MGMT Boston - W12, Q2 24 - Lightmatter / Hannah Leary, OneScreen / Tacos & Tech
Lightmatter / Hannah Leary, OneScreen / Tacos & Tech @ FC
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 935+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
Shout out to Alison Nordell, Tuck MBA student and BlueTrace (friend of the program) summer intern, for recommending the newsletter to a bunch of her classmates. Thanks Alison!
TLDR:
Lightmatter - building a photonic supercomputer company, reinventing how chips interact using optics instead of electrical transistors to power the GPU led AI revolution
Hannah Leary, Founding AE @ OneScreen - a revenue leader, technical customer practitioner, and discovery master at Boston based marketing technology startup OneScreen
(Operators Club Corner) Tacos & Tech with Founder Collective - thank you to Brent Willess for hosting the Operators Club and some other ecosystem participants for a great evening of tacos & startup discussion!
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping 50+ Boston based 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 (check out Dana’s Medium blog here)
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 - 2024 Companies to Watch
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q2 Startups Highlighted: Starburst, Neurable, Software Defined Automation, airSlate, Ayble Health, Occupier, Blink, Arcee, Lendbuzz
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious, Brian Moseley / Semrush, Sara de Zárraga / RapidSOS
Lightmatter
Founders: Darius Bunandar, Thomas Graham and Nicholas Harris
Founding: 2017
Mission: Accelerate human advancement through computing
Employees: 165 & ~35% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Series C & $450M+ raised
Investors: Fidelity, GV, Hewlett Packard, Sequoia, Spark Capital, Viking Global
Key Customers: Some of the largest chip makers & cloud service providers
Glassdoor Rating: 4.2
Valuation (estimated): $1.2B (reported as part of their Q4 ‘23 $155M Series C fundraise)
^ this is a useless number from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
It’s officially summer so this week I’m bringing you a lighter version of one of the freaking coolest technology companies building here in Boston: Lightmatter. Here are 10 things you need to know about this late stage, space age hardware company..
Lightmatter is building a photonic supercomputer company, reinventing how chips interact using optics instead of electrical transistors to power the GPU led AI revolution
Founder & CEO Nicholas Harris has over 50 patents and 80 publications to his name, joined by Chief Scientist Darius Bunandar and CFO Thomas Graham. The trio met at MIT
Major bottlenecks in AI development include hardware horsepower limitations and the electricity it takes to run the models. Lightmatter aims to use light (or photons) to better connect chips in a datacenter to help them run more efficiently and at a much larger scale
The global semiconductor sales forecast for 2024 is $611B (src) and NVIDIA is the largest player in the GPU market (I know you knew that!)
Lightmatter offers three products: Passage, Envise & Idiom
Passage is hardware that enables arrays of different chips to communicate with each other using photonics (light) instead of traditional electrical transistors and without fiber optic cable connections. This drives 5x more energy efficiency & 200x more bandwidth
Envise is a more efficient hardware server that combines photonic & transistor based systems to save power and deliver increased compute speed & performance in data centers
Idiom is a software platform that automates deployment of AI models to Lightmatter hardware & optimizes neural network performance too
Lightmatter’s flagship Passage hardware product aims to be a more transcendent traffic control officer in data centers, allowing GPUs to communicate directly with each other instead of through layers of switches
With Moore’s Law, based on transistor technology, finally slowing down (and arguably broken), a new promise of photonic computing allows for step function higher bandwidth and better environmental efficiency in semiconductor development
OpenAI’s GPT-4 was estimated to have been trained on ~20,000 NVIDIA GPUs. Lightmatter has a goal for 2026 to build Passage to enable capacity for similar models to run on 1M+ GPUs
The startup has raised $450M+ from investors like Fidelity, GV, Hewlett Packard, Sequoia, Spark Capital, and Viking Global to make their vision a reality
Boston is Lightmatter’s HQ and they have offices in Toronto and Mountain View
Operators to Know:
Jim Carr, Director of Systems Engineering
Carlos Dorta-Quiñones, Senior Staff Analog Design Engineer
Shashank Gupta, Technical Lead & Manager, Silicon Photonics
Rob Pellowski, Manager, Platform Software Engineering
Ben Madden, Senior Physical Design Engineer
Nick Moore, Libraries & Simulation Team Lead
Mihika Prabhu, Senior Photonic Design Engineer
Esha Radhakrishnani, Staff Physical Design Engineer
Ellen Schneider, Lead HR Business Partner
Joshua Zelman, DFT Architect
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Lightmatter team I know I missed many up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired (Locally):
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What are the key technology milestones that must be reached to make photonic supercomputing a reality?
