Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 725+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Merlin - building an integrated hardware and software solution, the Merlin Pilot, to create an advanced automation system for aircraft with 500+ systems-on missions completed to date
Thanks to Travis D. for the intro to Merlin
Parker Lawrence, Software Engineer @ Herald - a full-stack early stage founding engineer helping to scale the infrastructure of the easiest API for commercial insurance at Boston based insurtech Herald
Thanks to Jenni G. for the intro to Parker
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front (more Operators Club Corner content coming in 2024!)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Procurement Sciences AI, HYCU, Givzey, LogRocket, Stockpress, Mandrel, Nasuni, SportsVisio, OrbisPay
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Danielle Pedra // Delegate, Natalie Cantave // Estateably, Luciana Marzilli Lord // Repsly, Andrew Dickson // SevenRooms, Lucy Driscoll // 10Beauty, Gina Guarracino // Mirakl, Alan McKinnon // Jellyfish, Angela Gatta // Enspira
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q3 Startups & Operators Highlighted / 2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. They have operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
Merlin
Founder: Matt George
Founding: 2018
Mission: Create the world’s most capable pilot leveraging technology as the key enabler of air network resiliency
Employees: 100+ & 25% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series B & $130M raised
Investors: Baille Gifford, First Round Capital, Snowpoint, & GV
Key Customers: United States Department of Defense
Glassdoor Rating: 4.4
Valuation (estimated): $400M+ (assuming they sold 10-20% of the company in the Q2 ‘22 $105M Series B fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Merlin is building an integrated hardware and software solution, the Merlin Pilot, to create an advanced automation system for aircraft. They are the leading developer of certified autonomy for aircraft, with technical capabilities that allow it to assist and augment existing pilots in flight. Merlin is not only primed for takeoff, the Merlin Pilot is already flying with 500+ systems-on missions completed to date.
This startup story begins a few months after the conclusion of founder Matt George’s previous company, Bridj. Matt and his team were building a ground transportation network to help match commuters and pool resources to deliver a dynamic, more efficient, real time mass transportation system on behalf of organizations and governments.
As the company progressed through its lifecycle, taking passengers across millions of miles of road, Bridj explored autonomous technology in an effort to scale and create competitive differentiation. The biggest learning? Fully autonomous driving is hard.
Bridj was sold to Transit Systems in 2017 and Matt took some time off to regroup and refocus on what he wanted to do next. He was fascinated by autonomy, in particular the shifting perception of how humans will be moved around the world in the years ahead. Clearly in cars, eventually. But where else? And perhaps, where first?
Matt had learned to fly in Vermont during his Middlebury undergraduate studies at nearby Shelburne Airport under the tutelage of Paul Potter. His passion for aviation was there. With just a couple rent checks left in his bank account, he went out and raised the initial capital to launch Merlin’s operations and make an impact at the intersection of aerospace, AI & robotics.
Let’s talk about the moment first. We have ubiquitous digital connectivity through the Internet. The dominant way that we physically connect from long distances is through flights over our air network. Very few people are transiting via ships, in case you didn’t know. Grandma & Grandpa from Boca aside, god bless them. The civilian air network has more or less been delivered the same way for the last 50 years. An aluminum tube, pilots, and fuel. Rinse. Repeat.
On the military side of the coin, pilot training is expensive. When the U.S. Air Force trains a pilot, it can cost between $1M and $10M depending upon the aircraft (src). Two pilots flying a C-130 represents about $5M of training costs in a single cockpit. Merlin is chipping away at bringing in the digital age of piloting, reducing operational costs and driving autonomous efficiencies & reliability for carriers.
Originally, the team conceived of creating an uncrewed airfact by putting a fully autonomous system into an airplane. This is a needed solution! But the necessary evolution was for Merlin to take a phased approach by creating an advanced automation system that would act as the second pilot onboard a larger aircraft to make it flyable by a single human. They built their business case and closed their first customer, the United States Department of Defense.
The best way to think about Merlin is they are leveraging the skills of a human pilot and translating them into software. Along this journey they’re partnering with the world’s best avionics companies to bridge the gap between humans and technology through software with some additional hardware components, from takeoff to touchdown.
In 2018 Merlin was flying small airplanes like the Piston. By 2021 they progressed to Single TurboProp planes and then Heavy TurboProp planes. In 2024 they are gearing up to bring their technology to the C130J heavy transport aircraft.
