Jul 18, 2018
Zipcar’s first investor, Jean Hammond, is Boston’s indispensable angel. Her hands-on approach has been pivotal to the success of her startup and several others. She co-founded the leading accelerator for educational technology startups, LearnLaunch. The interview was great fun and hugely instructive to me. Don’t miss it!
Here are some highlights:
- Sal Introduces Jean Hammond
- From Studying Biology at Boston University to Running a Food Warehouse
- Jean Decides She Needs a Rigorous MBA – Goes to MIT Sloan
- Moved to Edinburgh & Worked at Fast-Growing Computer Networking Startup
- “By the time I left there [Spyder], I felt like I'd done all the different functions in a little startup and done it while growth was going on.”
- Jean Hammond Founds AXON
- “AXON was four years old when 3Com acquired it and had grown quite rapidly to a pretty good business, and we got a pretty good price.”
- Jean Hammond’s Second Startup, Quarry, Suffered from Bottlenecks in Telecom Infrastructure
- “We live in a magic world of technology today that just things you wouldn't have imagined could happen are happening every day.”
- “First, I wish to thank listener Phillip L. 36 for this great review on iTunes”
- Jean Hammond Becomes Zipcar’s First Investor
- “By coming back into town and talking to everybody, I found out that I was an angel investor. I didn't even know that all of that time.”
- This Is Why We Call Her the Indispensable Angel
- Jean Hammond Invests Widely with Boston’s Angel Community
- Golden Seeds & Teaching Angel Investing
- Jean Hammond Starts the Activity that Would Lead to the Founding of LearnLaunch, the Ed Tech Accelerator
- “Education is a really interesting industry. It's the last of the giant industries, well over five trillion globally, maybe six, to digitize.”
- “Qstream is based on technology that actually understands how memories are fixed.”
- “…learning science is quite clear that we need to be striving, taking a little bit harder than you took the last time.”
- “…some of our most excited investors in the LearnLaunch accelerator are coming in from India and China and Japan because they want to be a part of these changes.”
- Jean Hammond’s Thoughts on the Importance of Boards to Startups
- “Being a board member for a startup is actually quite a challenging job…”
- Jean Hammond’s Parting Thoughts