MGMT Boston - W12, Q1 24 - Causal Labs // Henry Gleason, iRobot
Causal Labs // Henry Gleason, iRobot
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 840+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Causal Labs - an AI workflow automation platform for marketers, empowering teams with AI-Driven copy optimization
Thanks to Tony P. for the intro to Causal
Henry Gleason, Technical Project Manager iRobot - drawn to the physical world, building products with mass appeal to consumers who can share feedback, and allow him to view the forest without getting stuck among the trees
Thanks to Ries M. for the intro to Henry
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dana Wensberg, Senior Engineer @ Paperless Parts - 4 Pieces of Advice for the next Manufacturing SaaS Startup
Sean Smith, VP Product @ Denim - lessons from a product guy who spent time moonlighting in revenue
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front
2024 Boston Tech Big Board - updated snapshot of 2024 companies to watch. The comprehensive funding list needs work. If anyone knows an easy way to capture this holistic view (ex-biotech), reach out!
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q1 Startups Highlighted: Merlin, BlueTrace, Osmo, Boswell, Tomorrow.io, Vizit, Centaur Labs, Verve Motion, Duckbill, Circle, OneScreen
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald, Aaron Whittemore / Humatics, Lauren Viscariello / Candex, Joe Kiernan / Perch, Micah Lanier / Jump, Craig Minoff / Kasa, Dean Walsh / TiE Boston, Kelly Peters / Tomorrow.io, Annie Lindseth / Connie Health
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. Onboarding or offboarding employees this quarter? What’s your process? TSP has operated in Boston as an IT provider on behalf of startups for the past 30 years for rapidly growing companies & premier clients like the Celtics, Accel, Matrix Partners, etc.
Causal Labs
Founders: Alexander May, Jeff Palmucci, & Christina Pawlikowski
Founding: 2021
Mission: Empowering Marketers with AI-Driven Copy Optimization
Employees: 6 & 100% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4M raised
Investors: 186 Ventures, Founder Collective, Pear VC & Notable Angels from Tableau, Adobe & Flywire
Key Customers: Coming Soon
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the $4M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Causal Labs is building an AI workflow automation platform for marketers, empowering teams with AI-Driven copy optimization. Because Kyle from your marketing agency might be hungover, or is at the very least disinterested, in brainstorming another dozen copy variations for your landing pages. How much does he even really know about your business?
Causal’s Founders Alexander May, Jeff Palmucci, & Christina Pawlikowski all met at TripAdvisor. Christina had joined the personalization team as a Product leader out of grad school working with Jeff, the Head of the Machine Intelligence group, and Alex who led Engineering to build machine learning tools that helped customize the TripAdvisor customer experience.
After four years Christina departed to join web3 startup Circle, where she led Product, but she missed working with Alex & Jeff. The friends began talking about starting a company together on the eve of Covid and spent the summer of 2020 exchanging startup ideas. Social distancing of course.
The trio founded Causal Labs on the premise that machine learning teams at consumer tech companies need better tools to optimize their models - gathering good data, shipping new features, and measuring the effectiveness of performance in real time. It was an infrastructure concept and, as they began experimenting with different architecture & using LLMs for the first time, it seemed like there were a lot of ripe opportunities for leveraging these new tools at the application layer instead.
As Consumer Product people conducting customer research, they knew (and heard) how hard it was to change product pages for testing. What if the headline was different? What if we changed the copy on that button to say “View Deal”? How about tweaking the layout?
Almost 10% of a company’s revenue is spent on marketing (src). The digital advertising market is now over $60B and growing at over 15% per year (src). It’s an exciting opportunity for businesses and marketers who take advantage of new growth tools. But it’s also a lot of work to bring it all together and build a digital marketing engine that performs well.
There is a steady drumbeat of optimization needed to rack up small wins that shouldn’t necessitate Product & Engineering resources. Growth & Marketing teams, particularly those that do a lot of Paid Advertising, spend a lot of their time testing different copy concepts and patching together workflows to deliver consistent results. What if they could put that on autopilot?
Causal Labs is building AI copy optimization so marketers can focus on more important priorities like strategy, creative production & brainstorming. There are lots of “copy generators” out there but LLMs on their own don’t really generate great copy or take into account historical performance to drive testing.
