MGMT Boston - W10, Q1 23 - TrustCloud // Rachel McIntosh, Venture Lane
TrustCloud // Rachel McIntosh, Venture Lane
TLDR:
TrustCloud - a trust assurance B2B SaaS platform turning GRC (governance, risk & compliance) into a profit center
Rachel McIntosh, Community Manager @ Venture Lane - an empathetic community builder & operations leader who is armored by the relentless pace of her formative years
Other Resources:
Boston Tech Big Board - building out data on every Boston area venture backed software company I can find
Q1 Startups Highlighted - Jellyfish, Hi Marley, Goldcast, Paperless Parts, Moxie Apparel, PartsTech & ezCater
Q1 Operators Highlighted - Laina Crosby, Sheila Connolly, Jack McDermott, Nick Abate, Stephanie Roulic, Campbell Brofft & Sejin Mong
TrustCloud
Founders: Sravish Sridhar
Founding: 2020
Mission: Earn trust in every business relationship
Employees: 65+ & 33% Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Series A & $22M raised
Investors: OpenView, Tola Capital & various Angels
Key Customers: BitSight, Snyk, DataRobot, Desktop Metal, Notarize, Robin, Gremlin, TetraScience, Wasabi, etc.
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): $50M – $100M (assuming they sold ~20% of the company in the Q2 ‘22 $18M Series A fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
TrustCloud, f.k.a. Kintent, is a “trust assurance platform to turn GRC (governance, risk & compliance) into a profit center”. Founder Sravish Sridhar started the company in 2020 after previously starting, scaling and selling a backend as a service (BaaS) startup by the name of Kinvey to Progress in 2017. I think he wanted to convey the intent that he was ready to help reinvent the back office again. And in a much bigger way. Is that too much?
Anyway, TrustCloud helps with a really sticky problem best known to B2B businesses and most painfully known to enterprise sellers who have to keep their biggest deals of the year at Stage 4, “Sales-Pending” week after week. What I mean by that is it’s very common (almost mandatory) in the later stages of a deal process for an enterprise to take their vendors through a rigorous security & compliance review process before signing a contract to do business together. They’ll vet all vendors, startups included, across a checklist of compliance guidelines to make sure they’re doing business with companies that they can trust.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a 50 person startup. It’s December 15th. They receive a 100 question security questionnaire from Walmart. Or Nike. Or Disney. It could be any F500 company with well intentioned reasons for putting a review process in place. Now they have to pull resources together before Santa comes down the chimney across leadership, legal, finance, sales and engineering to complete this thing. It’s a really expensive use of time and resources for a revenue opportunity that..might not even come to pass. It’s a security, compliance, and revenue problem. And the year is closing on 12/31 no matter what!
In addition to the security review process described above, there are other parts of a compliance program that can be very resource-intensive for companies of all sizes: preparing for an audit (collecting evidence, evaluating policies, testing controls, etc), maintaining continuous compliance, managing a risk register, and more. TrustCloud provides a product that helps manage compliance in a way that you just can’t teach - with speed and intelligence. The company raised an $18M Series A in Q2 2022 from OpenView and Tola Capital to build out their capabilities to serve growing companies and turn GRC into a profit center. Their team grew >100% in 2022 and they expect to beat that growth rate on the revenue side in 2023 too.
They released part of their product (SOC 2 readiness) for free for <50 person organizations as part of a really cool PLG (product led growth) motion. That’s pretty awesome, especially for cash-strapped startups. As their team and revenue grows, they can convert to paying customers. It creates good business practice, trust, and some lock in too which never hurts. And props to the TrustCloud team for keeping pricing pretty transparent. Much appreciated by all software purchasers stuck on demo calls.
The TrustCloud platform democratizes access to the tools needed to prepare for and pass audits, automatically respond to security questionnaires, confidently share compliance programs and maintain a risk register. They support frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001, CMMC, HIPAA, GDPR, CCPA & ISO 9001. For the purposes of this write up I’m not going to go into each one. But from the alphabet soup alone you can infer the complexity!
Today, the product has two core services that help bring compliance and sales together to enable “revenue-generating” compliance. TrustOps helps with adherence to that alphabet of compliance frameworks described above. TrustShare helps the team pass security reviews faster using AI to fill out those questionnaires and a shareable “trust portal” to provide compliance documents & data to prospects and customers. Soon, they’ll be launching a responsive risk register and a knowledge hub where anyone interested in compliance can learn more about how it all works.
