Why hello startup nation, and welcome to Episode 26 of the Early Stage Podcast. If you're tired of listening to shows full of wildly successful entrepreneurs telling tales of grandeur and more interested in hearing early stage entrepreneurs share their war stories, milestones, fundraises, and pivots, then you've found a home.

My name is John Valentine, or @JohnnyStartup on Twitter, and I'm your host. By day I'm scouting aerospace, space, defense, security, and transportation startups for Thales xPlor, the Boston-based innovation unit for French multi-national Thales, and by night I interview top entrepreneurs seeking the best part of the hockey stick.

The February #InnoSprint experiment continues with Dylan Martin, Tech Writer for Bostinno. We'll cover FitBit's acquisition of Twine Health, Amazon's acquisition of Blink, MEMS microphone startup Vesper, and new blockchain startups Algorand and Talla.

The main dish of today's podcast is an interview with RadioPublic Co-Founder and CEO Jake Shapiro. When I launched the podcast last year, I was surprised that Apple provided no listener analytics, didn't offer creative content curation for listeners in their podcast app, and most importantly, and didn't allow me any insights into who was a part of my listener community or how I could engage them. RadioPublic not only solves these challenges, but also just launched a "paid listens" program to help all podcasters get paid for their efforts. Jake was an amazing host at the PRX Podcast Garage, a converted Jiffy Lube fitted out with all the best podcasting equipment. The Garage has become a center-point for podcasting in the region, which has grown tremendously since its launch. Oh, and the audio quality for our chat is amazing.

Enjoy this weeks pod!