What are the company & strategic goals for 2024? 2025?
Who are the best Lightmatter customers?
What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2024 // teams that need the most help?
To learn more about Lightmatter you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring us closer to AGI. All of humanity applauds your efforts. See you around town!
Hannah Leary, Founding AE @ OneScreen
Hannah Leary is a revenue leader, technical customer practitioner, and discovery master. Today she serves as the Founding AE at Boston based marketing technology startup OneScreen.ai, helping B2B and B2C companies spread their message from the digital sphere to the real world through out-of-home advertising.
Growing up north of Boston, Hannah was raised by an entrepreneurial mom who inspired her with her work ethic and dad with a long and successful career in medical device sales. If we’re all destined to become our parents, Hannah is pulling from both of their examples with a formative appreciation for the grind.
Hannah was a competitive Irish step dancer, even traveling to the old country of Ireland for competitions. Dancing taught her self confidence, stage presence, and even helped lay a foundation for professional ownership. Young Hannah was decisive, practical, and self-assured, bound for a career in business.
She attended Villanova as a Finance major with a Business Analytics minor to learn about data and analytical storytelling, serving as the President of Villanova’s School of Business Peer Advisors group in her spare time.
After undergrad she began her career at fin-tech company Eze Software, which served hedge funds and asset management companies. Hannah worked with new & existing strategic customers on implementation & project based work, fostering her ability to balance technical skills and solving customer problems.
After Eze, Hannah found a role at rapidly-growing Boston-based ecommerce startup Salsify, and Hannah joined as the fifth member of their sales engineering org. Dave Copeland took a chance on her as the most junior member of the team and she ran with it!
Salsify and Sales Engineering were both natural fits, allowing Hannah to use both sides of her brain. She was promoted twice and a President Club qualifier in 2018 & 2020. Hannah worked with prospective customers on new business evaluations, helped with upsells, and saw all of the various customer facing roles & responsibilities inside of a fast growing startup.
After years of supporting the Sales team, Hannah was ready to jump into a closing role herself. Given her deep product knowledge and years of customer-facing experience, Hannah took a different path into an Account Executive role, never having experienced the BDR path.she jumped into an Account Executive role for newly acquired Alkemics, a French startup Salsify was integrating. Working at a startup within Salsify was a little chaotic but a very cool opportunity to be the “first” AE selling the product. She’s very thankful to Salsify Founder & CEO Jason Purcell for trusting her with the responsibility.
When Alkemics’ product became part of their partnerships channel motion, Hannah moved into a traditional AE role within the core business. There, she supported hundreds of brand manufacturers and retailers through full cycle Salsify evaluation.
Over almost five transformative years at Salsify, Hannah grew a ton. Watching the Salsify team create the Product Experience Management (PXM) category for the first time in her career - was an incredible experience. PXM was launched shortly after she started and she watched their talented team educate customers and launch a strong product with great retention. Leadership was extremely thoughtful in how they thought about growing the company too.
Next, Hannah went to Vendr where she learned a ton about different software tools, what’s broken in the traditional software buying process, and met a lot of great people who helped introduce her to a Founding AE role at OneScreen.
OneScreen is a technology company that enables tech-driven out-of-home advertising planning & measurement for performance marketers. As the Founding AE, Hannah is doing anything and everything related to GTM. It’s been super exciting for her to be back in an early stage environment, learning a ton every day. She is managing pipeline, purchasing software, helping to define their ICP, working on messaging, collaborating cross-functionally, creating processes, AND carrying a full quota! She has her hands in everything, all at once.
