In a startup, building strong relationships with your colleagues is imperative to success. You’re in it together, partnering for triumph and survival. As companies begin to thrive (think hiring lots of new people to the team, adding offices, etc.) these relationships become even more vital. However, more people often leads to more silos and factions. While not intended, it’s a reality as people hunker down in their pods to crank out their work. When people are spread out and can no longer solve big creative problems over a cup of coffee or by swinging by a desk, new challenges ensue.

It would be fantastic if the growing team could share the same passion and collegiality as that OG crew who started the company. When we grow and we aren’t able to communicate face to face on a daily basis, things can get lost in translation. Culture, tone, personalities all can get lost in translation when we aren’t physically together. And yet, this doesn’t have to mean we are doomed to miscommunicate with each other. Read on for a few helpful hints to stay connected as your company scales.

CHOOSE VIDEO OVER PHONE

Technology is a beautiful thing but you should use it wisely. When you have solid relationships, phone, Slack, and email are just fine for transactional encounters. However while nothing can replace in-person conversations, video chats are the next best thing as you are building new partnerships. Even if it’s for a short meeting, the opportunity to look each other in the eye, learn each other’s personalities, sense of humor and non-verbal cues can be vitally important. These are meaningful elements in influencing how we react and respond to one another.   

THINK BEYOND YOUR OWN TIME ZONE

Sure that meeting might work perfectly for you at 9 AM in Boston, but your teammates in Los Angeles is likely cursing the 6 AM start. Conventional wisdom might suggest that as the host of a meeting, select times that work best for the majority; even if it means inconveniencing yourself a bit. Sometimes, you just might have to be the one who takes the hit on that 11 PM meeting being held in Singapore. You might reside in the main office, but it’s not fair to ask all your other colleagues who are spread out to conform to your schedule. Bottom line: a little sensitivity and careful planning can go a long way in building stronger relationships.

CONNECT PROACTIVELY WITH REMOTE TEAM MEMBERS

Work isn’t always about solving hardcore business problems; commiserating about traffic getting into the office or standing in line together at that incredible new food truck is part of building relationships. When people work outside of the office, they miss out on those casual connection points the rest of us can take for granted. A decent way to include our remote friends on the banter? Take full advantage of messaging systems, chat rooms and quick video catch ups. When you build in those easy back and forth repartee throughout the day, it’s amazing how the walls can come down. In addition, think beyond who is right in front of you. Got a cool idea? Rather than turning to your pod mate, try connecting with someone who works remotely for their insight and input. Not only will you further build the relationship and make them feel more included, but you might just get a different (and valuable!) solution or idea.  

MAKE IT SIMPLE TO COLLABORATE

Long gone are the days of a red pen and faxing comments back and forth to each other. Make good use of available technologies to share access, idea development and edits on documents. This doesn’t just apply to final drafts of presentations; think to share notes, lessons learned, etc. Whatever you can do to keep each other on the same page is some organization and collaboration worth investing in.

BREAK SOME BREAD

Everything listed above aids in helping make the most of not being able to be together in person.  Nothing, however, replaces the opportunity to get in front of each other and share a meal or some basic human contact. Obviously getting together, especially when you are based in different locations, can be costly and/or inconvenient, but take advantage of those moments you do have. Traveling to a bigger office? Don’t just go to meetings and head back to your hotel room. Enlist some local team members to join you for an after-work cocktail or dinner.

Life is too short to make it ALL about business. A little focus on breaking down barriers and creating environments to build better relationships doesn’t just make it a more fun place to work; it creates the supportive, inclusive community where both the business and its people have the ability to thrive.

Christina Luconi is Chief People Officer for Rapid7. Follow her on Twitter: @peopleinnovator. 

We partnered up with Babson College to create a slideshow showcasing who has attended the college and what they have been up to. 

The goal of this slideshow is to not only highlight notable graduates from Babson, but also bring to light those who have started companies that may fly under the radar. Keep in mind that this is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but just a sampling.

