About Us
Our Values
PastPort’s mission is to make history tangible, relatable, and engaging.
Our Core Commitments:
Creating our Experiences
Our Experiences are based on historical evidence. Every script undergoes an internal review for accuracy and clarity.
We know that history is rarely simple. Rather than presenting a single narrative, we share the past’s complexity through historical figures with different experiences and perspectives.
Every figure is reviewed by a credentialed public historian. We're hiring more so we can continually improve our content. If you are interested in helping us, click here.
We are continually improving our content and software at PastPort. If you have suggestions on what we can do better, please contact us at enhancements@pastport.live.
Working with Cultural Institutions
We aim to partner with the existing groups that provide historical and cultural experiences in a city: historic sites, museums, tours, restaurants, venues, and so on. We work with them to get more people to experience what these institutions have to offer. If you are a cultural institution and would like to explore how we might work with you, contact us at partner@pastport.live.
Our Team
We are a lean startup with many part-time employees and interns. Our core leadership is:
Richard Berenson, Chief Executive Officer
Richard Berenson brings more than three decades of executive leadership and company-building experience to PastPort. Over his career, Richard has served as CEO or other C-level executive of numerous ventures spanning technology, life sciences, and consumer media. He holds a JD-MBA from Harvard and served as a strategy consultant for McKinsey & Co.. He also served for over 30 years as a Board Member of the Freedom Trail Foundation, chartered to promote and preserve Boston's Freedom Trail, and for 18 years as a Commissioner on the Freedom Trail Commission.
William Bryden, Chief Technical Officer
William brings a builder's mindset and hands-on AI leadership experience to PastPort. He previously served as Head of AI at Magellan Jets, where he crafted and executed a multi-year AI strategy that produced a state-of-the-art flight operations platform and company-wide AI adoption. He also founded Pro2Pro, an AI-powered B2B Data platform, giving him firsthand experience standing up technology-driven ventures from the ground up. Earlier in his career, he led revenue operations at Shopify and customer success operations at Mendix, developing a deep understanding of how technology, data, and AI systems translate into scalable business operations. He holds a degree in Economics from The Johns Hopkins University.
Barbara Berenson, Public Historian
Barbara F. Berenson is the author of Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers (2018), Boston in the Civil War: Hub of the Second Revolution (2014), and Walking Tours of Civil War Boston: Hub of Abolitionism (2011, 2d ed. 2014). She is the co-editor of Breaking Barriers: The Unfinished Story of Women Lawyers and Judges in Massachusetts (2012). Barbara earned her undergraduate degree from Harvard College and her law degree from Harvard Law School. She worked as a Senior Attorney at the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court until 2019. She has taught classes on women’s suffrage at Tufts University and on U.S. constitutional law at Northeastern University. She currently teaches at Harvard Law School. Barbara has served on the boards of Boston By Foot and The Royall House & Slave Quarters.
Isabella Waldron, Managing Editor
Isabella Waldron leads the development and refinement of historical content for PastPort’s location-based experiences. She brings more than five years of editorial and content-development experience, most recently as a Senior Editor at Curriculum Associates, where she developed print and digital content used by millions of students and helped pioneer AI-assisted editorial workflows. Isabella is also an accomplished playwright: her work has been published by Methuen/Bloomsbury, supported by Arts Council England and the Peggy Ramsay Foundation, and shortlisted for the George Devine Award. She holds a B.A. in English and Creative Writing from Scripps College.
Contributing Historians
PastPort engages a number of independent historians to help draft and vet our content. Here are some of them:
In the near future, we will provide more detailed attributions through this site.