Like any disciplined startup building toward a bold future, Merlin is taking a phased approach to their process and the types of aircraft they fly. Phase one is to build trust. They’ve installed the Merlin Pilot as an advanced certified flight aid, serving as the third pilot in the cockpit of Part 23 aircraft - think TurboProp twin seat type planes. Customers enjoy fuel savings, increase in duty hours, and flexibility in SIC (second in command) eligibility through the whole flight lifecycle.
Next, they will progress to Phase two which involves taking the place of the “second pilot” in Part 25 aircraft - transport type planes carrying freight. This will enable safe reduced crew operations for military and civilian freight end users with material cost savings. The Merlin Pilot will assume control of an aircraft and perform all flying functionality. Two human pilots will remain as safety observers, retaining full authority over the system.
Phase three is augmented autonomy where the Merlin Pilot will enable uncrewed flight on smaller aircraft. Merlin will be paired 1:1 with a human crew member on the flight deck of larger aircraft, augmenting operations and flying limited routes with a specially trained subset of pilot corps. They will also expand the number of aircraft they can support for reduced-crew operations.
Phase four is full scale autonomy, Merlin’s long term vision, where the Merlin Pilot operates without restriction as one of the two pilots onboard a flight deck for larger aircraft and fully uncrewed for small aircraft. A ground pilot will still be monitoring multiple aircraft to take over in case of some type of emergency.
To date, Merlin has flown hundreds of test missions across five different aircraft types and is generating revenue in the 10s of millions of dollars from the DoD. Since 2019 they have been selected by the FAA to complete flight test trials for the first non-human piloted cargo network in the U.S., as well as selected by the USAF to bring mission-critical, single pilot operations to the C-130J. Their closest competitor is Lockheed Martin and there are limited frontier tech companies with the capabilities to build similar types of technology today.
Merlin’s biggest differentiator? They’re already out there flying. During COVID they hired their first 50 employees and are now growing the team to 150 through a hybrid culture. As a frontier tech company, one of the biggest challenges is recruiting and assembling the right team. They are blending a high-growth, venture backed software startup with an aerospace & robotics company. Many members of the team are on-site, building and testing in dedicated facilities such as here in Boston, the Mojave Desert, and New Zealand.
Over the coming quarters they are working to grow the roadmap from working with smaller aircraft to TurboProp planes to jetliners. In 2024 there will be a big push with the U.S. government to take on a wider variety of aircraft and they will continue to move the ball downfield on certification with civil regulators. For the next couple years, Merlin’s full focus will be on meeting and exceeding the expectations of the DoD.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Shawn Bonneau, Senior Avionics Software Engineer
Patrick DePriest, VP of Finance
Ashley Ferguson, VP of Business Operations
Aubrey Kalashian, Senior Software Engineer
Joel Katz, Senior Software Engineer
Kristen K, People Operations Leader
William Koch, Senior Staff Software Engineer - Advanced Capabilities
Brad Martin, Senior Software Engineer
Ricardo Ortiz, Senior Software Engineer
Natalija Ulemek, VP of Talent
Ilana Petraglia, Controller
Cory Ronan, Senior Recruiting Manager
Jackie Scanlon, Staff Software Engineer
Sarah Siegel, HRBP Director
Patrick Shine, Lead Electrical Systems Engineer
Pat Taylor, Technical Project Manager
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Merlin team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the critical milestones the team is working toward in 2024?
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees?
How do you balance the commercial vs. government use cases for Merlin when designing the roadmap?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Merlin Labs you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more flights into the autonomous age. All future travelers applaud your efforts. See you in the skies!
Parker Lawrence, Software Engineer @ Herald
Parker Lawrence is a full-stack early stage engineer who went North, then West, South, and now Northeast to build his toolkit as a founding engineer in insurtech. Today, he’s helping to scale the infrastructure of the easiest API for commercial insurance at Boston based Herald as a Software Engineer.
Growing up in West Virginia, Parker took an interest in visual art and then ice hockey. As a young kid, he always had a sketchbook on hand with drawings of various cartoon characters, and in high school he played goalie for one of the only four high school hockey teams in the state. Parker’s dad, a Duke alum, was a litigator focusing on energy and environmental law and his mom, a UNC Chapel Hill alum, had an MBA and worked for a natural gas company. Now a dad with two young kids himself, Parker credits his parents as role models who effectively balanced impactful work lives with young kids.