Operators to Know (Locally):
Sara Dema, Customer Success Specialist
Aaron Lumnah, Director of Demand Generation
TJ Massie, Head of Sales
Shubhang Mani, Head of Architecture
Satya K. Moutairou, Compliance Director
Kevin Neary, Head of Finance
Brian Wilson, Lead Architect
Mike Salinger, Head of Engineering
Mimi Pham, Content Marketer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the TrustCloud team I’m sure I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What software verticals are the best fit for TrustCloud? What business verticals in general? This is a horizontal SaaS startup that solves a specific business problem but is vertical agnostic (from the outside looking in)
What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 100 employees? This is growing pain territory for any startup. New tools, processes & personnel are needed to get to the next level
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 / teams that need the most help? Another variation of a growth question to see where investments are being made this year
Who are the competitors you see most often in the market? How does that affect deals & win percentage? With security & compliance such a hot button issue for enterprises, best to understand the team’s understanding of their competition & market
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about TrustCloud you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more trust and speed into getting enterprise deals across the finish line. All GTM & Engineering teams applaud your efforts, especially around the holidays. See you around the Internet!
Rachel McIntosh, Community Manager @ Venture Lane
You might not be able to tell at first glance, but Rachel McIntosh’s work ethic is forged from steel. She’s an empathetic community builder & operations leader who is armored by the relentless pace of her formative years. She knows how to create value through helping others and has the determination, drive, and intangibles to go very far. She’s already putting her mind to it.
Rachel grew up in Pennsylvania. Her hometown, Altoona, is in Central PA roughly 45 minutes outside of State College, home of Penn State’s Nittany Lions. She recalled her childhood as a pretty idyllic experience. Her elementary school was in a traditional brick schoolhouse with a bell on top and her high school building was “out of an eighties movie”.
Rachel participated in more extracurriculars than anyone I’ve ever met. She was a member of 18 (!) different clubs in high school. She played the saxophone for the marching band, jazz band, and wind ensemble. She led the Mock Trial team that won the state championship her senior year. She took AP classes. She ran track & field. Rachel was “hellbent on having an impressive college application” and she did just about everything one could do to prepare. Finally, she was ready to head off to college.
Almost. Things took an unexpected turn when Rachel realized she’d need to pay her way through school on her own. Despite having received acceptances from some incredible schools, Rachel took a gap year to save up the money needed to pay her tuition. Rachel worked two full time jobs, realizing in a profound way that “you’re not owed anything in this life.” Faced with a difficult road ahead, Rachel decided come hell or high water she was going to do what she needed to do to pay for her college education. It certainly wasn’t going to be fun but, looking back, she would do it again in a heartbeat because of the lessons she learned along the way.
Let’s detail out what a day in her life looked like during that gap year. It was grueling. She would walk into Chipotle just after sunrise at 6am to help open the restaurant and work her shift which wrapped up around 3pm. Then it was time for a break. For 30 minutes. Cracker Barrel was 15 minutes away so she would drive over, change in the bathroom, and start her new shift at 3:30pm before getting off as late as 12am. That was six days a week, sometimes seven! This was back in Chipotle’s heyday and the company was giving out a ton of overtime so Rachel would take as much as she could get. She had a singular focus and went to work, day after day, with higher education blinders on.
During this year she also participated in a humanitarian trip to Guatemala, spending several weeks with the residents of a remote village near Zacapa where she worked alongside other volunteers to build houses and a community center for the village residents. This experience was a sage reminder of the privilege she experienced back home, even if her current situation wasn’t the ideal one she’d planned.
Rachel then set off to Liberty University in Central Virginia before eventually transferring to Temple University in Philadelphia. There, she majored in International Business with a focus in European Business & concentration in Marketing. She continued to work around the clock to help support her studies. Rachel transferred to Temple University’s on-campus Chipotle and began working at Anthropologie alongside adding a data analytics internship with specialty food company TBJ gourmet. That’s three jobs plus her studies, leaving little time for anything else. She would wake up at 5am and be in by 5:30am. On her “days off” from one job she would go to one of her other jobs or attend classes. If she had classes during the day, she would work at night. And vice versa. Every “off day” for one facet of life shifted her into the other, nonstop. This was still six or seven days a week. She worked her way up to become the Assistant General Manager at Chipotle while still balancing her full time studies by graduation, where she graduated with Honors.
After departing Temple, Rachel accepted a job at Amazon in Operations Management and Supply Chain. Rachel’s responsibilities covered some 1M square feet of warehouse space, learning the inbound & outbound motions of distribution for over 4M product units. The organization & documentation fit her personality well. Amazon was a fantastic place to start a career. This was also the first time Rachel only had to work 40 hour weeks. Days off felt like a new and novel concept. Rachel didn’t know what to do! It was a huge relief but...now what?
At this point, Rachel entered a major adjustment period. There was healing to be done from years spent working in the restaurant industry (carpal tunnel is no joke!), and a lot of internal exploration after years of putting herself and her social life on the backburner. Her college years were certainly formative but not in the traditional sense with which many of us recount those times. Rachel set out to “get to know herself again”, examining what she wanted out of life and taking stock of how her experiences molded her into the person she is.
