Jean Hammond "Indispensable Angel"

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