Parker’s path north began when his high achieving older sister attended a Harvard admissions event in Charleston, West Virginia, encouraging West Virginians to apply. She did, was accepted, and off she went to Boston. So naturally a couple years later Parker followed his trailblazing sister to Cambridge. It happened to be the only school he applied to north of the Mason-Dixon line.
During undergrad Parker studied Philosophy but quickly realized he didn’t want to pursue academia professionally. In his spare time he was the President of the Harvard Radio Station, and he played guitar and sang in a couple bands, though he resisted my attempts to obtain any audio or video evidence of this chapter of his life – “It was a bit aggressive. I was pretty into punk and hardcore at the time.” He took some math classes, logic theory, and Intro to CS but did not pursue engineering (yet!).
While considering a couple different post graduate career paths, including taking the LSAT, he did some on campus recruiting. Oliver Wyman, a consulting firm, was recruiting for Analysts in New York with the flexibility to try a number of projects across a variety of different clients. It helped that Parker’s sister had worked there, too!
In the shadow after the financial crisis, Parker started at the firm helping financial institutions comply with newly mandated stress tests for U.S. regulators. He built powerpoints & risk models, prepared reports, and learned technical skills like SQL, R, and VBA. He loved the self teaching aspect of these new skills - reading forums, researching Stack Overflow, and building solutions in a matter of hours. It was empowering, and he could work at his own pace.
After a couple years building up his savings, he wanted to pursue engineering full time and took a leap to attend the newly established Flatiron School. They were a local upstart 3 month coding bootcamp and he enrolled in one of their early cohorts. He immersed himself full time in the classroom, learning problem sets and establishing a good foundation for a career in software engineering.
Parker’s girlfriend (now wife) was moving to Chicago to attend law school, and Parker followed to find his first engineering role in the Windy City. He landed a full-stack role at LiveWatch, a home security platform that competed with Simplisafe. Working as a jack of all trades alongside a handful of other engineers, he built internal tools & data analytics tooling, worked on their main e-commerce platform, and overall learned a ton. He set up a data warehouse for the first time and made live dashboards to own these critical responsibilities for the first time in his engineering career.
Next, Parker went to a larger tech company, Guaranteed Rate. They had a much larger engineering team using Clojure, a language and technology Parker was interested in learning about more deeply. But, after about a year, opportunity struck to join Kin Insurance with some old colleagues, and Parker decided to jump aboard the promising young start-up.
Kin was Parker’s first true venture-backed, hyper growth-focused company, and he joined as one of their early employees, when the whole company still fit into a couple WeWork rooms. They were using technology to help bridge high risk insurance categories like “property insurance in Florida”. It was another full-stack role, but this time he was responsible for standing up a bunch of architecture from scratch. He built out several full analytics and testing services and maintained their internal rating API. And as a part of larger teams, he revamped their front-end customer flow and built out the first version of their policy administration system.
Parker & his wife then moved to New Orleans after his wife landed a coveted Federal clerkship. He found a role with AlltimePower, a venture & partnership of local utility giant Entergy. The board was interested in helping to build alternative, more intelligent uses for their power grid to help maintain power plant efficiency & utilization.
As their first full time engineer, Parker built a two-way marketplace for generator dealers to buy leads and sell remote switches on those generators. The product (and subsequent network) helped create more efficient uses of the power grid using a smart generator network in an effort to create a virtual power plant. The company grew to cover 20+ states with over 100 generator dealers on the platform.
After a couple years in New Orleans, his wife was offered a role in commercial litigation at a Boston area law firm to bring the family back to the Northeast. She is a native of Williamstown and, since they’re both familiar with the Boston area, it sounded like a great fit to plant some roots!
Parker was introduced to Herald founders Matt Antoszyk & Duncan Crystal through a family friend in the Phillips Andover network. They were looking for early stage technologists in the insurance space for their Lightspeed & Underscore backed startup Herald, building the easiest API for commercial insurance. Parker’s sweet spot!
As their first engineer, Parker got to help own the initial Product relationship, DevOps, and spin up all their alert & monitoring analytics. At this point, he knew how to build and apply this playbook for building from scratch.
