MGMT Boston - W1, Q3 25 - The Endeca Effect Rewind / Coworking Chronicles, Kendall Square Pt 2
The Endeca Effect Rewind / Coworking Chronicles, Kendall Square Pt 2
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help thousands of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups, founders, and local operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
The Endeca Effect Rewind - re-learn about the PayPal mafia of Boston: >$27B of alumni market cap created and counting..
The Coworking Chronicles: Summer Highlight Series with Rho - check out Episode 3 (Kendall Square Pt 2) with Nick Leonard from Prim AI, Steph Roulic from Startup Boston and Eric Moyal from Project Insulin
Thank you to Justin Wolz & the Rho team for the partnership
UPCOMING EVENT:
July 9th: Ditch The Deck with Jess Lynch & Greg Raiz from FoundersEdge
Around the Hub on MGMT Boston’s News Feed:
LogicFlo raises $2.7M to arm every life sciences expert with their own AI workforce
David Chang leaves Hunt Club / Ari Fine Glantz is stepping down from NEVCA after 10 years
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - a community and opportunity engine for 100+ Boston based up & coming venture backed operators
2025 Boston Tech Big Board - 2025 Startup Directory + Startups to Watch
Powered by RevenueBase
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q2 Highlighted Startups: Tines, Civic Roundtable, AceUp, Pentera, TruLeague, Glimpse, Datalign Advisory, H2Ok Innovations, Lila Sciences
Q2 Highlighted Operators: Subash Rajaseelan / Thinkverse, Nathan Teplow / Salsify
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 1H Recap / 2024 2H Recap
The Summer Coworking Chronicles: Kendall Square, Part 2
Episode 4 of the Summer Coworking Chronicles: Kendall Square, Part 2..
Welcome to Kendall Square, one of the most innovative square miles in the entire world. On Part 2 we caught up with..
Nicholas Leonard building Prim AI
Stephanie Roulic from Startup Boston
Eric Moyal from Project Insulin
Here’s what we learned on this trip to the neighborhood..
Nicholas Leonard building Prim AI:
Prim is a voice AI startup helping enterprises deploy enterprise voice AI at startup speed. There's a ton of top down pressure in enterprises and Prim helps them get solutions into production in days or weeks.
🏛️ What does Nick love about building in Boston and startups to watch? 🏛️
It's a huge talent hub. There's also a counter vibe to SF where, when they go out and find customers, there are a lot of great enterprises from all different verticals in and around Boston.
Nick thinks we should be watching Blitzy for enterprise code generation, Sales Mind AI (recently started) to deploy LLMs for sales analytics at scale being built by an ex-Palantir founder.
Stephanie Roulic from Startup Boston:
Startup Boston is working to become the center of gravity to connect the entire ecosystem from accelerators to networking groups to media outlets, and beyond. They help founders and operators figure out where to go!
👀 What trend should we be watching? 👀
Being able to create a tech platform without knowing how to code. Vibe coding is popping up more and more! There's a lot to be improved upon but Steph is very excited about this movement. Check out Launch by Lunch 🍕to learn how to use vibe coding as non-technical founders too!
Eric Moyal from Project Insulin:
Project Insulin is a non-profit making their own generic insulin to sell to patients at cost regardless of their insurance status.
🏛️ What does Eric love about building in Boston? 🏛️
Eric loves being a part of the community. He works out of the CIC in their latest Social Impact cohort, heard about us down putting some content together, and came out to share what he's working on. That's the power of community!
👀 What startups should we be watching? 👀
Tactus is a vest that allows people who are deaf or hard of hearing (also in Eric's Social Impact Cohort) to enjoy listening to music as if you're walking around with headphones.
Thanks to our guests and the ones to come for sharing their perspectives & insights!
Coworking Chronicles Startup Summer…
MGMT Boston is partnering with Rho, the business banking and spend management platform built for founders and finance teams, to find out what startups are being built around Boston neighborhoods this summer.
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.
When I moved back to the Boston area in the summer of 2022 and sought to learn about the tech ecosystem I’d grown up around but knew little about, the Endeca name came up repeatedly. 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, at the time of this resurfacing, Endeca alumni led companies have a market capitalization >$27B. 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. This project would have not happened if it weren’t for Jeff, so we should all thank him for coordinating. Thank you Jeff!!
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 help answer the following questions and share with the Boston tech ecosystem what was it that made the Endeca experience such a special part of their careers:
What was it about Endeca that bred so many startups and entrepreneurs? Is there an “Endeca Effect” or was it a series of coincidences?
What lessons did you learn about people, markets & products that carried through your career to today?
What overall “career learnings” did you learn from the Endeca experience that you would tell up & coming operators today?
What’s the most memorable thing Steve Papa, Endeca Co-Founder & CEO, taught you? And what did Steve learn from them?
Let’s also go ahead and save you the drama. Startups are hard. There’s no magic to this stuff. 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
Our series unpacks 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. Thank you all for your time. Let’s get to it!
Series Outline:
Any feedback for me? One thing you liked? One thing you didn’t? Local startups, founders, or operators to highlight? Just reply to this e-mail!
See you next week!
-Matt