MGMT Boston - W14, Q2 24 - Day.ai / Shaili Gupta, xFact
Day.ai / Shaili Gupta, xFact / Ryan @ Eppo is Hiring
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 940+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
Day.ai - an AI native CRM platform for the next generation of startups and businesses, bringing the voice of the customer into the center of growth
Thanks to Brian M. for the intro to Day.ai
Shaili Gupta, Senior Strategy Manager at xFact - a strategy leader who has multiple perspectives from sitting all around the startup table as an investor, operator & stand-in CEO, and product consulting expert
Thanks to All Raise for the intro to Shaili
(Operators Club Corner) Ryan Lucht @ Eppo - this team is looking to bring on some Boston based talent: Senior Product Manager, Marketing Experimentation &
Account Executive. Don’t let him down!
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping 60+ 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, Lightmatter, VODA.ai
Q2 Operators Highlighted: Adam Fisk / Tech Superpowers, Bryan Dsouza / Aptiv, Noah Massucci / Robin, Erica Kangas / Scroobious, Brian Moseley / Semrush, Sara de Zárraga / RapidSOS, Hannah Leary / OneScreen.ai
Day.ai
Founders: Christopher O’Donnell & Michael Pici
Founding: 2023
Mission: Reimagining CRM for the AI Age
Employees: 5 & 50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4M raised
Investors: Stage 2, Sequoia Capital, Pillar VC, Conviction, 20 Sales & Inspired Capital
Key Local 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 from MGMT Boston. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
Day.ai is building an AI native CRM platform for the next generation of startups and businesses. This team is using AI to bring the voice of the customer into the center of growing businesses, syncing conversations and contacts into a new type of first principles, insights driven CRM platform.
Founded in 2023 by a deeply experienced team led by former HubSpot executives Christopher O’Donnell & Michael Pici, the Day.ai team has lived in the CRM space for years. They’ve recognized this moment gives them a unique opportunity to create something brand new in a familiar space.
Christopher & Michael both joined HubSpot in its pre-IPO days. Christopher came to the company via the Performable acquisition - the training ground of David Cancel, Elias Torres, Andrew Bialecki & others. He helped re-write HubSpot’s entire product ahead of the HubSpot3 product launch. Michael was one of the first revenue leaders working on their emergent sales software acceleration tools and the foundational products which later became HubSpot CRM. Christopher later became HubSpot’s Chief Product Officer and Michael led new product & revenue expansion efforts as an executive here in the U.S. and Europe. Day.ai’s Founding Engineer, Erik Munson, was also an early member of the HubSpot team.
Building HubSpot into a winner was a formative experience where Christopher & Michael learned the critical skill of staying close to their customers. HubSpot had a monthly Voice of the Customer meeting to better understand “the big rocks” they needed to move to help customers succeed. The funny thing? A lot of the useful insights brought into those meetings lived outside of the core CRM - support tickets, call logs, etc.
The CRM market is massive. It’s over $75B today and expected to grow to $225B+ over the next decade (src). Historically, building a relationship management platform for your customer base sounds a lot like an engineering project. You create database objects related to primary keys. When you run a report and it doesn’t come out quite right, you’ll need to organize the underlying database in a different way. Having a good relationship with your customers is seemingly...unrelated to all of those things.
As companies grow, there’s an interesting paradox where it becomes harder to stay connected to your customers, even though staying close to your customers is what enables you to grow fast! If companies really looked at themselves in the mirror, they might find their CRM doesn't actually know very much about their customers.
Imagine a sales rep sitting down with their manager to walk through a pipeline review. Using Day.ai the rep can pull out clips like “what are my prospects most excited about?” and “what are the biggest objections?” exported into a beautiful document to have a much more impactful business conversation.
Day.ai is using AI to bring the voice of the customer into every interaction, without doing any of the hard prep work. They’re building a connected system which stays close to customers so you can focus on actionable insights to help drive your business forward. No database management skills necessary!
Christopher, Michael & team are using modern AI natural language & database tools to perform better core CRM activities…with a first principles approach in the way they were always meant to be leveraged. Their application is bringing together three distinct categories - a relationship focused Meeting Assistant, Pipeline reporting that automatically organizes CRM data, and Pages which act as a customer-centric knowledge base.
