MGMT Boston - W11, Q4 24 - Data Dilemma in AI at Innospark / Swapt & Æthos on The Lantern
Data Dilemma in AI with Innospark / Andrew Smith, Swapt & Nemo Shi, Æthos
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 1,100+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
The Data Dilemma in AI - last week we assembled at Innospark HQ to discuss The Data Dilemma in AI heading into 2025: We’re Early / Testing Techniques / Sequencing & Risk / Startups Have Advantages / Agents are Next
Thanks to Lily Zarrella, Eon Mattis & the Innospark team for hosting us
The Lantern Last Week - Andrew Smith, Founder & CEO at Swapt / Nemo Shi, Co-Founder & Chief Strategy Officer at Æthos
HIRING: Doyen AI is an exciting “agentic” Seed stage startup led by Alex Holub and backed by leading VCs, including Google, currently building out their Boston office. Builders apply!
Full Stack Engineer with Focus on Go
Full Stack Founding Engineer
Full Stack Founding Engineer (Backend/Infra Focus)
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - a community and opportunity engine for 100+ Boston based up & coming venture backed operators
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - 2024 Companies to Watch (evolving list). 2025 coming soon!
NEW - Trusted Partners - top local partners I’ve worked with directly or would trust with my own resources
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q4 Startups Highlighted: Cyvl, Modulate, PredictAP, Clasp, Clockwork, RevenueBase
Q4 Operators Highlighted: Laura Andre / Qunett, Dana Louie / InvoiceCloud, Sarah Clarkson / Vestmark, Brian Mongeau / Caveonix, Jenelle Kelly / SmarterX
2023 1H Recap / 2023 2H Recap / 2024 Q1 Recap / 2024 Q2 Recap / 2024 Q3 Recap
The Data Dilemma in AI
Thank you to the Innospark team (especially Lily Zarrella & Eon Mattis) and our talented speakers who assembled last week to discuss The Data Dilemma in AI. Innospark invests in early stage healthcare & B2B software startups, envisioning a world where AI is ubiquitous. It was our final event of 2024 and we went out with a bang! …discussing all things AI, data, and the terabytes in between.
Look at this lineup!
Rob Lincourt - Distinguished Engineer, Dell EMC
Rob Hickey - Former Executive Vice President of Engineering, Data Robot
Gauri Agarwal - Research Assistant, MIT Media Lab
Kevin Dunnell - Ph.D Candidate, MIT Media Lab
Eon Mattis - Enterprise Investor @ Innospark
Ok, what did we learn? Here are 5 takeaways for all the readers at home racing into the holidays:
It’s Early: We are REALLY early in the AI wave. All of our panelists were focused on considerations in both the development & deployment phase because Native AI (for the most part, outside of the LLMs) has yet to be deployed at scale
Testing Techniques: Gauri & Kevin from MIT talked about the tooling & modeling techniques they are exploring to get better results from both synthetic and source data in their research. This includes understanding key considerations like causal inference. There definitely isn’t consensus there and “transformers are still the best thing we have”
Sequencing & Risk: The Rob’s (from Dell & DataRobot) talked about all of the considerations that Enterprises must take into account to adopt AI and the challenges of nailing that AI vs. human in the loop “value chain” plus the visualization considerations of seeing where success & failure outcomes occur
Startups Have Advantages: Startups have a LOT of net new opportunities helping Enterprises navigate the AI wave
Rob Lincourt made sure to call out not forgetting about “good old fashioned AI and ML” outside of the large language models. There’s a lot more to be done improving product performance and helping Enterprises navigate these new tools
Data portability is a key part of this. It’s REALLY expensive to move data so helping Enterprises navigate these expensive AI models through innovative governance and access methods is something to watch
Agents are Next: Our panelists believe “agents” or agentic solutions - think workflow software, particularly at the infrastructure level, are really interesting 2025 use cases
Infrastructure use cases make a lot of sense for agents because it’s pretty much all code. Less customer facing hallucination type problems to contend with and Enterprises are grappling with “re-platforming” their technology stacks
Kevin Dunnell, who has worked in both industry settings and has done a lot of research at MIT, made sure to highlight that “chatbots” and text prompts will not create enduring value. Native AI companies who win will need to go 2+ steps beyond
We’ll see you in 2025! Thanks Innospark!
The Lantern Last Week: Andrew Smith, Swapt & Nemo Shi, Æthos
Andrew Smith from Swapt tells us about the marketing tech startup he’s building, how he thinks about aligning talent to their mission, and his learnings from Klaviyo:
Nemo Shi tells us about Æthos, a growing community of hundreds of founders and researchers working on responsible AI together at CIC One Broadway in Cambridge:
The Lantern - a short form video series by MGMT Boston featuring the best startups (+founders), ecosystem leaders, and ferociously talented operators in Boston
W11: Jehan Hamedi, Vizit / Drew Condon, BlueTrace
W10: Madeleine Smith, Civic Roundtable / Dana Wensberg, Paperless Parts
W9: Andrew Lau, Jellyfish / Will Lehmann, Step Function Ventures
W8: Palash Soni, Goldcast / Andy Palmer, Entrepreneur & Investor / The Market is Getting Better
W7: Daniel Pelaez, Cyvl / Sean Smith, Denim
W6: Jenni Goodman, Underscore / Jason Lavender, Electives / Productize Yourself
W5: Simon Taylor, HYCU / Nathan Rosenberg & Marc Printz, Farmblox
W4: Remen Okoruwa, Propexo / Amelia Van Camp, Mirakl
W3: Alex Ewing, OneScreen / Jess Lynch, FoundersEdge / What is MGMT Boston? And Why?
W2: Aniketh Mohanty, Wayfair / Amber Nigam, Basys.ai / W2 Summary (The Agents are Coming)
W1: Trailer Launch / Markit AI / W1 Summary (Setting the Culture)
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