Taking over will be Todd Tallman, chief executive of Southbridge-based Cornerstone Bank, which PeoplesBank’s holding company acquired this year. Tallman and Senecal have known each other since the early days of their careers, when they both worked in KPMG’s Boston office. (Athol Savings Bank is about to join Cornerstone Bank as well.)
Senecal believed it was important to ink the naming rights deal in Hartford because of his bank’s future growth plans and lingering confusion with a bank that had a similar name, People’s United Bank, acquired by M&T Bank in 2022.
Senecal said he had been thinking about retiring for a few years but wanted to get through the Cornerstone acquisition and the Nymbus conversion first.
“I’m really proud of . . . where this bank is today,” Senecal said. “If you don’t grow, you’re going to become irrelevant.”
He plans to move to Florida, but will be back in Massachusetts for much of the year. “Life is too short,” he said. “I don’t want to miss out on life because I’m working all the time.”
As a busy entrepreneur who typically has five to 10 meetings a day, it seems natural that the next big thing out of Paul English’s venture studio would be a scheduling app.
Last week, Boston Venture Studio launched the app, Supercal, and provided a comparison chart showing its free offerings versus a $12-a-month subscription to online scheduling leader Calendly.
Supercal’s main focus is on scanning the personal calendars of small groups of people to suggest good meeting times. English recognizes not everyone is comfortable with letting artificial intelligence pick meeting times, but he believes skeptics will be won over after they give it a try. English is using software from OpenAI.
Rather than charge for basic scheduling services, English said he hopes to make money by using AI to analyze users’ meeting transcripts and coach them on how to run better meetings.
It’s the latest app to emerge from BVS. Perhaps best known for cofounding and eventually selling online travel firm Kayak, English established Boston Venture Studio to develop consumer apps in 2022, and he sold podcast discovery app Moonbeam later that year. Another popular app is Steppin, which encourages users to lock their social media accounts until they make a certain amount of steps in a given day. Most of his team’s focus is on Supercal right now.
“I’ve been using it obsessively,” English said of Supercal. “I have an assistant [but] she’s more of a director of operations. . . . I don’t want to waste her time scheduling meetings.”
If Scott Strazik wanted confirmation that Cambridge is the place to be, the GE Vernova chief executive found it at MIT last week.
Strazik helped preside over the launch of a partnership between the energy company and MIT, held at the university’s campus. This past spring, GE Vernova announced it would pump $50 million into this alliance over five years to fund research initiatives, fellowships, and other programs with an eye toward improving energy technologies and decarbonization.
Former General Electric boss Jeff Immelt famously moved the conglomerate from Connecticut to Boston in 2016, to better connect with the entrepreneurs, professors, and students here. That move didn’t work out as planned, and GE eventually broke apart. The energy businesses split off last year under the new name, GE Vernova.
Strazik had picked Cambridge in late 2022 for his company’s home, for reasons similar to why Immelt chose Boston. The successful launch of this climate alliance with MIT provided yet more proof to Strazik that it was the right call.
Among those on hand to celebrate on Monday were MIT provost Anantha Chandrakasan, MIT professor and alliance faculty director Betar Gallant, GE Vernova chief corporate officer Roger Martella, state energy secretary Rebecca Tepper, and new state economic development secretary Eric Paley.
“I have the same aspirations today that I had when GE Vernova moved here,” Strazik said. “This neighborhood should be as renowned for electric power and green-tech as it is for pharmaceuticals. That’s the game we’re playing here.”
Can Greater Boston become a hub for blockchain and crypto businesses?
Fidelity Investments chief executive Abby Johnson sure hopes so. That’s how she responded when asked this question by Qubic Labs cofounder Ian Cain during the Boston Blockchain Week conference, held in Quincy Center.
For many big financial players in Boston such as Fidelity and State Street, so-called “digital assets” are becoming an increasing part of doing business. (Fidelity, in particular, was an early mover in crypto.) But the city lacks a globally known pure-play crypto or blockchain business after Circle decamped to New York.
Still, organizations like Qubic see the potential for growth, in part because of Greater Boston’s tech and financial talent, and universities. Cain and others started the nonprofit incubator a few years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a stated goal of positioning “Quincy and the region as a leader in the global blockchain ecosystem.”
It felt like they had succeeded earlier this month, with around 500 people attending the multiday conference. Mayor Tom Koch stopped by, mentioning how Quincy was the first seller of a municipal bond on blockchain in 2024, a $10 million issuance by JPMorgan Chase. (Blockchains are distributed databases or ledgers shared across computers, used for exchanging cryptocurrency but also for more conventional transactions.)
Johnson brought some star power to the proceedings. She talked about how Fidelity first experimented with digital assets about 12 years ago, later embraced them, and is now actively lobbying members of Congress for policies that encourage their growth.
“I would love to see Boston as a hub for all this activity,” Johnson said. “I think that one of the things that really helped us thrive in our core business [of mutual funds] was that we were here in Boston and there were lots of other companies similar to ours.”
Most of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce’s lobbying work focuses on state and local issues. On rare occasions, the chamber heads to Washington. With the research funding that underpins the city’s economy under threat, this is one of those times.
The chamber’s Chris Eicher and Emily Baer went to Washington last week, joining a multistate coalition of business groups to advocate for stable federal research funding. The Detroit Regional Chamber oversaw logistics, and the 15-person contingent included two emissaries from the New England Council, Emily Heisig and Mariah Healy.
Chamber chief executive Jim Rooney helped launch this coalition during President Trump’s first administration, and led its revival during Trump 2.0, to make the case for the importance of research funds for local economies.
“Little by little, we began hearing from other states that had participated, … saying, ‘Maybe we should get it going again,” Rooney said. “Within two weeks in April, we had 50 signed up.”
Now, that number is up to 82 chambers and other business groups across 35 states, many of them Republican-leaning.
This trip to Washington represented the first time coalition members made the case in person, in this go-around.
“We had some pretty positive responses,” Eicher said. “I won’t say every meeting was universally positive. Responses were varied but there was a general receptivity to our message.”