In the midst of this introspection, an opportunity presented itself. Through a friend she knew from her Philadelphia days, she was recommended for a role at Venture Lane in Boston. Venture Lane is an accelerator, co-working space, and online community helping early stage B2B startups. Rachel traveled to Boston to experience the community in-person ahead of her interview and her visit convinced her that this was a team and community she wanted to join. She’s a “see it to believe it” type of person and explains that she was welcomed with open arms despite being nervous to make the jump from corporate life to working with startups. “Life puts opportunities in your path and you’ve got to take advantage when they come!” She took the leap and moved to Boston where she serves as Venture Lane’s Community Manager today.
A self described “city person”, upon moving to Boston Rachel took the opportunity to explore the different neighborhoods throughout the city. She ended up in the West End where she could be centrally located but also still have the neighborhood feel. She knows the local bookstores like the back of her hand. She likes the Beacon Hill Bookstore on Charles Street, IAmBooks in the North End which celebrates the neighborhood’s Italian heritage, and Raven bookstore for used books. She reads a book a week these days!
Boston is a good fit for a lot of reasons. Rachel enjoys running and hopes to one day run the Boston Marathon. She’s also one of “those people” who brings a hammock out to the banks of the Charles River with her golden retriever, Finn. Believe it or not you have to get there early because those trees go fast! She’s also a big food lover and is a regular at Ma Maison on Cambridge Street. “Walking in is like a warm hug” she says with a smile. Rachel has found an incredible sense of community and kinship here in Boston. She loves living in an area where academia and innovation intersect. An ecosystem ripe with opportunity, right on the water.
She joined Venture Lane at an interesting time too. In 2022, Venture Lane worked to expand their business beyond the co-working space. They launched their first Accelerator program, Venture Lane Studio, which is currently working with its third cohort. They also continued to grow Venture Lane Connex, a 1,900+ person Slack community of B2B tech folks. Today, they have almost 55 companies working out of their co-working space too. It’s been huge growth across all axes and Rachel has learned a ton. She’s gotten comfortable with not knowing everything, being agile, and balancing the community as a whole as well as the subsets within it. From someone who didn’t have a “traditional path” to where she is now, Rachel deeply appreciates that the Venture Lane team recognized the value in bringing on someone who “didn’t fit the mold”.
Rachel wants Venture Lane to be a space where every single person feels seen & supported. She makes it a point to learn about each member of the Venture Lane space and aspires to make it a safe space to build and scale a company. Beyond Venture Lane’s own robust event schedule, Rachel maintains a consistent presence in the greater Boston tech ecosystem, making connections and fostering access to startup resources. She also meets with other ecosystem partners, forms relationships with local investors, and continues to find ways to make the Community Manager role her own. She’s passionate about representation for women and underrepresented founders and funders. She wants more ecosystem members to understand what’s equitable for themselves and their startups. Being grateful isn’t enough. So many members of the community deserve so much more. Rachel also volunteers with Startup Boston in her spare time to help bring what is being built at Venture Lane to a broader audience.
Here are three insights Rachel shared with me that have informed her work and career:
People are your most important asset: “If you invest in the people around you, they will invest in you. If you make that a priority, you will reap the benefits. It feels cliche but we have so much more work to do to put this idea into practice”. Rachel adds that it’s important to take care of yourself too!
Structure is not the enemy: Rachel finds it helpful to view the world in an organized way. “Adding structure to something that feels amorphous can be difficult but there’s merit to having something to build off of. Everyone needs a starting point”. She’s seen the benefits of having both a starting point and a framework at Venture Lane with companies and members alike helping to deliver strong results. Guardrails or guidelines can actually provide a lot of freedom.
“Failure” is sometimes the greatest lesson: There have been plenty of times where Rachel was going through a situation and thought “I failed at this”. She recalls “now when I look back those are the moments that propelled me to where I am now and taught me the importance of perseverance. That’s something I notice in other people too”. We can all relate to the process of failure. It makes the human experience what it is. What’s important is to take the learnings from both the good and the bad and incorporate them as you move forward.
Rachel is interested in continuing to explore the investment world and has loved learning while helping build Venture Lane’s accelerator - the sourcing, cohort selection, investment decisions, and beyond. As someone who deeply understands the value of a hard earned dollar, Rachel recognizes the weight of both offering and taking on an investment and looks to support cohort companies throughout this process. She’s excited about what Venture Lane is building and knows that she’ll carry these learnings with her wherever life takes her.
For more about Rachel check her out on LinkedIn, at a Venture Lane event, or in your nearest Boston-based bookstore. Thanks so much for sharing. Can’t wait to see how the Venture Lane community continues to grow with your guidance and the learnings you bring to Founders across Boston 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