MGMT Boston - W11, Q3 23 - Scroobious // HubSpot INBOUND Learnings
Scroobious // 5 HubSpot INBOUND Learnings
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 575+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Scroobious - a software platform building tools to help more underrepresented founders get funded, increasing the diversity of the startup ecosystem and helping underrepresented founders build more investable pitch materials and companies
Thanks to Allison for answering my cold outreach!
HubSpot INBOUND Learnings - Business is entertainment, AI is at the forefront, Build > Buy, Zag when others Zig, and Reese Witherspoon is awesome. One of the most ambitious public software companies serving startups & SMBs is being built right here in Boston
Thanks to HubSpot Ventures for the invitation to INBOUND
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
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
Q1 Startups & Operators Highlighted / Q2 Startups & Operators Highlighted
Scroobious
Founder: Allison Byers
Founding: 2020
Mission: Increase diversity in the startup ecosystem through scalable founder education and an algorithmic-driven investor connection platform
Employees: <10 & 50%+ Local
Workplace: Remote
Stage & Capital Raised: Pre-seed & <$5M raised
Investors: Various Angels
Key Customers & Partners: Morse, AAA, Brown Rudnick, JP Morgan, AWS, SVB, MIT, Harvard, Boston University, Babson & Northeastern
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$25M
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Scroobious is a software platform building tools to help more underrepresented founders get funded. In 2022, only ~2% of the $241B raised in venture capital investment went to female founded startups (Pitchbook). In MA, that number was 0.9%.. The numbers for underrepresented founders overall aren’t much better.
It’s hard to look at these statistics without flinching. We can do better.
In early 2020 Allison Byers’ first startup, Digital Cognition Technologies, was acquired. A medical device company translating seminal IP out of MIT, they were objectively quantifying cognitive function by applying AI to neuropsychological testing. As a founding team member involved in incorporating the company and the first employee, Allison rose to become the Co-President and Board Director, raising nearly $10M in capital. She’s no slouch, people. When she struggled to raise their Series B, they ended up selling the company. Yes, exits are rare and an incredible milestone. But they can still feel like a defeat.
What Allison came to understand as she dusted herself off and sorted through a crisis of confidence was that the system was inherently stacked against her (see the numbers cited above). As an operator and former management consultant, she didn’t feel she was equipped with the right tools as a first time fundraiser. There was a lot to learn about the world of capital allocation.
Naturally, as a researcher, she sharpened her pencil and got to work. First, she came to understand that her odds of raising capital were statistically small. Next, she completed hundreds of primary research interviews with networking platforms, founders, and angel investors. She wrote a business plan, sized her market, and validated the opportunity.
Scroobious was founded in 2020 to help increase the diversity of the startup ecosystem, helping underrepresented founders like Allison build more investable pitch materials and companies. Her team is on a mission to build an AI powered platform that connects diverse founders with investors and capital sources who actually write checks to diverse entrepreneurs, creating more representation for all.
A word about the moment. There has been a huge shift in how we collectively think about our careers. Many ambitious people are thinking about entrepreneurship or the creator economy as valid career paths. In 2022 over 5M new businesses were started in the U.S., a 53% surge since 2019 and 78% increase since 2015 (src). There are thousands of startup accelerators and an abundance of infrastructure to train entrepreneurs. However, access to funding has not grown along with the programs that educate people about how to become entrepreneurs.
Innovation has relied on venture capital funding for decades but, admittedly, these can be insular networks based on pattern & signal matching. There are billions in capital waiting to be unlocked with better infrastructure and discovery tools.
Scroobious was incorporated just before the pandemic, opting to build slowly to prioritize product development, thought leadership & brand building before scaling up. They have developed custom PiP (Pitch it Plan) software and worked with more than 600 founders during that time. 61% of their founders are female, 27% are Black, and 33% of community members can be found right here in Massachusetts.
Strategically, they’ve partnered with organizations, universities, and select partners to reflect the type of community they want to build. Their business model generates revenue from local service providers - law firms, technology companies, and financial institutions who sponsor memberships for founders. This model has organically and consistently grown in a way they didn’t expect. Incredible partners like Morse, Fidelity, J.P. Morgan, Silicon Valley Bank, AAA & Brown Rudnick have all signed on.
Angel investors are their “beachhead” market on the investor side. They recently released the first version of their investor facing platform and have already onboarded 50+ investors. The team is building a recommendation engine to power an interest based network that will make it fun and easy for investors to discover founders in whom they want to invest. Investors can also give anonymous or named feedback on company pitch materials, categorized by section (or slide), to help founders scale up more investible pitches even faster.
Behind Allison’s thought leadership and (proverbially) worn heels pounding the pavement, Scroobious is building a community where past program founders are returning to tell the next generation what fundraising, acquisitions, and other company building milestones are really like. The team has launched a brand ambassador program across startup cities nationwide to build out a local sponsorship network so the HQ team can focus on growing the investor & founder communities on the Scroobious platform.
Scroobious has 140% year over year revenue growth and onboarded hundreds of founders this year. Activism goes hand-in-hand with building Scroobious for Allison. She is Co-chair of the Boston All Raise Steering Committee, a national nonprofit, and is also working on a bill in California (SB54) that was just approved by the Senate and the House and is headed to Governor Newsom’s desk, aiming to promote fair access to capital and public disclosures that will help shine a light on the numbers behind fundraising demographics.
Operators to Know:
Lily Macomber, Community Lead
Daniel Volkovich, Head of Product
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Scroobious team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key milestones for the next step of Scroobious’ journey?
What are the biggest challenges as you continue to grow the platform?
How will you be looking to scale the team in the coming quarters?
What is the long term vision for the company?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Scroobious you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team fund more underrepresented founders. All future technology & business leaders from communities around the world applaud your efforts. See you around town!
**Still playing a tiny bit of catch up from the summer so we’ll have an up & coming operator back in this slot next week**
5 HubSpot INBOUND Learnings
Sometimes you have to play tourist in your own city. I set off to HubSpot’s INBOUND conference last week to experience what the biggest SaaS company in Boston has been working on. Here are 5 takeaways and thank you to HubSpot Ventures for the invitation!
Business is Entertainment - It wasn’t a conference, it was a damn show! Props to the HubSpot team, this company has 7,000+ employees and is now truly a global phenomenon. It’s much bigger than Boston in the best way possible. There were attendees from all over the world sipping cocktails with the sun high in the sky and grabbing swag from dozens of booths. The convention center was full and the Omni Hotel across the street was buzzing. Entertainment score.. 10/10
All about AI - The company launched ChatSpot via Dharmesh’s keynote (video here) and HubSpot’s thesis on AI is very compelling. Namely, that AI is most beneficial to smaller organizations - SMBs, startups, and scaleups - to help them sell better, market better, and service customers better. They’re building AI throughout the entire platform into an AI powered Smart CRM
Building vs. Buying - HubSpot believes that SMBs, like consumers, desire an “Apple like experience”. Or put another way, they aspire to build the majority of their solutions (Hubs) in house and make them tightly integrated (like iOS) across the platform. This strategy is differentiated relative to their Enterprise, more acquisitive focused competitors and predecessors. Is it better? We’ll see. But it’s working.
Category Creation & Zagging - Co-Founders Brian and Dharmesh sat down with Guy Raz from “How I Built This” to do a fireside chat and, after the conference, I listened to a Science of Scaling podcast episode with Brian Halligan hosted by Mark Roberge (first VP of Sales & CRO) via HubSpot’s Podcast network. HubSpot’s path from inbound marketing to marketing automation to CRM platform on the path to Smart CRM platform is all about intentionality and intuition. There was a lot of pressure to move up to Enterprise from SMB in the earlier days, for example. But they stayed committed to their thesis that the power of the Internet disproportionately benefits small businesses the most relative to large ones. AI supercharges that trend. So perhaps if you want to build a generational company, find that non-obvious insight and stick with it for 15+ years!
Dream Big - Reese Witherspoon told me (and thousands of others) that “no one will believe in your dreams as much as you do”. Thank you Reese. I love you!!
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!
Allison Byers is a legend! Kudos on this one, Matt!