
A physician left the operating room, found a team at an MIT hackathon, and spent the next decade turning a 20-second daily ritual into an argument for earlier, calmer care.
Ronn Friedlander is the co-founder and Co-CEO of Aeronaut Brewing Company in Somerville, Massachusetts. A New Jersey native who came to Boston in 2009 for a PhD in the Harvard-MIT Health Sciences and Technology program, he traded a career in medical engineering and biomaterials research for a brewery built on microbiology. He cultivates wild and custom yeast strains in an in-house lab, scaling them in a bioreactor from pilot pours to 500-gallon batches, and helped grow Aeronaut from a living-room homebrew operation into a regional craft beer brand with a second 'Cannery' facility in Everett and a 2023 strategic merger with Dorchester Brewing under the Tasty Liquid Alliance.
Colin Gounden is the co-founder and CEO of VIA (VIA Science), a Somerville, Massachusetts company building decentralized, quantum-resistant data and identity protection software used by global utilities and the U.S. Department of Defense. A Harvard biochemistry graduate turned serial founder, he previously built and sold a technology services firm with clients like Royal Dutch/Shell for roughly $97M (1999) and founded and sold the analytics firm Grail Research (2009). Since 2016 he has steered VIA from clean-energy analytics into privacy-preserving Web3 security, raising a $28M Series B led by Bosch Ventures in March 2025.