The front end sits on top of a powerful vector database to allow for better search and retrieval from large datasets. Instead of trying to shoehorn customer data into legacy relational databases, Day.ai can ingest raw conversational data and automatically format it across an infinite graph to help map conceptual relationships.
Their initial product works on Google Suite and Zoom, ideal for startups, building toward a fully integrated system that works perfectly before supporting additional platforms. As they prove out customer use cases and bring this promise to reality with early customers, they will continue to unlock access toward general availability.
After their recent public launch, they already have a significant number of companies on the platform actively using their product with a waitlist in the thousands. Their ideal customer is startup founders, small business owners, and early stage revenue leaders who don’t want to update CRM, but want access to hyper specific slices of customer data with the simple ask of a question. The goal for the rest of 2024? Build.
Christopher & Michael admire “compound” startups like Rippling who put their heads down and brought a fully packaged solution to market. They too are working on three distinct product categories and integrating them into a different, tightly bound CRM experience.
Everyone on the current team lives in or has previously lived in Boston and they hope to keep growing locally in the coming quarters! Here to support that goal!
Operators to Know:
Erik Munson, Founding Engineer
Gwendolyn Reynolds, Head of AI & Data Science
Erin Laio, Operations Lead
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Day.ai team if I missed any up & coming operators internally
Key Roles To Be Hired:
More roles coming soon!
If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:
What is the ideal target customer and how might that shift over the next 12-18 months?
What key milestones are the team organizing around? How are you making progress toward them?
What is the biggest competitive differentiator of the Day.ai offering relative to existing options?
What is the long term vision for the company?
We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Day.ai you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more GTM teams into the AI age. All pipeline & product feedback enthusiasts applaud your efforts. See you around town!
Shaili Gupta, Senior Strategy Manager @ xFact
Shaili Gupta is a strategy leader who has multiple perspectives from sitting all around the startup table as an investor, operator & stand-in CEO, and product consulting expert. Today she is a Senior Strategy Manager at xFact, helping the public sector better plan for the future.
Growing up in India alongside her two younger sisters, Shaili’s dad was a banker who moved cities & roles throughout his career. Her mom was a homemaker and artist who demonstrated you could jump into just about anything as she reinvented herself continuously.
Initially it was painful to start over after a move every few years. But moving around really shaped who Shaili is and how she works. In retrospect, it gave her the resilience and ability to deeply connect with people in any situation. Relationships are important to her as are understanding different perspectives. Being transported across India to experience different cultures, joining new communities, and making friends was hard work.
She had the most fun time in Bangalore, where she worked after graduating from university. It was the longest she’d lived anywhere until Boston. She thinks there are more parallels and similarities than differences between the two cities, even though they’re separated by a couple continents.
As an undergrad, Shaili studied Engineering and worked with data in SEO & SEM to begin her career in ad tech. She witnessed the potential of data in the growing digital world. After attending an MBA fair, she met the admissions director from Ohio State, feeling a connection for how they took care of their international students. So off she went.
What was it like to come to America for the first time as an MBA student? Well, the exchange rate was a bit of a shock. 70 rupees was…$1. Shaili spent her first week in NYC running around the center of capitalism surviving on KIND bars.
Ohio State’s Fisher School of Business was a small, fantastic program. Almost immediately she began working at Columbus based venture capital firm Ikove Capital. They focused on early stage, deep tech investing helping to commercialize emerging technologies. This role opened her eyes to the startup ecosystem for the first time. She was hooked!
From her childhood she knew how to jump into new things and move quickly, drawing energy from these early stage teams and the impact these growing companies could have on society. While at Ikove, she began working more closely with the NeuroPlay team as the founders were looking for some strategic help. They were developing brain-training technology solutions for seniors and autistic children.
NeuroPlay ended up bringing 27 year old Shaili on as their CEO. Quite the promotion! For some roles, outside perspective is very helpful and she was able to bring the power of questioning into this early stage company. She also..didn’t sleep for a couple of years while working as a CEO and full time investor!
Shaili learned to solve problems that customers actually care about. It’s easy to lose the link between “does this really matter?”, but building great products by staying close to your customers was an important early lesson. And to strive to be different, building a value proposition that far exceeds the incumbency.
