6:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDT
Recap
independent
Ugly Talk: Building and Scaling Tech Companies in Boston
Photo gallery
6:00 PM – 8:00 PM EDT
About Event
Boston does not get enough credit.
When people talk about startup cities, it is always New York and San Francisco. Boston gets dismissed as a college town with great hospitals. That is lazy.
Boston is quietly producing some of the most fundable and defensible startups in the country. The city has world-class research institutions, deep biotech and SaaS talent, and a cost structure that still gives founders a better shot at keeping equity instead of lighting it on fire.
The ecosystem is tighter. The networks are more accessible. The builders care more about substance than hype.Why you should attend
Hear why some founders chose Boston on purpose and why others moved there to build.Get a clearer read on what the city actually does well for startup operators.Understand where Boston gives founders an edge, and where it still falls short.Meet builders who care more about real company building than looking important online.
Featured speakers.
Steve Dow is a financial services veteran turned fintech founder and CEO. Prior to Monit, he served as Head of Corporate Strategy at Webster Bank and later helped lead their Business Banking group. Under Steve’s leadership, Webster became the #1 SBA lender in New England two years in a row. At Webster, Steve observed first-hand the difficulty that banks have serving business customers and likewise the issues SMBs have interfacing with their bank. Monit aims to solve both problems by partnering with banks to deploy its award-winning software, which gives business owners the financial optimization tools they need to prosper and, in turn, provides banks an analytics and targeting platform to serve their business customers more effectively and profitably. Steve also ran Webster’s corporate investment fund and sat on the Board of Payrailz (now a Jack Henry company). Mr. Dow has been a speaker at American Banker Small Business Banking Conference, CBA Live, ICBA Live, Janney Community Bank Summit, Startup Boston among other industry events.
Meghan Houle is the Founder & CEO of CONCÉ, an AI-powered hiring intelligence platform leveraging AI with a human touch, redefining how companies engage talent through predictive matching and curated professional networks supporting the recruiting flow from job description, to job offer. With more than 20 years of experience in executive recruiting across luxury and consumer brands, Meghan has placed thousands of leaders and generated over $15M in placement revenue. She is recognized for her forward-thinking perspective on the future of work, hiring intelligence, and the evolving relationship between AI and human potential. Through CONCÉ, she is building the infrastructure behind a more intentional, intelligent, and aligned hiring ecosystem.
Ahmed Rashad is founder and principal of RoleOS, an AI workforce architecture consultancy that helps enterprises decide which roles to keep human, which to augment with AI, and how to sequence the transition. He is also a cofounder of Sunny Side Up Studio, and previously led product design at Wayfair and Fannie Mae. His take: AI transformation is not a tools problem, it is a workforce design problem. Tech, people enablement, and process reinvention have to compound together, or the rollout stalls.
Who's hosting it.
Deveney Williams is the founder and CEO of Sunny Side Up, an embedded creative agency for growth-stage B2B SaaS founders. With 10+ years across brand strategy, creative operations, and visual storytelling for brands like Adobe, NPR, and Liberty Mutual, she now partners with founders to turn traction into a brand the market actually remembers. Curiosity is her operating principle, and clarity is the deliverable. Based in Boston, she splits her time between client work, building SSU’s team, and finding the city’s best cortado.
Questions? Talk@UglyTalk.com
Location
Idea Space
867 Boylston St.
Boston