In the 3 years since, Parker has helped Herald scale their Product and helped focus on horizontal scaling to help the business build new relationships with insurance carriers integrating into Herald’s API. He helps own new features and the process of “what does it look like to add a new integration” while making the process repeatable and high quality. He serves in an individual contributor role but feels like he's growing with the company, mentoring colleagues and making a positive impact on the team & product footprint for a growing technical team.
In his spare time, Parker is spending time thinking about the future of AI and how to incorporate these new tools into his workflow for maximum leverage. He’s experimented with GitHub co-pilot and has toyed with ChatGPT to write some experimental code, testing the potential opportunities and risks of this new paradigm.
Optimize feedback loops
Any work we do involves one or many feedback loops. One way to structure our thinking about these loops is to break them into 3 broad categories:
Immediate feedback - info you can collect without relying on anyone else or some long-running process.
Mediated feedback - involves some other person or process and can’t be gathered immediately.
Customer feedback - feedback from the person who ultimately determines success. This could be customers, users of an internal tool, a manager, etc.
When starting on a new task, think about what kind of feedback loops you can create across these categories, and follow these rules of thumb:
Rule 1: Make sure you have a plan to cover all 3 categories, as each provides unique value:
Immediate - Spending a small amount of time to create immediate feedback can save a lot of wasted effort. For example, writing unit tests can often save a lot of back-and-forth with QA teams or users. Or, if you’re working with large datasets, it’s always good to do a sense check of aggregated stats (percentiles, outliers, etc) before passing along findings drawn from potentially bad data.
Mediated - While immediate feedback is great, it’s hard to overstate the value of getting another human involved. I expect most have seen this scenario play out: you carefully craft unit tests for a seemingly simple change. When the tests pass, you decide to skip manual review. It’s a simple change, right? And you wrote such great tests - nothing could go wrong. But of course, you already know the conclusion, don’t you? Moments after the change hits production, a customer reports a bug.
Customer - Don’t forget about what really matters - the customer experience. Often this feedback is the easiest to gather, but it can still get skipped if you aren’t careful. Make sure to collect and review usage stats or do customer surveys or whatever is needed to close this final feedback loop. You don’t want to do all of the work getting something into the world and then wait weeks before realizing it’s not being used due to some easily addressable issue.
Rule 2: Move things “forward” toward immediate feedback as much as you can. A couple examples:
Say you are designing a new feature and one step in the process is for your manager to review the design. Take time at the onset to agree on a checklist with her about how she will assess the design. That way, you can first go through the checklist on your own and move her mediated feedback forward into immediate feedback.
One way to move customer feedback forward into mediated feedback is to pay attention to your data. Modern technology systems often collect a lot of data passively, either in logs or directly in operational databases. Bad changes that pass standard QA steps can still create obvious red flags if you review the data created from testing.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Invest In Your Tools - “You spend so much of modern work using sophisticated technical tools like a text editor, programming languages, framework within a language, SaaS platforms, etc. Really make sure you are investing in your workflow(s) and enjoy your tools. Donald Knuth says ‘The enjoyment of one's tools is an essential ingredient of successful work’”
Adopt New Tech Thoughtfully - “Any time you adopt cutting-edge new technology, you have to make the investment to learn it and effectively be a beta tester of it. At the end of the day, that can add up to a substantial amount of time - time you could be spending solving domain-specific business problems. So often it is better to lean on battle-tested tools.”
Solve Hard Problems Together - “I think there’s immense value solving hard problems together in a pair-programming style, but it can seem harder than ever in a remote world already packed with fatiguing video calls. Use your judgment to identify problems worth solving with a colleague or as a team, and resist the urge to ‘take it offline’ - get into all of the hairy details together.”
Parker is excited to see what the future holds for him at Herald as long as possible. Over the longer term he plans on continuing to specialize in early stage startups. Perhaps one day that means pursuing the entrepreneurial route or bringing technology to the Education space. In the meantime, he’s focused on gaining the best insights to bring to any future experience, growing as a leader at Herald.
If you’d like to learn more about Parker, you can find him scaling technical infrastructure and tooling at rapidly growing Boston based insurtech Herald, taking care of his rapidly growing newborn at home, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see what you continue to build at Herald and the teams & companies you continue to impact in the years ahead!
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt