Cents Check

Shriya Jonnalagadda
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  • Entrepreneurship

Founders. First principles. First checks. A Startup Boston production. Building a startup is a series of hard decisions made with incomplete information. Cents Check goes inside Boston's early-stage ecosystem to unpack how those decisions actually get made — from the first product bet to the first term sheet. Each episode, host Shriya Jonnalagadda sits down with founders, operators, investors, and researchers to get past the polished narrative and into the real mechanics of company building: how capital gets raised, how risk gets priced, and how ideas become institutions. From university labs and accelerator cohorts to venture-backed startups, Cents Check covers the full arc of Boston's builder community — because the next great company is already being built somewhere in this city.

Episodes

  1. Jun 8

    Ratnam Srivastava @ LabOps

    From Lab Bench to Founding Table: Ratnam Srivastava on Building LabOps What does it actually take to go from medical researcher to founder in one of the most relationship-driven ecosystems in the world? Ratnam Srivastava spent five years as a health data scientist across Northwell Health, Mount Sinai, and Harvard Medical School and kept running into the same wall: getting research protocols approved was a six-month slog buried in paperwork and bureaucratic back-and-forth. So, he decided to fix it. The result is LabOps, an AI-powered platform streamlining research operations and compliance in life sciences, now operating out of the Cambridge Innovation Center. In this episode, Ratnam gets honest about the messy early days -- a co-founder split at the three-month mark, pitches that went nowhere, and the assumption he had to completely unlearn (hint: full automation isn't the play when human lives are on the line). We also get into what it's like to sell into institutions with serious inertia, how he's juggling multiple accelerators at once, and why Boston's startup scene is finally catching up, even if the investors haven't followed yet. In this episode: The specific moment in research that made him think someone needs to build thisWhy "we'll automate the whole pipeline" was the wrong pitch and what replaced itNavigating co-IP conversations with major research institutionsWhat programs like I-Corps and Evolve Accelerated actually give you (beyond mentorship)His no-fluff first move for anyone sitting on an idea right now

    26 min

  2. Season 1, Episode 1 Trailer

    Trailer

    Welcome to Cents Check, a Startup Boston Podcast. Hosted by Shriya Jonnalagadda.

    1 min

Trailer

About

Founders. First principles. First checks. A Startup Boston production. Building a startup is a series of hard decisions made with incomplete information. Cents Check goes inside Boston's early-stage ecosystem to unpack how those decisions actually get made — from the first product bet to the first term sheet. Each episode, host Shriya Jonnalagadda sits down with founders, operators, investors, and researchers to get past the polished narrative and into the real mechanics of company building: how capital gets raised, how risk gets priced, and how ideas become institutions. From university labs and accelerator cohorts to venture-backed startups, Cents Check covers the full arc of Boston's builder community — because the next great company is already being built somewhere in this city.

Information

  • Creator
    Shriya Jonnalagadda
  • Years Active
    2K
  • Episodes
    2
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Cents Check
  • Show Website
    Cents Check