Going through the pictures, there's bound to be at least one person that will make you go, "I didn't realize they went to Babson?" Since the last one featured undergraduates, this slideshow will feature those who graduated with a Master of Business Administration (MBA) degree from Babson!

Take a look in the slideshow below!

Colin Barry is an Editor & Staff Writer to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash

For this episode of The VentureFizz Podcast, I interviewed David Friend, who is the Co-Founder and CEO of Wasabi.

Here’s a fun fact. You know the legendary synthesizer sound to "Baba O’Riley" by The Who?

Well, that legendary sound was created by David’s first company, ARP Instruments, which provided synthesizer technology to The Who, Led Zeppelin, Stevie Wonder, The Beach Boys and many others. The company was ultimately sold to CBS.

As you will find out, exits are a common theme throughout our discussion.

David and his business partner, Jeff Flowers, have started five companies together, all of which have been acquired or in the case of Carbonite, that company went public in 2011 and currently has a market cap over $1B.

The duo’s current company, Wasabi, is taking on the cloud storage giants like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft by offering faster storage at a fraction of the price.

In this episode, we cover:

• David’s entrepreneurial journey through many successful companies
• The details on Wasabi and why they aren’t afraid to compete against the giants
• Why he keeps building companies, plus the secret to staying young
• And of course, a lot of useful advice for entrepreneurs!

Babson College is one of the many, many prominent colleges in the Greater Boston area. Similar to many other colleges, several alumni have gone on to do some incredible things, including and not limited to, starting their own companies.

We partnered up with Babson to create a slideshow showcasing who has attended the college and what they have been up to. 

The goal of this slideshow is to not only highlight notable graduates from Babson, but also bring to light those who have started companies that may fly under the radar. Keep in mind that this is not meant to be a comprehensive list, but just a sampling.

Going through the pictures, there's bound to be at least one person that will make you go, "I didn't realize they went to Babson?" Since the college has had such a large pool of alumni, we decided to showcase some of these accomplishments in the slideshow below!

Colin Barry is an Editor & Staff Writer to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash

From our government to some of the most widely recognized companies in the world, the topic of diversity and inclusion are dominating our headlines. CEOs are making public statements about their efforts, including new approaches to long scrutinized practices in compensation, promotion, and awareness. In other words, while we’ve been witness to a variety of organizations addressing some pretty intense public flogging, others are moving quickly in hopes of tackling the topic in a meaningful way before they face an issue.

Whether the company’s motivation is truly building a more inclusive workforce or just trying to avoid a lawsuit, there’s no ignoring this is a critical issue in today’s business landscape. And while this leaves consumers with a better understanding of where some of their favorite brands stand on this topic, it often leaves employees of all companies wondering, “What can I do to support these efforts?”

Let’s start with agreeing on the underlying language:

• Diversity typically focuses on that which makes us different.  

• Inclusion is a deliberate act of welcoming that diversity while creating an environment where everyone can truly thrive. Stated simply by expert Verna Myers, “Diversity is being invited to the party.  Inclusion is being asked to dance.”

Efforts to strengthen diversity, even with heavy focus, is often a long journey to achieve results. Attracting and hiring a more diverse team takes time, as well as changing mindsets and practices within an established company. Creating an inclusive environment also takes time to see an impact, but it’s something every employee can be contributing to directly, every day. While leadership teams need to lead the charge for change, it’s up to the collective team of employees to contribute to actually making that change real. Largely acknowledged as a controversial topic, there is no denying that the more diversity your team has, the greater the opportunity to find game-changing innovations and results. Isn’t that what every business is after? Here’s what YOU can do to help lead your workplace to be more inclusive.

PARTNER WITH SOMEONE UNEXPECTED

It’s often fairly easy to turn to trusted members of your team and ask for input.  Maybe if you are feeling bold, you’ll reach out to a broader set of people on other teams that you work with often.  However, it’s not as likely that you’d actively seek out the insight of someone you rarely work with. Why would you? For example, why would a finance person ever reach out to someone in product development for their input? Well, the benefit is that diversity of thought might actually net some interesting results. Find someone you’ve met before but never had any major interaction with. Ask them for a few moments of their time, and share your idea. Then listen. Even if they don’t provide deep insights, you’re likely to hear some feedback you hadn’t considered before. And of course, that can lead to a more creative solution.

