MGMT Boston - W1, Q4 23 - Procurement Sciences AI // Danielle Pedra, Delegate
Procurement Sciences AI // Danielle Pedra, Delegate // Oct Event
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 600 of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here and Happy Q4!
TLDR:
Procurement Sciences AI - an artificial intelligence software platform that helps government and commercial contractors build a unique era of competitive advantages, designed to help them win more bids and proposals
Thanks to Steve L. for the intro to Procurement Sciences AI
Danielle Pedra, Director of Sales @ Delegate - a thoughtful revenue leader who has grown through mastery of process and an innovative understanding of how to appreciate those she works with through emotional intelligence
Thanks to Connie L. for the intro to Danielle
🔥 Upcoming Event: MGMT Boston AI Breakfast - 10/25 @ 9am - co-hosted by Fidelity for Startups 🔥
Inviting Boston-area venture backed software operating leaders, founders & investors to join for breakfast on Wed, 10/25 to engage with the MGMT Boston Operators Club, co-hosted by Kristen Craft @ Fidelity for Startups
Our special guest is Meghan Keeney Anderson, head of marketing at Jasper.ai and former/longtime HubSpotter. Meghan will share her perspective on trends and best practices in the AI space
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - e-mail me directly to learn more!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Snyk, FeatureByte, Neural Magic, Notable Systems, Akooda, Posh AI, Propify, Klaviyo, UptimeHealth, Scroobious, PredictionStrike & Benchling
Q3 Operators Highlighted: Alexa Murray / WHOOP, Kieran O’Driscoll / AtScale, Max Milhan / Rhino, Ries McQuillan / Vested, Dave Barron / HubSpot, Sam Richard / ngrok, Ben Katz / Appex, Wyatt Bramhall / Perch, Pablo Bello / Product Leader & Joe Haftel / Paperless Parts
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted
Procurement Sciences AI
Founder: Christian Ferreira
Founding: 2022
Mission: Helps Government and Commercial Contractors of all sizes and industries increase their probability of winning by using AI to help automate traditionally labor intensive tasks
Employees: 6 & 30% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & <$5M Raised
Investors: Tower Research Capital & Strategic Angels
Key Customers: Multiple of the top 10 Government Contractors and leading consulting firms
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Procurement Sciences is an artificial intelligence software platform that helps government and commercial contractors build a unique era of competitive advantages, designed to help them win more bids and proposals. Founded in 2022 by Christian Ferreria and John Knapp, this is a rapidly growing startup leveraging AI to solve the workflow challenges of government and commercial contractors.
Christian was a Marine for four years, joining directly out of High School. Thank you for your service, sir. After the military, he worked as a government contractor for identity technology leader IDEMIA. IDEMIA works with 600+ governments and 2,300+ enterprises across the world, developing facial recognition and cryptography technologies across a host of products. Christian started as a Software Engineer but he had a talent for working with clients so he was recruited to the Business Development side of IDEMIA as a Solutions Architect and then Director of Business Strategy.
He intimately learned how bidding for government contracts worked. He would respond to proposals and acted as a technical subject matter expert. Designing systems, he wrote proposal responses to win 7, then 8, then 9 figure deals for the company. He loved it, growing to oversee multiple lines of proposal teams and overseeing business strategy for his group.
But he had always wanted to start his own startup. And Christian is an entrepreneur at heart. While he was serving and then growing his career, he built up a portfolio of real estate assets. He sold the entire thing and raised some family & friends money to fund the launch of his new, AI powered startup, Procurement Sciences AI.
Christian recognized that AI has the power to really accelerate the right type of application workflows in ways that were not previously possible. The specific pain point he aimed to tackle was the painstaking processes of government contract proposal selecting, writing, reviewing, evaluating, and handling compliance in order to get bids properly submitted and selected for award.
For a little perspective, the U.S. federal government granted $694 billion in government contracts for the 2022 fiscal year, with $400B+ of that coming from the DoD (src). The composition of contracting is changing. Cutting edge technology is needed as threats abroad increase, massive climate and sustainability opportunities need to be funded, contracting structure & speed are paramount, outdated IT needs updating, and compliance is a continued priority (src).
Procurement Sciences AI is helping government contractors win bids and maximizing workflow efficiency with Generative AI. At its core the platform ingests documents, understands bidding requirements, and automatically responds. They’ve developed tasking logic to augment and supplement responses from their tooling too. The platform is LLM (large language model) agnostic, leveraging the best open source and private models customized for their application’s specific use case.
The team is building an end to end solution business development bidding teams can use from start to finish drafting, submitting, and using win/loss analysis so they can learn from their mistakes. Their roadmap is focused on five key areas: finding new opportunities, bidding decisioning, proposal strategy & drafting, proposal fine-tuning, and post-award analytics. You can think of them as a verticalized Salesforce or Monday.com mixed with chatGPT-like functionality for government contracting.
