MGMT Boston - W1, Q3 24 - Endeca Effect Rewind / Q2 '24 Recap
MGMT Boston - W1, Q3 24 - Endeca Effect Rewind / Q2 '24 Recap
Endeca Effect Rewind / Q2 '24 Recap
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 950+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Endeca Effect Rewind - Oracle acquired Boston based Endeca for $1.075B in 2011. Now, the story of its alumni is being told at local Boston area anchor & growth businesses like Toast, Salsify, Jellyfish, Parallel Wireless, Manifold, Cimulate and beyond who all have its Kendall Square roots. Endeca alumni led companies have a market capitalization >$15B! Six alumni looked back on their time with us last summer to share their learnings
Thanks to Jeff Boehm for the intro to the Endeca Mafia
Q2 ‘24 Recap
Startups: Starburst, Neurable, Software Defined Automation, airSlate, Ayble Health, Occupier, Blink, Arcee, Lendbuzz, Lightmatter, VODA.ai, Day.ai
Operators: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious, Brian Moseley / Semrush, Sara de Zárraga / RapidSOS, Hannah Leary / OneScreen.ai, Shaili Gupta / xFact
Thanks to all the startups & operators for participating in Q2 ‘24!
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping 60+ Boston based up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dana Wensberg, Senior Engineer @ Paperless Parts - 4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup (check out Dana’s Medium blog here)
Sean Smith, VP Product @ Denim - lessons from a product guy who spent time moonlighting in revenue
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - 2024 Companies to Watch
The Endeca Effect - Rewind
In 2011, Oracle acquired Boston based Endeca for $1.075B. The acquisition ended an 11 year journey spanning the Dot-com bubble, 9/11, the Great Financial Crisis, 3 Super Bowl wins, 2 World Series titles, 1 NBA Championship, 1 Stanley Cup and the punishing drumbeat of technological progress.
There are a bunch of places you can go to read or hear more about the company’s journey over that time period and their core asset, the MDEX engine. Or their second act, a Business Intelligence application, that led them into the arms of Larry Ellison. But this ain’t that kind of story.
Because 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, Parallel Wireless 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. In the biz they would say that’s a “top decile return” right there.
I was lucky enough to meet Jeff Boehm, an early Endeca Marketing leader, who served from 2002 - 2006. He agreed to collaborate with me on a project for Boston area operators to help unpack what was so unique about the company, time period, and its employees who have gone on to reach great heights.
We sat down with John Andrews (CEO, Celect, Co-Founder and CEO, Cimulate), Steve Fredette (Co-Founder & President, Toast), Andrew Lau (Co-Founder & CEO, Jellyfish), Vinay Mohta (Co-Founder of Kyruus & CEO, Manifold), Julie Yoo (Co-Founder of Kyruus & GP @ a16z) and Steve Papa (Endeca Founder & CEO) to share with the Boston tech ecosystem what was it that 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, the management team, 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 was constrained by the context of their time. They 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 through multiple market cycles on the eve of the cloud revolution
Power Functions & Special Ops - Many of Endeca’s most successful entrepreneurial alumni came from the “power functions” of Product & Sales. Specifically, many of them served on Endeca’s “Special Operations” team, which gave them exposure to the entrepreneurial game. This team sat outside of the core org chart and 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 to bring new product prototypes to market over and over again
See It To Believe It - during our conversations everyone referenced the value of seeing “what good looks like” or the first person perspective of experiencing product market fit as it was occurring [really experience “listening” to the customer]. 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, launch new products, etc.
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
In the series last summer we unpacked what these Endeca alumni learned about Markets, People, & Products and what they would tell up and coming operators about their career. These are their lessons, repackaged with a rose colored tint as a gift to all the operators in the trenches building the next anchor technology businesses of our era in this great championship city of Boston:
Q2 2024 Recap
Q2 Startups Highlighted (Sequentially): Starburst, Neurable, Software Defined Automation, airSlate, Ayble Health, Occupier, Blink, Arcee, Lendbuzz, Lightmatter, VODA.ai, Day.ai
Native AI: Arcee, Day.ai
Vertical & Horizontal SaaS: airSlate, Blink, Occupier, Starburst, Software Defined Automation, VODA.ai
FinTech: Lendbuzz
Hardware: Lightmatter
Robotics: Neurable
HealthTech: Ayble Health
Seed Stage: Arcee, Ayble Health, Day.ai, Software Defined Automation, VODA.ai
Growth Stage (A-C): airSlate, Blink, Neurable, Occupier
Late Stage (>C): Lendbuzz, Lightmatter, Starburst
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 - 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
Q1 2024 Operator Rewind
Q2 Operators Highlighted (sequentially): Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious, Brian Moseley / Semrush, Sara de Zárraga / RapidSOS, Hannah Leary / OneScreen.ai, Shaili Gupta / xFact
Product & Engineering: Erica Kangas, Shaili Gupta
Growth & Marketing: Bryan Dsouza, Sara 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
Some other quarterly highlights if you’ve made it this far..
NextView Future Founder Soiree (April) - Thank you to the NextView team - Rachel Hodes, Lee Hower, Rob Go, Dave Beisel & the rest of their squad for co-hosting our Future Founders Operators Club event in April with Fidelity Private Shares & Travis Drouin & Ries McQuillan from Baker Tilly
Sports, Gaming & Wellness Q2 Report (May): Thank you to Kristen Craft @ Fidelity Private Shares for hosting our Q2 Sports, Gaming & Wellness breakfast with Drive by DraftKings at High Street Place
Tacos & Tech with Founder Collective (June) -Thank you to Brent Willess at Founder Collective for hosting the Operators Club in June
We’ll leave it there for now. On to Q3!
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