CHANGE YOUR PHYSICAL PERSPECTIVE

When you sit in the same location day after day, you aren’t likely to tap into your most creative energies. Rather than settle into the comfort of “my desk,” find new places to work periodically - especially if it is a highly well-traveled area.  You are likely to see an entirely new set of people, which could spark conversations and idea sharing.

ALTERNATE LEADERSHIP

In even the most effective of meetings, they tend to get stale when you’ve got the same leader, same format, etc. consistently.  You’ll often hear the same voices over and over again, with a population of people who appear disengaged and/or quiet. By changing up who leads the meeting, you invite fresh perspective and ideas to be shared.  Obviously, give the person enough latitude to run the meeting their way, while still aiming to achieve the meeting objective. By doing so, you’ll likely see more diverse points of view begin to surface; and a more collaborative space in which to share.   

MAKE SOMEONE NEW FEEL WELCOME

Remember how awkward it felt to be the new kid in school, or attempting to navigate your first day in a new job? Now put yourself in someone else’s shoes. Whether it’s on your team or just a face of someone you have never met before in the office, be bold and introduce yourself. Politely ask them about themselves to break down barriers. If you really want to go crazy, invite them to connect with you if they have questions or you can be of any help. Not only does this pave the way for your organization to be a friendly, more collaborative place, but it helps to foster strong cross-collaborative partnerships. You never know what help you might need, so better to build collegial relationships up front.

MAKE A NEW FRIEND

We all work hard in the office, but nearly everyone will agree work sure is enhanced when we have some people we really connect with. Rather than grabbing coffee with your same crew, branch out. At Rapid7 we created a program called InsightCoffee that promotes employees to grab a coffee with each other - IRL or virtually - for the sole purpose of breaking down boundaries and getting to know people you don’t connect with on a daily basis. It’s been hugely successful not because we are a bunch of caffeine junkies, but rather because it is a non-threatening, very low-pressure way to get to know a diverse set of people in the company.  We share what we learned on a Slack channel, and it promotes people getting to know each other as human beings, not just their job title.

These are all fairly simple ideas but can be incredibly powerful in creating a more inclusive workplace. Just step out of your comfort zone and connect with someone new...you won’t just be contributing to inclusiveness; you just might increase your own impact while you’re at it.

Here is an obvious statement: Boston is a college city. Here is another one: Most of Boston’s tech talent is fostered at those colleges.

When someone talks about where the talent comes from, its the general collection of MIT, Harvard, and Northeastern. But while they are all impressive and deserve to be revered as they are, there are several other schools in the Greater Boston area that are equally deserving of recognition.

Located right in Needham and south of Babson College is the Olin College of Engineering. The school currently offers its students three (although technically four) degrees in engineering including mechanical, electrical, and computer, alongside a general engineering degree. At Olin, all students are engaged in a curriculum that is project-based, design-focused and hands-on.

A majority of the college’s graduates are employed by leading tech companies. A few you may have heard of include Google (which the college’s website claims are the largest employer of their graduates), Microsoft, athenahealth, Pivotal, and HubSpot. In fact, Google makes an effort to travel out to Needham and to conduct mock job interviews and resume reviews with students.

Other alumni of the college have gone on to start their own companies, including indico CTO and former CEO Slater Victoroff (Class of ‘14), Bigbelly Co-Founder and current Director of Product Jeff Satwicz (Class of ‘06), and RightHand Robotics Co-Founder Leif Jentoft (Class of ‘09).

The college also shares a trait with many other fantastic startups and entrepreneurs in the Boston tech scene -- Olin College sometimes (and unfortunately) flies under the radar.

“While we are new, in less than 20 years our graduates have landed at some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, and they have launched their own startups in cutting-edge fields,” said the college’s Corporate Relations Coordinator Suzanne Alcott. “We used to get people wondering if we were part of Babson. We don't get that anymore."

