MGMT Boston - W1, Q4 24 - Going Early with Asymmetric / Going Long at Klaviyo / Simon Taylor, HYCU / Laura Andre, Qunett
Going Early with Asymmetric / Going Long at Klaviyo / The Lantern with Simon Taylor, HYCU / Laura Andre, Qunett
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 1,040+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Going Early with Engineers & Operators at Asymmetric Capital - Thank you to Rob Biederman, Nancy Chou, and the rest of the Asymmetric team for having us to their Back Bay office to discuss the right individual characteristics and cultural ingredients needed to be successful in early stage environments
Going Long to Build an Enduring Career at Klaviyo - Thanks to Klaviyo, Women in Product, Lily Lyman, Stephanie Furfaro, and Jen Kessler for sharing a ton of wisdom on following your interests, mentors, what stays the same, maintaining energy, business school, and guidance for mentees
The Lantern with Simon Taylor, Founder & CEO at HYCU - HYCU is the world’s fastest growing data protection as a service company with 4,200 customers in 78 countries. Simon shares what is going on this fall and some key startup learnings
The Lantern is brought to you by Innovation Economy Banking at J.P. Morgan this September
Laura Andre, CEO at Qunett - a researcher, operator, and ascendant executive who tinkers with curiosity and a methodical approach to the scientific method
Upcoming Featured Boston Event: Ditch The Deck, 10/10 @ 5:30pm - Ever notice how most demo-days don’t actually have any demos? FoundersEdge is ditching the deck to showcase the game-changing products local startups are building. Or if you’re interested in submitting a demo, enter here 🚀
Other Resources:
The Lantern Short Form Video Series (YT / IG) - Intro Trailer / Jonathan Chang, Markit AI / Aniketh Mohanty, Wayfair / Setting the Culture / Amber Nigam, basys.ai / The Agents Are Coming / Alex Ewing, OneScreen.ai / Jess Lynch, FoundersEdge / What is MGMT Boston? And Why? / Remen Okoruwa, Propexo / Amelia Van Camp, Mirakl / Simon Taylor, HYCU
MGMT Boston Operators Club - a community and opportunity engine for 80+ Boston based up & coming venture backed operators
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - 2024 Companies to Watch
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q3 Startups Highlighted: Sense, mabl, Customers.ai, Wicket, Form Health, EnFi, Crunchtime, OfferFit
Q3 Operators Highlighted: Greg Montemurro / Posh, Susan Roth / Quantified AI, Jason Jones / Klaviyo, Haley Wilcox / ezCater, Peter George / MX
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 Q1 Recap / 2024 Q2 Recap
Going Early: Engineers & Operators at Asymmetric Capital
The MGMT Boston Operators Club was hosted by Asymmetric Capital last week to discuss “Going Early as an Engineer & Operator”. Thank you to Rob Biederman, Nancy Chou, and the rest of the Asymmetric team for having us to their Back Bay office.
Moderated by Asymmetric’s Managing Partner Rob Beiderman, we had Asymmetric portfolio founders Alex Zimmer (Topologic), Mike Torra (Copley), Arjun Aggarwal (Mandrel), and Brian Elliott (Blitzy) on hand to talk about their experiences as early stage founders and what it’s like to “go early”.
Our panel agreed that being successful in early stage environments involves the right individual characteristics and cultural ingredients:
Mike shared that you “have to want to go early” as you will be forced to learn new things and take ownership
Alex talked about his focus on recruiting early stage team members who are enthusiastic, curious, and get excited about solving new problem with a low ego
Arjun talked about how early stage startups are one of the best places to experience a fast pace of learning that are hard to replicate in other environments and that investors are there to underwrite taking this type of career risk
Brian, as a non-technical founder, has not stopped asking questions and it has led him to the point where he can now contribute to high level design / architecture conversations since he’s spent so much time stepping outside of his comfort zone to understand the entire technical picture
These Asymmetric founders also shared that the landscape changes when you move from idea to building as they get deeper into their problem spaces. Every startup has an initial approach that needs to be tweaked when it collides with reality and you have to embrace the challenge of finding product market fit.
Mike talked about the hard work Copley is doing to close the gap from “pretty good most of the time” to closing those last percentage points of accuracy for the AI commerce solution they are building to drive “Enterprise ready” results.