When NeuroPlay needed to pivot, Shaili looked for another challenge and moved to Boston. Committed to building her network (like she has done many times!), she started advising and working as a mentor with MIT Bootcamps.
In Boston she has served as a Senior Strategy Manager at xFact, a public sector consulting firm where she is focused on technology products & digital transformation, modernizing legacy systems.
Shaili goes deep with her customers on technology & product evaluation to improve their organizations. She is in charge of leading their product based consulting practice, helping to de-risk businesses that are grappling with AI, quantum computing, and other frontier technology evaluation. She helps customers understand how to manage and evaluate tools based on their existing offerings. Shaili even helped develop a customer engagement program which has really helped customer satisfaction (CSAT) increase and drive a positive impact on their reputation.
She has done work for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts technology office to come up with a Generative AI evaluation matrix of different product offerings in the space too. Now, the local government can take a cautiously innovatie posture to evaluating and adapting these new technologies so as not to be left behind. Government is designed to be slow, but still innovative, due its large impact on the population. It can’t exactly move fast and break things.
In her spare time she enjoys salsa dancing, even attending an International Salsa Congress, where she got to dance with the world’s #2 salsa dancer. Shaili teaches us that if you put your mind to anything with the proper speed, persistence, and confidence you can learn lots of new things. It just takes a little bit of confidence.
Being Adaptable & Pivoting
Adaptability and nimbleness are key traits that have driven Shaili throughout her career. The one thing she learned early in life? The only constant is change. It’s inevitable.
Shaili has found it critically important to embrace that change and be ready to pivot when the signs are shown to you.
When she took on the CEO role at NeuroPlay, they had a great product but the problem they were trying to solve was (in retrospect) a niche market. There were signs. When they wanted to test their solution they had difficulties recruiting for clinical trials. They struggled to get the sample size they wanted to further their research. It was a sign. Even though they had done a thorough academic market analysis, in practicality there was a limited potential customer population and therefore limited momentum they were able to create.
If they had pivoted faster to leverage their solution for a larger problem space they might have been able to find more traction. Therefore, Shaili learned that finding PMF is a structure problem. First, you need to identify what you’re solving, for whom, and how will that vector of change make their lives better? When commercializing new technology it’s critical to pause and ask yourself “is this path scalable?”
If that flywheel doesn’t spin faster, and more continuously, it might be a signal to change your approach. That point was driven home when a similar startup aimed at a larger segment of the market raised a large round of fundraising by a tier one VC soon after Shaili’s departure.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Be Generally Curious - “Ask questions and don’t listen to answer. Truly be curious. Say yes to things, figure out what’s happening. Challenge yourself by being curious about everyday life and then carry those learnings with you to try new things”
Build Strong Relationships - “Build true relationships with people. Whether that’s people who can be your mentors, your peers, or even people you might mentor experiment with meeting new people to better impact your career and life”
Focus on Impact - “Make a meaningful difference in whatever you’re trying to do at work, at home, or even in society. Go and volunteer, get involved with something you’re passionate about. The growth that you get from these experiences will take you far and broaden your perspective”
Shaili wants to continue leveraging groundbreaking technology in her career to drive growth through product development and build products that are scalable. She is focused on driving positive social impact and solving problems for customers that also face the world at large.
She’s even starting a podcast with a friend of hers, where imagination meets innovation, called Boundless. Their first episode is on Space tech. Keep an eye out!
For more about Shaili you can find her mentoring early stage startups, salsa dancing or recording new episodes of her podcast by night, continuing to experience the city of Boston, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, technologies & impactful work you continue to do in the years ahead!
(Operators Club Corner) Ryan Lucht @ Eppo is Hiring!
Our very own Ryan Lucht, a Boston based growth & marketing leader and Operators Club member, is putting the word out.
Eppo is building the future of experimentation so that every company can have an entrepreneurial, customer oriented culture. Their next-gen platform allows companies to 10x their volume of AB experiments and their team is made up of veteran product builders from Airbnb, Slack, and Snowflake having raised over $19M in Seed and Series A funding backed by top-tier venture firms like Menlo VC and Amplify Partners.
They’re hiring for a couple key remote roles and he (+me!) would like them to be in Boston:
Do your thing. Spread the word!
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