What is UNLMTD?

Richard Hawke and I met on a hot day, under a white tent, at a Quaker wedding. We were peripheral attendees at this event, only there as volunteers helping mutual friends. I think that outlier status brought us together.

I remember the day clearly. It was beautiful, sunny, busy. Rich and I drove to a bakery in Somerville to acquire cakes and we discussed our business ventures and our personal lives.

I told him how I’d been an author and content creator for a number of years. He told me about his thriving video production company. I told him about my love affair with technology and product design. He told me about his involvement with the creative arts community.

At that point I’d been living in Boston for less than a year. I was (and still am) designing and building product for a company called Behavioral Technology Group, the maker of Pavlok. I also do a lot of evangelism and hiring in my day-to-day work, so I was deeply involved with the startup ecosystem, regularly attending events, Meet Ups, and exclusive soirees in order to meet people and discover cool projects.

Immediate Access / Collective Wisdom

New England’s business community is incredibly vibrant. There are start ups and established companies. There is bleeding-edge technology and life-saving medicine. There are early-stage social impact projects changing the world and there are centuries-old academic institutions that have already left their mark.

The problem I perceived, and voiced to Rich, was that despite a diverse array of resources there is no free platform that provides broad, immediate access to the collective wisdom and experience available in the community.

If I wanted to know who was important, I had to go to Meet Ups and ask around. I’d get very different answers from very different people, and everyone had their own agenda. This took a lot of time and was often a fruitless endeavor.

If I wanted one-on-one mentorship and insight, I had to hunt the right people down, ask the right questions, and hopefully, they’d give me the right answers. Even then, only the two of us stood to gain anything from the interaction.

That’s not a problem per se, but it’s certainly not a solution.

Well, I design solutions, so I did. UNLMTD was born.

Deeper Conversations / Beneath the Veneer

Founders: we want to know why you’re changing the world. Then we want to know how. We talk about your opportunities, your challenges and your process. The things that work and the things that don’t.

So a newcomer to Boston, with no friends and no familiarity, can get to know the players before they play the game.

There’s nowhere in the world better than Boston for UNLMTD to get started. The sheer variety of pursuits is enough to justify the location. It just happened to be that Rich and I were in the right place at the right time.

So, starting in July of 2014, I began reaching out to influencers in my network. We scheduled interviews and asked a lot of questions. The answers were sometimes superficial, but just as often they were candid and insightful.

Since then, our circle has widened a bit and the team has gotten a little bigger. We’ve gained a brilliant strategist and manager with the acquisition of Anna Miller. We hope to work with more bright Bostonians as we move forward, and hope that all of you will reach out with feedback and suggestions.

I invite you to share your startup wisdom with me at justus@unltmd.tv

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