Brian talked about the opportunity for Blitzy evolving as it became clear they could go far beyond their original concept but, as a result, they have had to spend more time understanding what is needed to deliver on the larger ambition.
The panel also shared the importance of cultural make-up of earlier stage teams that need to be able to discuss ideas openly, ask a lot of questions, and collaborate to move quickly.
Thanks a lot for sharing your insights & experiences and thanks to Asymmetric Capital for hosting us!
Going Long to Build an Enduring Career at Klaviyo
Last week at Klaviyo HQ we assembled an All Star panel to share their lessons on Going Long to Build an Enduring Career. Thank you to..
Lily Lyman, GP @ Underscore VC
Stephanie Furfaro, Chief Business Officer @ Rapid7
Jen Kessler, VP of Product @ Klaviyo
…for sharing their wisdom & insights. And a special thank you to Jason Jones from Klaviyo & their team alongside Daria Marmer & Women in Product for helping pull the evening together.
We covered Following Your Interests, Mentors, What Stays the Same, Maintaining Energy, Business School, and guidance for Mentees.
Simon Taylor, Founder & CEO at HYCU and more Lantern content..
The Lantern is brought to you by Innovation Economy Banking at J.P. Morgan this September
Welcome Simon Taylor, Founder & CEO of HYCU, Inc. on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥
HYCU is the world’s fastest growing data protection as a service company and the world’s #1 leader in backing up and recovering SaaS data across the 30,000+ SaaS services in the world. With a click of a button, they can recover data lost to an unforeseen event or ransomware attack.
🔍 What’s going on inside the startup this fall? 🔎
HYCU has about 4,200 customers in 78 countries. They backup and recover data for every branch of the U.S. military and government.
They recently launched a powerful relationship with Dell pairing HYCU’s data protection expertise with Dell’s leading storage business
🤔 What has Simon learned building startups that he would pass along? 🤔
Starting a company is not glitz and glamour. It is fun! But you can be the janitor on a Monday, king on a Tuesday, and back to washing floors on Wednesday. You need to do it all!
You’ve got to earn your seat. As the company starts to scale, your business has an entirely set of requirements and needs. Every day I come in and say “I need to earn the seat today”. The person I was yesterday isn’t the right CEO for this company
Partner, partner, partner. As you scale, there is always somebody much bigger than you. Get the leverage to build true value added partnerships, where both sides are winners. Lead with the business value you can provide and their goals, with technology as the enabling function
🤝 How can we help? 🤝
Back your SaaS up. Ransomware attacks are off the charts. SaaS is so dominant in our lives (look at what happened with Crowdstrike’s bad patch). Take stock of where all your data is, who is managing it, and back up all of your data to make sure it is protected. And perhaps HYCU can help!
Recent episodes of The Lantern:
Amelia Van Camp, Chief of Staff to the CEO at Mirakl (video)- teaching us what a Chief of Staff does, opportunities in e-commerce, and areas Mirakl is focused on this fall
Remen Okoruwa, Co-Founder & CEO of Propexo (video) - a fast growing proptech company with 30+ customers and hard lessons learned. Help them out with an intro to Yardi!
Jess Lynch, GP @ FoundersEdge (video) - a new Pre-Seed & Seed stage venture capital firm providing an unfair advantage to exceptional founders at the intersection of AI & UX
With J.P. Morgan’s guidance, your startup can go from growing pains – to growing without limits. With tech that powers your growth and bankers across the globe to help you disrupt every market, you can go from seed to IPO and beyond.
J.P. Morgan. Let’s Build Your Future Together.
Laura Andre, CEO at Qunett
Laura Andre is a researcher, operator, and ascendant executive who tinkers with curiosity and a methodical approach to the scientific method. Today she is the CEO of quantum research company Qunett, a startup building at the edge of what’s possible to create a quantum-connected future.
Growing up in our nation's capital, Laura’s parents worked in and around the government. Her mom was a project manager who started her own company in the government contracting space. Her dad also worked in government for the State Department. Her love for action items, contingency plans, and agendas comes from her mother's example. Like mother, like daughter - organized and efficient.
While both of her parents are talented and successful, they are non-technical. Laura pursued a slightly different path. As a kid, she liked tinkering with things. If something was broken, she would try to take it apart and fix it. Tinkering is a theme that she has carried through her life & career.