Causal Bandit sits on customer landing pages and in their conversion funnel to help properly sync landing page copy to the advertisements being run. Next, the software tweaks and iterates the pages to generate alternate versions and split traffic without anyone needing to create new landing pages or integrate external tools to conduct analysis. Over time, their product automatically optimizes the landing page based on the learnings gained, generating new copy variations too.
There is some hands-on calibration time at the beginning to better understand brand guidelines, but from there it’s pretty hands off. Teams save time they might otherwise spend in meetings brainstorming “strategy” i.e. copy ideas with agencies, creating new landing pages, or matching excel sheets with internal codes so that ads, copy & landing pages all sync up.
Causal is most ideal for large search & paid social advertisers, acting as a workflow automation tool for middle & back office work that should either be outsourced or automated to let machines do the “button clicking” and copying & pasting. From a performance perspective, their product reports out on what has been tried, what’s working, and the overall conversion lift Causal delivers with additional reporting per page & per variant as needed.
Any B2C company that buys five to six figures worth of search & social ads monthly, with lead generation funnels that need to be maintained & optimized, tend to be a great fit. Really any company that leverages paid advertising as a core part of their growth strategy can leverage Causal.
Today their revenue model is a SaaS model with a flat monthly licensing fee, based on customer traffic volume. Over time they will plan to evolve pricing based on usage, conversion lift, and event based outcomes. They might even help write the copy for their ads!
The team is in the deployment phase of scaling up their customer base to dozens of customers in 2024. Causal is backed by 186 Ventures, Founder Collective, Pear VC, and notable Angels from Tableau, Adobe & Flywire winning the Emerging Tech Company of the Year at the 2023 NEVYs. They’ll be hiring for Sales Engineering & Customer Support help later this year and likely grow the Engineering team too.
Operators to Know:
Louis Calisi, Principal Software Engineer
Tony Haenn, VP of Product
Paul Meyerle, Principal Software Engineer
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Causal Labs team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
New roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
How long does it usually take to see lift from Causal Bandit based on traffic threshold(s)?
What are the biggest competitors to this AI powered workflow automation tool?
What is the long term vision for the company?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Causal Labs you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more marketers into the AI age. All understaffed and overstretched applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Henry Gleason, Technical Project Manager @ iRobot
Henry Gleason is drawn to the physical world, building products with mass appeal to consumers who can share feedback and allow him to view the forest without getting stuck among the trees. Today Henry serves as a Technical Project Manager at Boston based robotics leader iRobot.
Henry grew up in Wareham just off the Cape. He has an older brother who’s a ceramic artist, a different flavor of builder. His Mom is an architect, working at the intersection of fine arts & physical goods. And his dad is a lifelong boat salesman, a passion once discovered he never left.
In high school, Henry had a physics professor who made science interesting & fun. He had always had an interest in math & science but, because you could see & feel physics in action like watching the acceleration of a dropped object, the tangible nature drew him in.
As a long time legacy, Henry followed his four grandparents (and more) to Tufts. On campus, he studied Mechanical Engineering and in particular loved Product Design. To him it’s the tangible execution of physics, bringing design to life and making things work how you want them to in the real world.
Through engineering professor Joshua Wiesman, he found an internship at Waltham based medical device consulting firm Catapult Product Development that turned into a full time role. It was a 10-15 person company where Henry helped the team with quality, electrical, mechanical, and test engineering roles. He worked as a field technician delivering units to clients and did a TON of paperwork for their quality system. In the medical device field everything needs to be documented and cataloged, even down to the screws.
It would comfort you to know that anything (machine or part) that comes in contact with a human body is strictly regulated and has intense quality engineering requirements. Pretty understandable. Henry worked on custom products built for labs used by trained technicians, like microfluidic devices isolating white blood cells from a sample or ultrasonic drug delivery devices. A mesmerizing topic at dinner parties.
It was the niche applicability of these devices that steered Henry toward consumer product design. He wanted to work on something that would be used in mass markets, where he could solicit and incorporate feedback more broadly.
Robotics leader iRobot was hiring and Henry was lucky enough to find the role through fellow Jumbo Whitney Crooks who had helped to teach one of his Intro to Robotics classes. He’s been at the company for 5+ years, working on driving advanced technology development for their leading consumer devices across their product suite.