The team has already reached a mid six figure revenue run rate in their first twelve months of operations and are racing toward seven figures by the middle of 2024. They’ll be looking to add to their team on the GTM & Engineering sides of the house in the coming months. Procurement Sciences is about to go into a rapid growth stage, solidifying the final pieces of their product to capture the entire bidding workflow, handle many more customers, and ramp up marketing to reach more contractors.
Operators to Know:
Christian Ferreira, Co-Founder & CEO
Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, Founding Advisor
Nick Bryant, Chief Engineer & VP of Engineering
Matt Pinkston, Chief Growth Officer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Procurement Sciences AI team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
Infrastructure / DevOps Engineer
More roles coming in the months ahead!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the next critical company milestones?
Which product features will be part of de-risking the company ahead of the next stage of growth?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in the quarters ahead?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Procurement Sciences you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more legacy industries into the AI revolution. All taxpayers and government contractors applaud your efforts. See you around the internet!
Danielle Pedra, Director of Sales @ Delegate
Career Summary / Reporting + Individual Motivation Balance the Scales / Career Learnings
Danielle Pedra is a thoughtful revenue leader who has grown through mastery of process and an innovative understanding of how to appreciate those she works with through emotional intelligence. As the Director of Sales at Delegate, she’s helping Revenue Operations teams reach their revenue goals by providing Salesforce admin services on a flexible subscription basis.
Danielle grew up in the Boston suburbs into a family that emphasized the importance of education and family values. Her parents were tireless workers; her dad a restaurant franchisee and her mom a healthcare executive. They taught her that education is paramount and set a high bar for the family’s success.
Her independence started from a young age; at 14 she set off for Lawrence Academy, a private boarding high school. There she pursued her passion for dancing and traveled to the Fringe Festival in Scotland to dance with the varsity team. Danielle still keeps in touch with many LA alumni from those days before traveling south to Virginia Tech to become a Hokie where she majored in Marketing for an inevitable business career.
After internships at Siemens and Schwan’s where she gained experience planning events, Danielle joined Cvent in D.C. to sell event marketing software upon her graduation. Cvent hired a 40 person new hire class and they went through training for the first two months of her job. They learned Salesforce, had pitch competitions, honors, and even won the award for valedictorian during Cvent University. Danielle loved it and became obsessed with the process of learning the Salesforce platform.
When she figured out she would be compensated more if she booked her meetings by cold calling instead of warm intros, Danielle jumped in feet first and learned to love the thrill of the sale. In her spare time, she coached 3rd grade girls basketball in Arlington, Virginia. This external career experience helped her realize she wanted to be in management. She saw how the girls beamed when they accomplished something in a game they learned in practice. Being a role model for 10 third graders? What’s better than that?
Back at Cvent, she explored ways to unlock a management path through coaching & mentoring. Her first time applying? She didn’t get it. It was frustrating too when she received some disappointing feedback that she wasn’t ready. So she doubled down and worked harder. The next quarter? Danielle became a Team Lead.
She grew to manage 10 SDRs on the Event Core sales team with over 50+ sellers and created an intern program across all product lines. After a couple years, the company was acquired by Vista Equity Partners. She helped her reps hit their numbers, coached multiple people off of performance improvement plans, and learned the ropes of a first time manager. During her 3 years at Cvent the company more than doubled in size to over 2,700 employees (now close to 5k).
Most notably, Danielle learned everything she could about the system her job and team ran on. Salesforce. Danielle gave her reps visibility into what reports were important to her and learned how to make them herself. Curiously, she wanted to understand her reps better so she gave them the “5 love language test” - acts of service, gifts, quality time, words of affirmation, and physical touch. Because some reps like high fives! And some reps need to hear “great job” individually or have a team e-mail sent around. And some reps need you to show up for them in 1x1s to let them vent. And some just want prizes or spiffs. Danielle kept sticky notes on each and every one of her team members.
She left Cvent to move to Charleston, investing in herself professionally alongside a personal relationship she was committed to at the time. It didn’t quite work out. On both fronts. This stuff happens! It’s ok! We pick ourselves back up. After a couple of roles and false starts, Danielle was ready to move closer to home and get back up to Boston.
Torn between an opportunity at Boston-based workplace experience company Robin and another Vista Equity Partners portfolio company, out of Providence, Danielle chose to go back to the “Vista Family”. Her mandate was to help grow the sales team as well as hire managers to give her the opportunity to manage managers for the first time. Upserve transitioned to a new CEO just before her start date and rapid shifts in leadership and strategy soon followed. Jamie Wilson had been disappointed Danielle chose not to join Robin and after 6 months of changes at Upserve and the commute to Providence, he convinced Danielle to make the move.
