Matt Crane’s Post

Here are the talented Boston operators we highlighted at MGMT Boston in Q2 '24... Q2 Operators Highlighted (sequentially): Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan D. / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious, Brian Moseley / Semrush, Sara Dickhaus de Zárraga / RapidSOS, Hannah Leary / OneScreen.ai, Shaili Gupta / xFact, Inc. Product & Engineering: Erica Kangas, Shaili Gupta Growth & Marketing: Bryan D., Sara Dickhaus de Zárraga Revenue: Noah Massucci, Brian Moseley, Hannah Leary Operations, Finance, G&A: Adam Fisk Adam Fisk, Director of IT Services @ Tech Superpowers - a fixer with a calming voice trained on FM radio waves, tinkering with machines from an early age and trained by the most prolific retailer in the world. Bryan Dsouza, Head of Marketing, AI/ML, Mobility, UX @ Aptiv - a man of faith, family, and fun - stepping off the beaten path and venturing out onto the road less traveled, to experiment with emerging trends & technologies Noah Massucci, Director, Sales Engineering & Implementation @ Robin - a curious leader, brought up by educators, who's all about diving in and figuring things out alongside his team at hybrid workplace experience platform Robin Erica Kangas, Head of Engineering @ Scroobious - an engineering leader, voracious learner, and feminist builder who seeks out the biggest levers to move the world Brian Moseley, Director of Enterprise Sales @ Semrush - entrepreneur, small business owner, and partnerships leader with a championship mentality who has built startups and Enterprise teams by learning from legends Sara de Zárraga, VP of Growth @ RapidSOS - a founder, operator, and financier who has traveled the world and uncovered the inner machinations of global economies & technologies to bring us a better future Hannah Leary, Founding AE @ OneScreen - a revenue leader, technical customer practitioner, and discovery master at Boston based marketing technology startup OneScreen Shaili Gupta, Senior Strategy Manager at xFact - a strategy leader who has multiple perspectives from sitting all around the startup table as an investor, operator & stand-in CEO, and product consulting expert 😁🛫 On to Q3! 😁 🛫

🚪 Greg Montemurro is a fast talking, hard charging product & community leader who opened doors..so he could knock them down. 🚪 It's W2 / Q3 / 2024 and this week in our MGMT Boston up & coming operator series we’ve got Greg, who’s own dad was even named after him! Today he serves as the Chief of Staff to the CPO at fast growing fintech AI startup Posh and is the Founder of GenZ community platform Capital Z. He just wants to build things and make a dent in the universe with the help of 900+ of his closest Boston area friends. Previously Greg led marketing, due diligence, sourcing, automating & building new tools all the way through college and COVID under the leadership of Vasilios Roussos at the DCU FinTech Innovation Center. After 5 years at the Center, Greg joined previous Center accelerator alumni member Posh. Posh had scaled to dozens of employees & clients. After a year in Client Operations, Greg joined Posh’s co-founder & CTO Matt McEachern as his Chief of Staff. He’s rediscovering his technical roots on their “second biggest” product problems, working on hard product problems to help make their AI voice product perform better, faster, and reduce customer implementation time too. 🗣 👨💻 Getting Comfortable Through Repetition 👨💻 🗣 With his career starting when he was just a teenager, Greg has gotten really comfortable being uncomfortable. After working on so many problems at the DCU FinTech Innovation Center, seeing so many founders and teams, he’s proven he can break things down into component parts. He writes things down, breaks those problems down into a system, runs through them, and is totally fine putting together simple prototypes without over obsessing about perfection. He listens a lot too. 72 companies, hundreds of founders, and almost a thousand more ran through diligence, Greg has learned to always ask more questions by figuring out “what are you doing this for? Who is it for?” so they can search together for better answers…and then design the solutions to follow. 3 Career Insights / Learnings 😁 Be Excited - "Excitement is palpable and contagious. People can tell when you're excited. And they love helping excited people” 🏃♂️ Just Try - “We could talk for a long time about all the things I”ve tried that haven’t worked very well. But I learned so much every time I tried. It’s very rewarding when I see what I put in at the Center being put into practice at Posh. You’ll never be completely ready!” 🤩 Figure Out Who You Are - “I’ve been lucky in my career to be around so many authentic people. I’ve seen that people who don’t change who they are, regardless of the audience, have a big advantage. People can sense authenticity. Learning who you are and embracing it has really helped me perform better” If you’d like to learn more about Greg’s career, the full post is linked in the comments. Go ahead and sign up to see the operator learnings we bring you in the weeks ahead too, will ya? #bostontech #operators