First, Henry worked at the company as a Test Engineer. He was assigned to test components and subsystems like the mobility system and bumper for the Brava M6, a robotic cleaning mop. A Test Lead would assign Henry tests to run to see how the system would interact in real life. Henry had to leverage creative problem solving and a strong attention to detail to run the tests, analyze the data, summarize it, and return it to the Test Lead so it could be packaged up for a wider audience and ultimately consumers. After the M6’s launch, he then pivoted to the Roomba team, working on a variety of their products.
In late 2020 Henry enrolled in a Masters Program at Tufts to study Engineering Management while at iRobot and began preparing for a move to Technical Project Manager, which in iRobot speak is a “Test Lead”. As a Test Lead, Henry was first assigned to work on the auto evac dock and standard dock for the Roomba J7+. Sitting on the core team, he listened to the mechanical & software teams design plans, how they were integrated, and helped build test plans to validate any new, unique, difficult, or different features as the product design roadmap progressed.
Throughout his time as a Test Lead he has worked across the product life cycle. Sandwiched by two new product introductions – the Roomba J7+ and Combo J9+ – he also worked in advanced development and on the Sustaining portfolio. He has worked on proof of concepts for the next generation Roombas to test ideas like “could they use one roller instead of two” or to prove out other technologies they might want to productize in the future. On the Sustaining team, Henry was charged with ensuring cost reductions and second-sourced components would remain invisible to the end user. For example, he designed bespoke test plans to ensure new plastic resins are just as functional or durable as the original, or that another vendor’s semiconductors could perform the same functions as the first component.
Today Henry works as one of the handful of Test Leads across the company. Henry continues to design test plans and delegate out work to team members in the role he had previously served. He reviews test reports, summarizes & compiles data, and reports to the management team on what is working & what needs further iterations to dial in new features. He continues to focus on the end product and on creating the best possible experience for the consumer.
Context Drives Better Results & End Speed
As a Technical Project Manager, Henry knows that communication and strategic thinking drive better test results.
He leans on individuals every day, as he was leaned on before, to deliver results and insights that can bring high performing products to market. Collaboration, subject matter expertise, and attention to detail are critical.
When Henry assigns a test to a member of his cross functional team, he aims to provide as much context as possible up front so they’re aligned on what they’re trying to get out of the given test so it doesn’t need to be repeated.
Whether trying to understand what “thresholds” a robot can cross between rooms or how sensitive a new bumper is, as the Project Manager Henry is always trying to think about the end user and what product would work *best* in a person’s home. As testers capture learnings, he aims to make sure each tester has the collective knowledge they need to conduct a good experiment that leverages prior learnings and captures new ones to drive product development forward.
As Henry describes, “you can’t just expect someone to know what you’re thinking. If you want better tests, you need to give better information.”
As a Test Lead who’s had to re-run a few tests himself, he knows that getting it right up front by providing the correct amount of detail is the key to maintaining speed of product design.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Don’t Be Afraid of Feedback - “Feedback is how you progress in your career. Give people feedback and ask for feedback. In my Masters program I learned the SBID model - be specific, identify the behavior, describe the impact, and have a discussion about it to improve.”
Know Leadership Nuance - “It takes a lot of experimentation to figure out whether being an engineer or manager is the best path for you. And there’s no right path for everyone. I moved into management because I wanted to help align people, get them moving in the right direction, and motivate them instead of performing day to day engineering work.”
Find an Exciting Industry - “The biggest difference between my first two jobs was the size of the company and the industry. I loved the first company I worked for but wasn’t as energized by developing medical device products that lived in a lab. I found out at iRobot that I much preferred developing consumer devices that make it into the mass public”
As Henry progresses in his career, he aspires to continue developing as a leader to design industry leading products for mass audiences. He likes getting into the details so that he can be a better strategic thinker who manages product launches from conception to production. He hopes to continue leveling up his competitive benchmarking, corporate strategy, and business development skills to better understand all the various aspects to build a growing business.
If you’d like to learn more about Henry you can find him in the MetroWest of Boston with his young family, creating robotics products of the future at iRobot, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see all the hardware you develop and push to production 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