Hannah also manages a BDR who she worked with previously at Vendr. She spends a lot of her time collaborating closely with one of OneScreen’s co-founders Chief Customer Officer Greg Wise, CEO Alex Ewing, and their media planning team.
Hannah works with net-new customers on their evaluation and initial campaign before transitioning the relationship to OneScreen’s Customer Success team. She feels most comfortable selling a solution she really believes in, knowing how customers get value from the product, and understanding the vision of the product to accompany the technical details. That gives her the confidence to go out and sell!
Deals are Closed During Discovery
Hannah took a different path to become a Founding AE, first doing account management & implementation and Sales Engineering before becoming an early stage Account Executive. Through those roles, she has seen a lot of customers march through the customer journey.
When she became an AE, she sought to tailor a specific & better approach to discovery. Her impression was that proper discovery is rarely done and is never finished throughout the sales process. Even though property discovery is critical for win rates and onboarding qualified customers who will drive better cohesion between Sales & Customer Success. It’s become a passion. In Hannah’s view, there are three levels of discovery:
The Contact - does the primary point of contact have the ability to make a decision? If not, who is and will they be a part of the buying process to better organize timelines?
The Deal - how is the buying decision being made? Who else is involved? What other approaches are being considered, why, and what steps have they taken already? How does that fit into the customer’s budget?
The Campaign - what is the customer actually looking for in terms of product performance - in OneScreen’s case: who are they looking to advertise to - cities, areas / formats (and other tactical details) and can we deliver on that promise?
Discovery is so critical to helping guide how a deal will get done, what the product does for the client, what customers are looking to achieve personally & professionally and how she can support that process as a sales person from start to finish. She has incorporated her experiences in Sales Engineering, where she had to understand how the customers would be using the product for all her demos, into her Sales process.
Hannah uses HubSpot for documentation and then Typeform questionnaires for campaign details, prioritizing a lightweight approach but continuing to refine the customer journey during these early days of growth.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Make Connections - “I’ve made some of my best friends and most important career connections through places I’ve worked. Networking and making connections can bring so many new opportunities if you commit to cultivating those relationships”
Raise Your Hand - “You have to open yourself up to different opportunities to find out what you like and what fits your professional personality. Being able to get my hands on a bunch of different things allowed me to learn how much I love building early stage startups & teams with an influence in their strategic direction.”
Celebrate Your Wins - “When I started my career I never really knew if I was doing a great job unless I got praise or direct feedback. There is a whole qualitative aspect that goes into everyone’s role (especially Sales) and its important to me to celebrate daily wins to continue helping celebrate wins around me so that our sales team knows what factors will help us win outside of the numbers”
Hannah plans to continue building her career at the intersection of strategy and execution, in roles where she can see her impact on the rest of the company. Over time she would like to continue impacting strategy, with her hands in multiple departments. One day that could mean overseeing a GTM org, or becoming a Chief Revenue Officer focused on both the numbers and strategy.
If you want to learn more about Hannah you can find her building the GTM strategy at OneScreen, planning for her upcoming wedding, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, colleagues, and customers you help better qualify in the years ahead!
Tacos & Tech with Founder Collective
Last Thursday we hosted our June MGMT Boston Operators Club monthly event in Cambridge with Founder Collective. A special thanks to Brent Willess & the Founder Collective team for welcoming us into their offices!
Founder Collective is a Seed stage venture capital firm with a mission to build the most aligned VC fund for Founders at the seed stage. They’ve backed Uber, Coupang, Cruise, WHOOP, Cruise, PillPack, the Trade Desk, and many many more led by Boston partners David Frankel & Eric Paley. It’s a very thoughtful group with a track record that speaks for itself. David was named #15 on the 2024 Midas List and Eric recently wrote an important post on building startups in 2024 - The Two Laws of Startup Physics - I highly suggest you check out.
Thanks for the support team and looking forward to doing it again soon!
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