⚡ 🔌 Sense is helping to decarbonize the world through better grid analytics as we march through a critical intermediary step: electrification 🔌⚡ It's W2 / Q3 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got Sense, a growth stage startup bringing better intelligence to the edge of our electrical grid. Founder and CEO Mike Phillips has built software companies through many cycles, including the dot com era. In the early days of AI and machine learning he founded a company called Speechworks, licensing speech recognition technology from MIT. When Mike & his early team were ready to build something new at the intersection of machine learning, data and consumer in climate tech, they had a battle tested plan. Electrification helps decarbonization because we can then use software to more intelligently identify areas of efficiency. As we onboard more electric vehicles, integrate more heat pumps, and stop burning stuff in our home and cars we need to see what is where. When you get a bill from your energy provider and it shows that energy usage bar chart relative to your neighbors, it’s not very actionable. Did you know the transformer at the end of your street can only support charging 3 EVs at any given time? Our electrical grid is the largest machine in the world, based on 100-year-old technology. It’s amazing it even works because it’s practically devoid of real time insights. When Mr. & Mrs. Smith move in next door with the 4th EV in the neighborhood and the power goes out, do you know how the utility knows? When you call them! Estimates from Bloomberg, McKinsey & others state that $21T of investment is needed to upgrade our electrical grid in order to hit net zero emissions with capacity also needing to double by 2050. In 2024 they are focused on meter rollouts to utilities across the U.S., partnering with major utilities on the east coast to bring Sense’s technology and insights to over 3M consumers, with more on the horizon. Sense is proud to be a part of Boston’s growing climate community seeing big potential throughout the Boston ecosystem, aspiring to be one of the companies leading the way in the years ahead. Sense is backed by Blue Earth Capital AG, Bolt, TELUS Global Ventures (TGV), MCJ Collective, Schneider Electric, Energy Impact Partners, Prelude Ventures, and iRobot. Operators to Know (Locally): -Karen Rubin, COO -Colin Gibbs, VP Energy Services -George Zavaliagkos, VP Technology -Sam Alden, Director of FP&A -Maggie Fitzgerald, VP Business Operations -Vikas Garg, Senior Electrical Design Engineer -Joel Margolese, Director Software Engineering -Stephon McCoy, Head of Strategic Integrations, North America -Aisha Strauss, Director of Customer Success -John A. Watlington, Director of Hardware If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments! And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you next week, will ya?? #bostontech #startups #AI

Another quarter in the books! Here are the Boston startups we covered at MGMT Boston in Q2 '24... Q2 Startups Highlighted (Sequentially): Starburst, Neurable, Software Defined Automation, airSlate, Ayble Health, Occupier - We ❤️ Leases!, Blink - The Frontline Experts,  Arcee.ai, Lendbuzz, Lightmatter, VODA.ai, Day.ai Native AI: Arcee.ai, Day.ai Vertical & Horizontal SaaS: airSlate, Blink - The Frontline Experts, Occupier - We ❤️ Leases!, Starburst, Software Defined Automation, VODA.ai FinTech: Lendbuzz Hardware: Lightmatter Robotics: Neurable HealthTech: Ayble Health Seed Stage: Arcee.ai, Ayble Health, Day.ai, Software Defined Automation, VODA.ai Growth Stage (A-C): airSlate, Blink - The Frontline Experts, Neurable, Occupier - We ❤️ Leases! Late Stage (>C): Lendbuzz, Lightmatter, Starbust Starburst - an end to end cloud software analytics platform for cloud and on-premise workloads, with industry leading price-performance Neurable - building state-of-the-art brain-computer interface neuroscientific technology and packaging it into wearables, beginning with headphones Software Defined Automation - building an industrial DevOps platform so that manufacturers and capitalism can move faster. They might even help save industrial engineering airSlate - a no-code workflow automation, electronic signature, and document management SaaS platform with 100+ million users and 900k+ customers Ayble Health - an end-to-end care platform for digestive health, utilizing technology like predictive AI to increase access to nutrition and behavioral therapy for more than 70M Americans who live with gut discomfort and make that care better, faster, and more personalized Occupier - building software to help commercial tenants make better real estate decisions to drive the operational needs and growth of their businesses Blink - building a “super app” for frontline organizations to make working lives easier, uplevel their internal cultural experience, and help employers better understand how their disparate workers are thinking & feeling Arcee.ai - an AI startup building Small Language Models (SLMs) so companies can deploy their own proprietary models quickly & cheaply without hallucinations or purchasing GPUs Lendbuzz - an AI-powered auto finance platform using technology to broaden access to credit Lightmatter - building a photonic supercomputer company, reinventing how chips interact using optics instead of electrical transistors to power the GPU led AI revolution VODA.ai - this team is helping analyze our nation’s water infrastructure at a local level to deliver better service for utilities and local populations across the country Day.ai - an AI native CRM platform for the next generation of startups and businesses, bringing the voice of the customer into the center of growth 🚀 ...see you tomorrow for Q3 🚀