Jamie Wilson personally recruited her to Robin and committed to carving out a new role for Danielle. She became responsible for handling the training for the revenue team across BDRs, Account Managers, Account Executives, and Sales Management. She created documentation, handled onboarding, and upskilled the team. She started at Robin when there were only 60 people, and they had a strong leadership team from a bunch of familiar Boston anchor startups like InsightSquared, LogMeIn, HubSpot, etc.
She brought her Salesforce skills to bear, eventually reporting to the VP of RevOps to help build out dashboards and reporting for the team. She trained everyone new in the revenue org that first year as they hired close to 80 people company wide, doubling the size of their sales team and raising a Series B venture financing. Robin was building workplace experience software for a hybrid workplace - conference rooms, desks, analytics around usage, etc.
When Danielle moved to manage the SMB team, her team became the highest percentage to goal in the company. She then took over the Mid Market Sales team and was Robin’s company MVP in 2021 as the company grew to 250 people. Finally, she was promoted to Director and led the Enterprise team of SDRs & AEs with about 20 people under her. After a company restructuring, she departed Robin.
What did Danielle learn from all these experiences? Sometimes it’s just impossible to see the full picture from the outside. There are only so many questions you can ask to understand the inner workings of a startup with all the different variables around the product, company growth, and other personnel movement. Are there better ways to understand the innerworkings? Maybe, but sometimes the solution is to just keep going.
Danielle keeps learning and growing. Through Pavilion, a venture backed GTM community she’s a member of, she used her career development stipend to take a course for rising executives. One of her cohorts was led by Aaron Smith, Delegate’s VP of Client Services. Danielle told him she was looking for emotionally intelligent leaders to work with next and Delegate luckily needed a first time Head of Sales. She’s continuing to learn how to better understand the needs of her team, through process and personal preferences. The tests have evolved, slightly, but they’re a continued way to stay effective and drive growth.
In her spare time, Danielle is an active member of GTM community Pavilion and mentors with startup Tandem, which helps first time managers and employees reach their goals faster through mentorship.
Reporting + Individual Motivation Balance the Scales
Leaders all have different strengths. And company building is slightly different than excelling in a role or function. What Danielle can teach us from her career is that the combination of analytical and emotional understanding of her team drives better performance.
Reporting is Storytelling
Danielle put in the time early in her career to intimately understand Salesforce reporting and how to make behavior and analytics match. By building reports that her team could use to measure their performance, she could help them build behaviors that would influence those metrics they all looked at together. She could take the vanity out of the metrics because she understands how to build the specific views and then model the revenue behaviors that drive revenue growth. By using Salesforce’s analytics to help tell a story, she can better steer her team into high performance.
Understanding Individual Motivation
Meyers-Briggs and other workplace personality tests are pretty well known now but, earlier in her career, Danielle went outside of the business world to learn more about her team. The five love languages, of course. This simple, fun test helped her better understand the individuals that came to her from all sorts of different places and their motivations. By unlocking the way they thought and wanted to be rewarded, she could help unlock better incentives and performance.
Danielle enjoys telling stories with numbers. She loves the problem solving of diving deeper to understand her team, what motivates them, and how the numbers and changes in an organization affect the whole picture. Combining reporting and individual motivations, she can dig in to figure out the whole story with Salesforce as her compass.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Be An Advocate - “Having been through so many ups and downs, you need to be vocal and ask for what you want to get to the goals in your career. If you’re not an advocate for yourself, no one else will be an advocate for you. Any blockers you encounter, you need to be vocal about what you need”
Ask Genuine Questions - “If you’re asking thoughtful, genuine questions you will learn about things outside of your purview. In Sales you work with every single team at a company and you need to ask questions about different teams, processes, and people to learn how to better navigate the company”
Investing in Your Peers - “The reason I’ve been successful in my role is that people I’ve invested time in have helped me in my role because we’ve gotten to know each other and helped each other succeed. If you don’t build those relationships, your job is going to be a lot harder”
Eventually, Danielle would like to grow to become a Chief Revenue Officer. She loves the interplay between sales, events, reporting, and networking. She enjoys mentorship and the leadership journey, optimizing revenue funnels to solve the pain of customers across markets.
If you want to learn more about Danielle, you can find her actively participating in Boston’s Pavilion revenue chapter, mentoring emerging startup leaders at Tandem, or helping RevOps team with their Salesforce challenges at Delegate. Or you can reach out to her on LinkedIn! Thanks for sharing Danielle. Excited to see all the teams you inspire and reporting you build in the coming years!
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