Alcott joined the college as part of their staff as the fall 2006 semester was just starting to kick into high gear. At this point in the college’s lifespan, Olin was only four years old.

Who is Frank Olin? - The Man, the Myth, the Legend Behind the College!

Franklin W. Olin (1860 - 1951) was a lifelong civil engineer who founded the manufacturing-focused Olin Corporation, which is a Fortune 1000 company today. While his many personal and professional accomplishments are impressive, it was in his later years that he founded the Franklin W. Olin Foundation, using a substantial amount of his personal wealth as a means to focus on his philanthropic efforts. The foundation gave out grants to dozens of colleges across the country, in order to construct and equip STEM-focused buildings on college and university campuses.

After his passing, the Olin Foundation continued its mission, but in the late 90s, the foundation’s board of directors understood that they would have to plan for the future. It would be board member Lawrence “Larry” Milas who proposed an idea that allowed the foundation to continue its cause of helping higher education institutions but also try to advance engineering education.

“Mr. Milas, who was one of the heads of the board of directors at the time, helped them come up with the idea of starting their own college,” said Alcott. “The idea was to change engineering education.”

In 1997, Olin College received its educational charter from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and plans began to move forward.

As the construction and development of the campus chugged along (including the hiring of full-time faculty) in 2000-01, the college began a partner program with a select group of 30 students to help develop and finalize the course of study and iron out any other kinks that the school may experience when enrolling more students.

The following year, the students in the partner program, along with an additional 45 students, had the honor of being Olin’s introductory first-year class.

Classes and campus life at Olin College

On average, Olin’s student population consists of about 350 students, which perfectly fits the relatively small campus. There are three main buildings surrounding the Academic Oval, with an additional two to house the students.

Olin makes up for its relatively limited number of majors through the direct and authentic academic experiences it offers students. As stated above, many of the classes at Olin involve more hands-on work, as students gain real-world engineering experience and practical skills within their major. Students also have the option of creating a “self-designed” major where they can build their own syllabus, often taking classes at Babson and Wellesley to complete their degrees.

Combining Entrepreneurship and Engineering

Professor Lawrence Neeley, the Assistant Professor of Design & Entrepreneurship at the college, is no stranger teaching at engineering schools, as he was an adjunct professor at MIT. He has been guiding students on transforming their engineering ideas into real-world applications.

“Our Introduction to Entrepreneurship class is intended to allow engineers to not just create potential solutions, but also deliver,” Neeley said. “What I mean by delivering is asking students how they can create these enterprises that allow these ideas to land in the world.”

In his classes, he teaches students design framing of their projects, whether it’s hardware or how to sustain a business. It’s the hands-on and collaborative approach to class time that is one of Olin’s core differentiators. Neeley chalks it up to his courses being more open to including a more human element.

“People are on both sides of the coin, as our entrepreneurship classes offer students social and emotional development. We’re developing whole people, which is a big part of our mission at Olin,” said Neeley. “A lot of our classes overlap one another, which also creates a more interactive environment at the college.”

The synergy between different individuals is also apparent within the faculty, as Neeley helps organize the entrepreneurship curriculum with two other professors who have biology, anthropology, and humanities backgrounds.

The college gives students a significant amount of freedom as they begin to show interest and start creating their plans for focusing on a particular industry. Robotics, software, and bioengineering are some of the favored sectors students will work in. A wide interest in robotics is also reflected in one of the many student teams, the Robotic Sailing team, which has students developing all kinds of seafaring robots.

Finals Week Events - Olin EXPO and SCOPE

EXPO is Olin’s bi-annual event where students showcase the various projects they have worked on throughout the semester. In addition to being a chance to display educational projects, the gathering also enables the students to share creative side projects, such as a piece of music or artwork. The goal of  EXPO is to not only to exhibit what they have been up to, but to also bring the school together as a community.