🏋♀️ All the Endeca employees were forged through this difficult but rewarding experience. 🏋♀️ Aside from some outliers, it’s hard to do unreasonable things and it’s a lot of work. If you sign up for the work, you need to be committed to it. Here are the career learnings they would tell up & coming operators today: 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 I tell people when I speak at universities how valuable it is to have gotten six to seven years of work experience out of school before we started Toast. Learning to be a manager, spending time in sales, engineering, marketing, etc. You learn a lot of basic skills learning about the lifecycle of products, “what good looks like” and what a high growth company looks like. -Steve Fredette I got to experience the early days, finding PMF, and then getting to scale. Through those chapters I learned you need a different organizational strategy at each of those phases. The people who were there at the beginning got to see the magic of being an “athlete” on the front lines, representing the company well and getting $hit done -Julie Yoo 𝗚𝗶𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗕𝗮𝗰𝗸 There’s kind of an unwritten rule that if someone from Endeca asks for help, you help them. It’s so important to have a professional network that you feel like you accomplished something special together with. We’ll always have that bond. We all appreciate each other and what we did together. -John Andrews 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗟𝗼𝗼𝗸𝘀 𝗟𝗶𝗸𝗲 I learned the shrewdness and intensity with which you need to approach company building. I learned how to be a critical product decision maker, leveraging “product grit”. Learning the patterns on the art of using professional services - picking and choosing who you listen to - in order to refine a good product experience. I learned what “good people” means. People that are collaborative, that inspire you, and how to treat each other. -Andrew Lau I really valued the time I spent in the field working with world class Enterprise Sales reps. Knowing what large scale Enterprise software sales looked like has served me so well in my career. Also, working on “hard tech” as an engineer is really helpful to then inform some of the complexities of why products are hard to build. -Vinay Seth Mohta 𝗕𝘂𝘁…𝗗𝗼𝗻’𝘁 𝗪𝗮𝘀𝘁𝗲 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗧𝗶𝗺𝗲 High growth environments allow you to see lots of people, patterns, and higher frequency repetition allows a breeding ground for you to learn stuff. -Andrew Lau Be super picky about the people you work with. Life is too short. I was so lucky to work at Endeca early in my career. I had no idea until much later. -Julie Yoo A clever, mischievous, and fun loving group who enjoyed competing, innovating & winning. If you’re looking for a great startup to join and grow your career with, I hope you can find something similar. Because if you can’t win with friends, why do it at all?

⚖ The context of Endeca at the time was the tug of war between being a platform company vs. a vertical application company ⚖ In order to raise capital in 2001 to get the company off the ground, they had to pitch a platform and didn’t necessarily have the persuasive arguments for why they should be a vertical application company instead. Here are their learnings about products: 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁𝗶𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗜𝗣 & 𝗣𝗼𝘀𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 I learned how important it was to build differentiated IP. We had built a technical moat at Endeca, the MDEX engine, and I learned from that experience how critical it is to solve a hard problem that not just anybody can go out and solve without spending a long time on it. -John Andrews Endeca was “Engineering first” culturally. The technology was super innovative and it was a novel way to do something that hadn’t been done. The technology helped carry the day and create a category. It was almost successful despite ourselves. Platform success is rare and hard to achieve. But our success allowed me to see “what great looks like”. - Julie Yoo 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 > 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 Good product is a process, not a static thing. It’s the people you sell to, who you listen to, who you build for. It’s also who you don’t sell to, the customers you churn, and which of those problems you choose to take on. Rinse & repeat, that’s the iteration. My friend Rob Go, Co-Founder & Partner at NextView, refers to it as “Product Grit”. A little hardship is how you build a good product person. Those hardships teach you how to solve the problem. -Andrew Lau 𝗦𝗲𝗿𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲𝘀 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 There was a playbook in the 90’s that we used at Endeca where we would do deep services engagements on behalf of customers - like Barnes & Nobles & Tower Records - to help inform our learnings for the product we were going to then go out and build. And that’s basically how we built our commerce product, from those consulting projects. Later, for the first couple years of Jellyfish, we were completely quiet. We did professional services too, we just didn’t charge for it. We would go to customers and say “we’ll build anything you want as long as you let us do it with you”. -Andrew Lau 𝗜𝗻𝗻𝗼𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮𝘁 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 The MDEX engine took a lot of engineering work where architectural overhauls took time. Being cognizant of the cost and time to invest for the long term was a great experience to witness. Serving on the Special Operations team, we built a lot of prototypes that then got deployed with customers - contracts in the thousands of dollars. From there, I learned what is a service you have to provide vs. building a product around it. It’s much harder to make something really scalable vs. building a prototype. The Special Operations team was a part of helping preserve that innovative culture and we’ve replicated our own Spec Ops group, a program called New Ventures, that does similar work within R&D at Toast. -Steve Fredette