Enrolling at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, Laura studied mathematics & applied physics. Through some great internship experiences, her eyes were further opened to the magic of light-matter interactions. Then she traveled to the University of Michigan to study optics and photonics. At the University of Michigan, bigger in every way, she obtained her PhD in Electrical Engineering and served as the President of the Student Optics Society. Laura also pursued leadership training toward the end of her graduate school career and earned a certificate in entrepreneurship.
During her years of studies, she helped tutor young students in her spare time who were curious about future careers in STEM. Laura helped them learn how to tinker and stoke their curiosity. In one particular project, students from kindergarten to high school would disassemble old cameras and learn how the different subsystems worked.
Through his academic website, she found Prof. Dirk Englund, Qunett’s Founder, looking for ambitious talent to help build a quantum research startup. Qunett’s mission is to develop scalable hardware solutions for quantum device connectivity that seamlessly integrate with existing infrastructure to enable deployable quantum networks. Say what?
Yes, the market does not quite exist yet. So how do you support a company in the meantime? In the near term, Qunett will rely on revenue from early sales to researchers at universities and national labs to build a bridge to the future of quantum technology.
Laura joined the startup as a Research Engineer. She loves the hands-on technical work but also enjoys communicating & leading. Soon she was presented with the opportunity to take on an executive leadership role as Qunett’s COO. As COO, Laura helped implement proper project management best practices - better tools & processes - along with contributing to better external positioning about the work they do too.
Just seven months later, Laura was named Qunett’s CEO to lead the mighty team of five through their next phase of development. Her job as CEO is to be responsible for the company’s strategy and see all the pieces of the organization with the benefit of her previous experience. She facilitates their partnership strategy and keeps the big picture in mind to make sure all the pieces fit together. She has learned to make decisions quickly every single day. Laura admits she didn’t quite realize the scale of decision making!
From an execution standpoint, the Qunett team is focused on doing what they need to do to build out their technology. Laura is still writing code to help make that future a reality, balancing what needs to happen right away by staying in the details alongside her forward thinking tasks.
Laura and her team recently completed a month-long quantum specific bootcamp organized by Creative Destruction Lab. Through the program they learned how to better tell their story, enunciate their mission, and convey their value proposition. Best of all? They won the end of program pitch competition in a field of 33 companies!
Science Communication
In science, research is of course important. But communication is table stakes too. Trying to explain technical concepts in different ways so that they can be understood & received by general audiences is a skill Laura has worked hard to hone.
From getting feedback to asking directly what resonates, she has iterated on her storytelling of quantum technology to make sure her very technical message resonates with generalists.
For example, she describes the quantum internet by first saying, “We are trying to connect quantum devices. Quantum computers need to be enabled to talk to each other & share information in the same way that computers talk over a network like the Internet. We’re building the quantum version of that.” Obviously there’s a lot more to it! But anyone can get the quantum gist with that analogy.
Laura explained that quantum technology won’t replace the classical Internet but will instead run in parallel. Some problems are better solved by different “rails” and quantum will, in her view, upgrade Internet capabilities. Like a “three level approach”, she will uplevel the complexity of her explanations based on the interest of her subject, technical acumen, and ability to receive complexity.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Say Yes to New Opportunities - “You never know what doors will open if you say yes to new opportunities.”
Energy Management - “Managing your energy is arguably more important than time management. If you can design your schedule around activities that give you energy and fit in things that drain you in between, you can better maximize your energy to get things done.”
Don’t Avoid Uncertainty - “In grad school, I convinced myself that I would never want to work at a startup. The inherent risk in the endeavor didn’t seem to fit my personality. What I learned later is that you shouldn’t let a fear of uncertainty guide your decisions. Look at uncertainty as a challenge to be overcome rather than a threat.”
Laura aspires to build cool technology that helps people and enables a more productive world. She would love to spend her career carrying the future of quantum technology forward, building something really awesome, while also helping to make a positive impact on the people and world around her.
If you’d like to learn more about Laura, you can find her near BU’s Photonics Center working on the future of quantum research, being a tourist in her new home of Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. Excited to see all the technologies, accomplishments, and out of this world difficult problems you & your team continue to solve!
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