“In the first few years of its existence, we would invite faculty members from other engineering schools in the area to evaluate not only how we were doing, but how the students were doing,” Alcott said. “Now, it’s a celebratory occasion. It’s a great way for people who have never met us to come and see what our students are doing. It gives them the sense of how different we are regarding hands-on projects and team building experiences compared to other engineering institutions.”

On the other end of the spectrum is the Senior Capstone Program in Engineering (SCOPE), which is a more like the showcases that are commonly seen in the Boston tech space—but with a few slight differentiators. The largest one being is it is more involved with academics with pitching an idea or asking for money. Instead, students take the stage and detail what projects they have been working on all year for a corporate or nonprofit client.

Olin College - What’s next?

To reiterate earlier statements: Boston is a college city, and a large amount of Boston’s tech talent is fostered at those colleges. But in addition to those obvious statements, here is a third: There is a seemingly perpetual competition for talent in the Boston tech scene, especially with companies trying to retain top talent. This may be a result of several factors, including a limited pipeline of students studying STEM subjects.

Maybe local companies should look a little beyond the typical MIT/Harvard/Tufts cluster and check out Olin, a little engineering school in Needham.

The college has been around for just a decade and a half, and while it remains on the outskirts of Boston, its reputation as a source of engineering talent is growing more and more. Olin ’s success with students is nothing to take lightly, as they have a 90% graduation rate.

“While we may not be on the radar as a lot of that may have to do with name recognition with the average college student, we are well-known within the engineering world,” Neeley told us. “If they know Olin, they are super excited to hear more about us.”

Colin Barry is an Editor & Staff Writer to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash

Images courtesy of Olin College

For this episode of The VentureFizz Podcast, I interviewed George Colony, who is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Forrester Research.

George originally started Forrester out of his basement, and the company has gone on to become one of the world’s most influential market research and advisory firms. Forrester went public in 1996, and is still traded on the Nasdaq today.

George is also involved as the founder of a new startup called Your Call Football, which is modernizing the game of football by giving fans the chance to influence a live sporting event in a real-time competitive gaming experience. Your Call Football actually just completed a very successful inaugural season.

In this episode, we cover:

• George’s participation in the World Economic Forum in Davos
• The story of Forrester
• How an interview with former NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue led to the a-ha moment of Your Call Football
• All the details on getting a new football league set up for its inaugural season, plus the future of the company and technology
• And of course, lots of useful advice for entrepreneurs!

Web analytics is something that is commonplace in the tech world, but back in the early 2000s, it was still something new. Founded in 2000 by Bill Gross (Founder of Idealab) and David Cancel, Compete offered companies intuitive consumer insights based on web traffic, which in turn, allowed marketers to create and develop campaigns to drive customers to their websites.  The company was acquired by TNS in 2008 for $150M, with $75M upfront and another $75M in earnouts. 

Compete left a lasting impact on the Boston tech scene, as many of the company's former employees have gone onto executive roles at other prominent tech companies or have started their own. We've compiled a slideshow of 40+ alumni to share the details on what they are up to now. 

For this slideshow, we used the following criteria: 1) Must be based in the Boston area; 2) Tenure at Compete for at least two years; 3) Currently a founder or executive. However, we did make a few exceptions if the person played a key role in the early days of the company.

If you are interested in hearing more about the early days at Compete, listen to our recent interview with TJ Mahony on The VentureFizz Podcast. Here's a fun fact that you'll learn... Compete.com was one of the first advertisers on TechCrunch.

Colin Barry is an Editor & Staff Writer to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash

What is everyone reading this summer? For me, I'm reading Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye, the only Philip Marlowe mystery I've yet to read.

Inspired by Bill Gates' list of 5 books worth reading this summer, we asked founders, CEOs, and operating executives across the Boston tech scene for book recommendations. The goal is to give you some great books to check out during those summer vacations or whenever you have a chance to read.

Last week, it was books all about entrepreneurship and business. This week's is an assortment of books of all different subjects, and below is a slideshow with all of them. Check it out!

Colin Barry is an Editor & Staff Writer to VentureFizz. Follow him on Twitter @ColinKrash