Elementary schools are no longer exclusively about academics. Now, educators also share responsibility for building students' character, as well as their social and emotional health. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Maria Howard, founder of Heroes Made, a character education platform for grades one through six that personalizes lessons to every student through storytelling, eliminating prep time for overburdened teachers while giving every child the experience of being the hero of their own learning journey. Joining Maria is Dr. Maurice Elias of Rutgers University, a pioneer in social-emotional learning who is not affiliated with Heroes Made but believes so deeply in what they are doing that he is helping them get the message out. Together they discuss why character cannot be taught from the outside but must be caught from the people and environments surrounding a child, how Heroes Made analyzed why good programs collect dust on shelves and built something specifically designed not to, the circle of control lesson that teaches students to separate what they can manage from what they cannot, the role of technology in personalizing education without isolating children behind screens, and how the platform turns students into published authors whose stories are read by peers across every participating school. The mental health crisis reaches down to primary school age, and Heroes Made is one of the rare programs designed not just to respond to it but to get ahead of it. Learn more about Heroes Made at heroesmade.com and reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

Angel investing in medical technology can be tough. The science is complex, the timelines are long, and the risks are hard to judge without the right expertise in the room. At the New York Angels, that has changed. In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet NYA members and medical experts Vijay Aggarwal, PhD and John Younger, and learn how they evaluate life science opportunities. Joining them is Greg Fischer, founder and CEO of AIM Medical Robotics, one of the standout companies the New York Angels chose to fund. AIM is bringing a compact surgical robot to neurosurgery that works inside an MRI scanner in real time. The core problem it solves has haunted neurosurgeons for decades: the brain moves during surgery. Targets the size of a grain of rice can shift millimeters to centimeters mid-procedure, making preoperative maps unreliable exactly when precision matters most. AIM's robot continuously updates its guidance using live MRI imaging for conditions including Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and brain cancer. Greg, Vijay, and John discuss what it takes to evaluate a medtech company before there is revenue, why AIM's FDA path is unusually clean, how existing reimbursement codes remove one of the biggest commercialization headaches in medical devices, and what the next wave of medtech investment looks like. Learn more about AIM Medical Robotics and find out who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.

When Pascal de Mul was part of a young Spotify team revolutionizing music distribution, he unintentionally killed something he loved: the live bootleg. Now he is bringing it back, legally and in studio quality. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Pascal de Mul, founder of Setmixer, the UK-based music technology company that permanently installs recording equipment directly into venue mixing desks, capturing every live performance in full multitrack studio quality and delivering it to fans almost instantly. Artists keep 70% of every sale and remain in full control of their recordings. Joining Pascal is Daryl Clarke, incoming chairman and serial entrepreneur with a history of building and profitably exiting businesses. Daryl discovered Setmixer the way great opportunities often arrive, on a random double date, and has not stopped thinking about it since. He is joining to leverage his business relationships and open doors to major music and entertainment companies and artist management firms. Together they discuss how Setmixer is already operating across 75 UK venues, a weekly showcase newsletter that connects grassroots artists directly to major labels and promoters, plans to integrate fan-shot video with studio-quality audio, a festival download model that could let you leave with the full day’s sets in your pocket, and the untapped archive of legendary performances that are sitting in mixing engineer hard drives around the world waiting to be released. The US launch is coming, the opportunity is colossal, and the answer to why nobody has done this yet may simply be: nobody thought of it until now.

Learn more about Setmixer at setmixer.com and reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.