilsley is the chief executive at life science and technology incubator North Shore InnoVentures (NSIV) in Beverly, MA. He’s also a board member of both the North Shore Chamber of Commerce and North Shore Technology Council. Ilsley stands out for his role fostering an innovation community outside of Boston. He serves as NSIV’s representative to a variety of local, regional, state, and i...

Guest Markus Sebastiano is an artist-entrepreneur like no other. He made waves at SXSW 2019 for his “PowHERful” piece for SAP promoting gender equality. And while he’s the epitome of a modern-day thriving creative -- working with major brands like Coca-Cola -- don’t let his success fool you, because he’s fought for his achievements. The now highly coveted mixed media artist has popular installatio...

Guest Kim Driscoll has been the mayor of Salem, Massachusetts since 2006. She’s responsible for several economic initiatives that have transformed Salem into a popular Greater Boston destination. As a result of Driscoll’s leadership, Salem became one of 110 cities and towns in the state of Massachusetts designated as Commonwealth “Green Communities.” Driscoll is also spearheading innonorth, a free...

Guest Galen Moore is an entrepreneur, consultant and independent analyst with experience in media, research and customer development. BostInno readers will recognize Galen from his days serving as Editor-in-Chief of American Inno, and before that writing about VC and startups at Mass High Tech and Boston Business Journal. In 2017, Galen founded Token Report, a financial data infrastructure for an...