Why we decided to launch a podcast
Jaye Goldstein, CEO + Founder, of Founder to Leader
Episode transcript
Welcome to From Founder to Leader: The human stories behind bio + climate tech startups. In this podcast episode, I’m actually interviewing myself. I wanted to share a little meta with all of you about why the world needs one more podcast - and how we hope these stories will help bio + climate founders and leaders.
First, let me tell you a little about me - as your host of this show.
I’m Jaye Goldstein. Legally, my name is Jaime Goldstein. Funny story, actually. I started going by the name when I worked on a really small team in venture capital. Two of the three people on the team were named Jaime Goldstein, so we came up with a nickname for me to simplify things - and, well, it stuck. So, I’m Jaye.
I’ve had a wildly windy career path that makes way more sense in reverse than it did moving forward. I’ve always been driven by impact. I studied environmental science and writing in college and became a writer and editor for Backpacker Magazine after graduating. I thought I was going to change the world with my prose but in the end I was mostly rating energy bars and hiking gear. I led wilderness trips for kids in the Rockies during my summers in college and loved it and thought that teaching might be a great way for me to have an impact. I went to graduate school and became a certified teacher and taught middle school in inner city schools. I quickly realized that scale mattered to me and I got out of the classroom and into leadership positions in the education sector.
It wasn’t until I ended up at MIT, in my thirties, when I realized that I am an entrepreneur. At MIT, I founded and scaled a lab to help engineers learn to communicate effectively - it’s called the MIT Communication Lab or Comm Lab for short. I then went to Harvard where I oversaw education innovation across the University and later on joined as part of the founding team of Petri - an early stage venture capital fund that focused on early stage bio + climate startups. Petri later merged onto Pillar VC. I realized that the part of the job I loved most was coaching and supporting founders, so, in 2022, I decided to launch Founder to Leader.
Looking back, I think I’ve always been an entrepreneur. Founder to Leader is my 4th startup. My first two startups were technically intrapreneurship, launching and scaling organizations within Harvard and MIT, my third startup was launching a new venture capital firm and my fourth is this company, Founder to Leader.
Before I knew what an entrepreneur was, I was always drawn to roles and positions that were new so I got to write the playbook as I was building. I’ve always been a creative thinker, a hustler, and a problem solver.
Founder to Leader is in many ways the perfect culmination of all of my previous experiences. I now have a partner, Dr, Shelby Doyle, and we have brought in some incredibly talented women leaders in the field to share their expertise with emerging founders and leaders.
We’re more than just an executive coaching team. We specialize in supporting early stage hard tech startups. We design courses and workshops and teach for teams and for accelerators like The Engine, Activate, and the Termeer Institute. We help meta science organizations with strategic planning. We run a Femme Fellows program to support women and underrepresented genders. We facilitate discussions. We have built the Tough Tech Toolbox in collaboration with The Engine, built by mit, which is a highly curated set of guides, tools and templates to help accelerate founders. We love the zero to one space in science innovation. We’re constantly challenging ourselves to find new ways to support the humans behind these scalable and impactful organizations.
Our Theory of Change is: If we help founders and leaders of early stage bio + climate startups build healthy human-first and strategic organizations, then more thriving organizations will produce scalable and impactful solutions to improve human health and our planet.
So why did we decide to launch a podcast? The truth is that so much the early stages of launching and building a bio or climate startup is opaque. On LinkedIn, we hear about the big raises, the major milestones that are worthy of celebrating. But we rarely hear about the real and the hard stuff.
As executive coaches, we are in a privileged position as trusted confidants. We hear all of it. We know intimately about the pivots, the layoffs, the mental health battles while fundraising, the tricky board members, the quiet wins.
We wanted to create a forum to share these stories so that you can hear how people just like you are actually aligning your teams, setting goals, building culture, making tough decisions, and persevering through challenges. We want you to hear how your peers are doing hard things so you can learn from each other - and so you can also feel less isolated out there. We really do hope that you find these conversations to be helpful to you tactically, strategically, and emotionally.
Our interviews will all be 20 minutes or less so you can get quick insights to help you build. The structure of this podcast will be fairly similar each time and will always end with at least one concrete tip for listeners.
So here’s mine: Challenge yourself to grow faster than your team. Get the support you need and be brutally honest with yourself about your own strengths and weaknesses. Successful entrepreneurs don’t have all of the answers - they know how to ask the right questions to the right people and build a village around them to take on ambitious solutions to change the world.
Thank you for joining From Founder to Leader. If you are looking for more concrete tips, tools, and guides to accelerate you as you build, check the Tough Tech Toolbox, which is a collaboration between Founder to Leader and The Engine, Built by MIT. You can buy a membership as an individual, as a team, or as an enterprise for your accelerator or portfolio. And, if looking to skill up with a coach please reach out; we’d love to meet you, hear about your goals, and explore how we can support you.
Building hard tech doesn't need to be so hard. We’ve got you.