👫 Good people that work well together is a fundamental necessity in startups 👫 Finding ways for them to grow to keep them together long enough to find success is even more important! One way to do that is to ask unreasonable things of them. The Special Operations group was another place where Endeca could bring in talented folks they didn’t necessarily have a place for yet and keep them busy before reorganizations or strategic repositionings as the company grew. It’s not enough to just be smart either. You have to find people who can think through hard problems, communicate, be collaborative, and make good decisions through distributed decision making. Here are the Endeca learnings about people: 𝗦𝗺𝗮𝗿𝘁𝘀 𝗔𝗿𝗲𝗻’𝘁 𝗘𝗻𝗼𝘂𝗴𝗵 Hiring smart people was an important part of Endeca’s success. But that’s not enough. Are you a good person? Do you have the right headroom to think through hard problems and make good decisions? That was just as important! -John Andrews If markets are the “at bat” then people are the “batters”. You need to find people who will be adaptive, willing to learn, and be able to dig in. When we started Jellyfish David Gourley, Philip Braden & myself wrote down the qualities of the types of people we wanted to hire at the very beginning. We knew it was fundamentally critical to our success. -Andrew Lau The caliber of people make such a difference. I joined when we were 25 people and had amazing early managers like Keith Johnson, Andrew Lau, Jack Walter and Jason Purcell. If you raised your hand that you were willing to try different things, they gave it to you. -Julie Yoo 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝘁𝘆𝗹𝗲𝘀 At Endeca, we had really good people. After I’d been a manager for a period of time, I learned that I was spending most of my time on getting people to perform vs. coaching the best performers. So I learned to focus on hiring well, first and foremost, to help lighten my management load. Also, one of the Sales teams was particularly collaborative, encouraging, and motivating with each other. There was a clear difference in performance and morale on that team and we definitely replicated and emulated that style when we started Toast -Steve Fredette When Julie Yoo & I started Kyruus, it was so helpful when we could say a couple sentences to each other or refer to a personality from the Endeca days using shorthand based on the previous experiences we’d had together. It was like “going to the same school” or “training alongside the same physician”. -Vinay Seth Mohta 𝗕𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗣𝗿𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗻𝘁 The Toast crew was going to leave at one point to start their own e-commerce mobile company. We let them go out and pitch to VCs and they agreed it was more of a feature than a company. We created an opportunity for them to do that inside of Endeca and build a business. The 2nd e-commerce app in the app store was written by Aman & Steve at Toast - Shoebuy. -Steve Papa

