Today is the last day to nominate an individual or company for our upcoming 50 on Fire awards, so if you know someone who’s setting Boston on fire with their energy, their innovation, or their originality go nominate them now!
This week, we’ve been asking some of Boston’s best and brightest to weigh in with the people and organizations they most respect. We heard from chefs and restaurateurs on who’s setting the dining scene on fire and from some big names in edu on the city’s top innovators. We’ve offered a preview of some of the other nominees so far here and here.
To round things out, I asked a number of individuals in tech, media, and healthcare who they’d nominate. Sure enough, they came back with an amazing list of people, teams, and companies that are lighting things up in their respective spaces. Take a look at the nominations below, and be sure to add yours today!
Jason Jacobs, CEO of RunKeeper (Tech)
Hardi Meybaum/Grabcad – GrabCad is a big idea, Hardi is a big thinker, and he is not afraid to take big swings to make it happen. He’s also great at execution.
Sravish Sridhar/Kinvey – Great entrepreneur, and a marketing machine! Able to take a relatively boring category (which great markets often are) and make it sexy! He’s also just a super nice guy, which counts for more than people realize.
Ambar Bhattacharyya, Bessemer (Healthcare)
Rushika Fernandopulle, CEO of Iora Health: The company is taking on the hardest of all hard challenges in healthcare services – how do you improve the care for the sickest of the sick while doing it cheaper than the existing primary care system? The company has a bold vision, and I’d like to nominate Rushika for leading that charge.
Patrick Doyle, Executive Editor, Boston Magazine (Media)
The Team Behind the Boston Globe’s Redesign: Considering the web’s massive surge toward responsive web design—in which websites automatically adjust their layout to your device (ie: desktop, tablet, smartphone)—it’s tough to remember that this whole concept is only a few years old. Which makes the September 2011 launch of BostonGlobe.com all the more impressive, because they went fully responsive—and did so beautifully. Every other newspaper in the world has been playing catch-up since then. And everyone who worked on it deserves all the acclaim they’ve received, including the Globe’s Miranda Mulligan (since departed to the Knight Lab at Northwestern), Ethan Marcotte (the guy who kind of invented responsive design), and the crack coders/designers at Upstatement and Filament Group.
The Nieman Lab: I have a problem of signing up for e-newsletters, reading them once, ignoring them for a couple weeks, and then unsubscribing. But the one I read daily—as does everyone who cares about the future of media—is the newsletter from Harvard’s Nieman Lab. Josh Benton and Justin Ellis are continually on the bleeding edge of what’s happening in the industry. (Little surprise, then, that former Nieman staffers have gone on to key digital positions at the Atlantic and New York Times.)
Rob Day, Black Coral Capital (Tech/Energy)
XL Hybrids: They’ve got a bunch of really smart minds focused on a capital-efficient way to tackle a big chunk of wasted transportation fuel.
Ambri (The artist f/k/a Liquid Metal Battery): It’s molten metal in a can and it can provide deep, clean storage. Pretty cool.
Practically Green: Engaging Boston’s biggest employers and figuring out how to get their employees to shift to sustainable practices.
Digital Lumens: Intelligent lighting systems.
Next Step Living: Residential energy efficiency.
Sravish Sridhar, CEO of Kinvey
You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more on-fire in Boston than Chris Lynch. Vertica, where he was CEO, was acquired by HP for over $300M. He then angel-invested in many of the hot startups in Boston, became a partner at Atlas Venture, co-founded the Hack/Reduce Big Data space in Boston, and is an active mentor to numerous entrepreneurs in the community — On Fire!
Related:
Here are some more nominees…