With the right imagination, timing & strategy Endeca could have potentially built an e-commerce business that rivaled the scale of Shopify. Large markets matter. Being bold matters even more. Timing, of course, matters too. They built the Endeca platform with eBay as their scale target in terms of product variety, scale of users, throughput, SKUs, etc. A “pile of all the stuff in the world” and a completely unreasonable ask. Here are their learnings on markets: 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿. 𝗕𝗲 𝗕𝗼𝗹𝗱 Markets matter. A lot. Timing of course matters too. The generational switchover of search & commerce helped fuel the growth of the company. When we looked at starting Jellyfish, we looked at the market first. -Andrew Lau Fast growing markets almost matter more than how good your product is. It’s hard to accept but we see it in the world regularly that sometimes it’s better to find the right river to be in. It was one of the few times I could pattern match to visceral product market fit and almost never experienced again at that velocity -Vinay Seth Mohta 𝗛𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘇𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗼𝗿 𝗩𝗲𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗮𝗿𝗸𝗲𝘁 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗿𝗼𝗮𝗰𝗵𝗲𝘀 𝗕𝗼𝘁𝗵 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 - 𝗝𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗕𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗯𝗲𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲 We had a core asset with strong product market fit in the commerce vertical. Then we learned how to use that core asset and apply it to various use cases across financial services, media, manufacturing, etc. It was interesting to explore how to expand across many different horizontal areas with a core pre-existing vertical (e-commerce) asset. -John Andrews I thought it was critical to see the benefits of being vertically focused and selling more products to the same customer (with the benefits of a brand) vs. what it looked like to try and be a horizontal player. When you don’t have a customized product to support the vertical solution marketing, it’s harder to make that work. Where the product and marketing lined up most closely is where we saw the most success. It influenced how we thought about building a vertical company at Toast -Steve Fredette 𝗦𝘂𝗿𝗳𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝘆𝗰𝗹𝗲𝘀 & 𝗛𝗮𝗻𝗱𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗲𝘁𝗶𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 I joined Endeca straight out of college. Years later, I heard Steve Papa speak on a panel and describe how the company had almost run out of money in the fallout after 9/11. I was just starting my career and had no idea! During my 5 years at the company we went through at least 1.5 cycles and I learned a ton about how to persist through those cycles. -Julie Yoo We learned a lot about product lifecycles and the evolution of a market. We saw competitors get acquired and then later the pressures of open source software on price showed the market and competitive evolution. Early on at Toast, we had a lot of competitors, but the Endeca experience taught me that some of this just plays itself out. You have to stick with it and not let competition scare you. Just focus on what you do and do it well. Focus on your customers. -Steve Fredette

In 2011, Oracle acquired Boston based Endeca for $1.075B... ...while the Endeca company journey concluded in 2011, the story of its alumni is still very much being told at local Boston area anchor & growth businesses like Toast, Salsify, Jellyfish, CloudZero, Parallel Wireless, Manifold, Cimulate, Inc. and beyond who all have its Kendall Square roots. One count has Endeca alumni founding 25+ companies and Endeca alumni led companies have a market capitalization >$15B. Last summer I chatted with John Andrews (Cimulate), Steve Fredette (Toast), Andrew Lau Lau (Jellyfish), Vinay Seth Mohta Mohta (Manifold), Julie Yoo (a16z) and Steve Papa (Endeca Founder & CEO) to help understand what made the Endeca experience such a special part of their careers. The Endeca folks were intelligent, hardworking, found a great market, and stuck together to see the mission through. If it was anything, maybe one thing? It was the people. Led by a bold, inspiring, no frills leader – Steve Papa. These are their learnings: Unreasonable Things – Steve Papa and the early leadership team asked people to do unreasonable things. The people that signed up to work on those hard problems and stuck with it had a unique set of experiences, recruited like minded colleagues, and were forged by the experience Context & Timing – Endeca couldn’t raise money to build an application company because investors thought the e-commerce market was too small and uninteresting at the time. They had to build a platform in order to secure funding and people joined the team to build that platform company. There was a ton of valuable experience gained within the context of building horizontal & vertical platform strategies at an enterprise software company on the eve of the cloud revolution Power Functions & Special Ops – Many of Endeca’s most successful entrepreneurial alumni came from the “Special Operations” team, in Product & Sales roles, which gave them exposure to the entrepreneurial game. This team would go out to the field with prototypes, meet with customers, solicit feedback, and return to tweak their learnings to seed future product development. There, they obtained the “grit” of trying, failing, and trying again See It To Believe It – everyone referenced the value of seeing “what good looks like” or the first person perspective of experiencing product market fit as it was occurring. Having that personal, up close experience early in your career as a reference point was supremely valuable when they later went off to start new companies Validated Network – The network is a huge part of it. You can’t always see that at the beginning or even while you’re in the middle of it but a group that went through something meaningful and then were able to achieve a successful outcome were rewarded with capital, experience, talented colleagues and validation from their peers in the market We'll be recapping the series all week!

⛵ Great jobs could be anywhere...but probably best filled in Boston ⛵ Our very own Ryan Lucht, a Boston based growth & marketing leader and Operators Club member, is putting the word out.. Eppo is building the future of experimentation so that every company can have an entrepreneurial, customer oriented culture. Their next-gen platform allows companies to 10x their volume of AB experiments and their team is made up of veteran product builders from Airbnb, Slack, and Snowflake having raised over $19M in Seed and Series A funding backed by top-tier venture firms like Menlo VC and Amplify Partners. They’re hiring for a couple key remote roles and he (+me!) would like them to be in Boston: -Senior Product Manager, Marketing Experimentation -Account Executive Do your thing. Spread the word! Link below.