MGMT Boston - W2, Q1 24 - BlueTrace // Aaron Whittemore, Humatics
BlueTrace // Aaron Whittemore, Humatics
Welcome to MGMT Boston where we try to help 735+ of you manage your awareness of top Boston startups and local up & coming operators putting in the work. Glad to have you here!
TLDR:
BlueTrace- B2B verticalized software to empower seafood distributors and producers, helping these underserved businesses simplify their operations and comply with increasingly complex regulations while growing their bottom line
Thanks to Matt S. for the intro to BlueTrace
Aaron Whittemore, GM, Mobility @ Humatics - a business & product leader whose career spans the public & private sector, delivering hardtech solutions that matter for customers, technologists, taxpayers, and busy consumers on the move
Thanks to Michele C. for the intro to Aaron
Other Resources:
MGMT Boston Operators Club - helping up & coming operators grow beyond their day to day
Dillon McDermott, Head of Sales @ Zowie - this one’s for the job hunters out there. A report from the front (more Operators Club Corner content coming in 2024!)
The Endeca Effect: Overview / Markets / People / Products / Conclusion / Bonus - Steve Papa Alumni Learnings
Q1 Startups Highlighted: Merlin
Q1 Operators Highlighted: Parker Lawrence / Herald
This week’s newsletter is sponsored by Tech Superpowers. They have 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.
BlueTrace
Founders: Drew Condon, Cat Ganim, Andy Kearney, Chip Terry
Founding: 2017
Mission: Simplify the Seafood Supply Chain
Employees: 10 & ~50% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $4.3M Raised
Investors: York IE, Maine Venture Fund, CEI Ventures, SeaAhead and strategic angel investors
Key Customers: Denarius Trading, Madhouse Oysters, Nonesuch Oysters, Calm Cove Oyster Company
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation (estimated): <$50M (assuming they sold ~10-20% of the company in the Q1 ‘22 $3.2M Seed fundraise)
^ this is a useless number. There is no tangible valuation until the business is sold or goes public. Don’t forget it!
BlueTrace is building software to empower seafood distributors and producers, helping these underserved businesses simplify their operations and comply with increasingly complex regulations while growing their bottom line. If they do that well, the outcome is fresher, better, and safer seafood on consumer’s plates. This Seed stage startup works closely with local shellfish farmers and seafood distributors (of all kinds) to bring them technology solutions & supply chain transparency in order to meet rising regulations and increased consumer demands. They do it all through a mobile, easy to use, automated traceability system.
In 2017, Chip Terry the “Main Founder from Maine”, was funemployed. The startup he worked at, BzzAgent, had been acquired by dunnhumby and he was starting to look for his next thing. Maybe owning an oyster farm would be cool? The aspiring gentleman farmer, he went to visit a few and realized that perhaps playing the part and acting it were two entirely different things.
In fact, it seemed like oyster farmers had some serious challenges running their day to day operations. Over the next 3 years, a nights and weekends project began to take shape. Chip recruited BzzAgent & dunnhumby colleagues Cat Ganim & Andy Kearney to develop their initial product. Drew Condon, a colleague of Cat’s, soon came onboard to complete the part time founding team.
BlueTrace’s MVP served oyster farmers (and was at the time called OysterTracker). Their tool helped owners map their farms and identify when various lines & bags of oysters needed to be handled and harvested. It was a cool product, but “not a great business” (their words, not mine!). The ultimate vitamin that everyone said they wanted but, when things got really busy on the farm, it was really tough to keep up.
The thing about Chip, Cat, Andy & Drew though is that they are deeply experienced startup builders. They dig deep into customer development and know to seek out the true pain of their customers. Through the course of developing their initial tool, they uncovered that federal regulations mandate every single shellfish bag needs to be physically tagged when harvested. This tag then travels with the bag through the lifespan of these oysters from farm to (basically) table.
Once you tag the bag, you capture the transaction in a log. Imagine being out on the water, where farmers are handwriting records on paper. Tags get smudged, ripped, & lost and the same goes for logs. No one wants to be doing this! So the BlueTrace team started automating this process through an iPhone app attached to an industrial mobile printer. Oyster farmers started using it, paying for it, and BlueTrace started accelerating.
Part of what attracted the team to this space is not just the business opportunity (which there is) but also through going to visit customers and seeing that no one really focused on solving the problems they have. These are hardworking people out on docks, scaling fish, making deliveries, doing really hard work to put food on your plate. BlueTrace started its focus on the actual factory floor and they built an iOS app for the operators receiving the fish, not only for the accountants upstairs. BlueTrace intimately understands how seafood operations physically work versus how a financial resource might want a seafood business to work.
Global seafood happens to be the most traded protein in the world. Each March in Boston, the Seafood Expo for North America comes to town and blows minds with the sheer size & scale of the industry. It’s raw capitalism in action. If you want to see some of the numbers behind the seafood industry, you can here. Spoiler alert, it’s really big. The global seafood market is >$250B and U.S. landings revenue (i.e. all fishing) represents >$5B. It’s an industry that is definitely behind on digitization and deals with tricky, rapidly depreciating assets. Distributors and providers do math in their heads, on the fly, and rely on heuristics. Not to mention the barriers to entry are high and..physically demanding.
The founding team developed an initial foothold serving 12,000 U.S. shellfish producers and, when they began building the business full time, they expanded to serve seafood distributors too. The distributors have the net benefit of being larger with the ability to spend more on technology solutions.
BlueTrace competes most consistently with spreadsheets, paper, and traditional battleship gray ERP software. The startup offers a SaaS usage based model for their software, printers, and paper based on “pay per print”. As they serve more distributors, they will likely evolve into more of a pure play SaaS offering for some customers. Deal sizes are consistently in the four to five figure range growing across their customer base as they unlock a wider segment of the underlying network of producers and distributors.
In 2023 they crossed 400 small and mid sized customers but also remain committed to selling to mom & pop producers to fulfill their mission of empowering seafood businesses of all sizes. Through this full channel approach there is the added benefit of continued exposure to more distributors as they see BlueTrace tags trafficked across the network driving further adoption. Their north star metric - prints - just crossed 3M. That’s a lot of fish! Their customer base includes all but two coastal U.S. states and most Canadian coastal provinces.
In February of 2023, BlueTrace announced $3.2 million in Seed funding led by York IE, Maine Venture Fund, and CEI Ventures. In 2024 they will be working to bring in larger deals and reboot their GTM motion after an engagement with advisory firm York IE. They recently onboarded two sales resources and will likely invest further in Engineering in 2024.
Over the coming years they aspire to build a verticalized seafood inventory management platform that serves the whole seafood lifecycle from providers (farmers) to seafood distributors to customers (restaurants). As they build a team focused on sustainability and solving the problems of a legacy industry in new ways, there will be many more products & use cases to come across this growing opportunity.
Operators to Know:
Andrew Condon, Co-Founder & Head of Design & Marketing
Sean Conroy, Software Engineer
Matt Staff, Software Engineer
Cat Ganim, Co-Founder & Head of Product
Andy Kearney, Co-Founder & CTO
Maureen Vaughan, Sales
Xavier Leroy, Sales
Kam Kim, Sales
Chip Terry, Co-Founder & CEO
My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the BlueTrace 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 BlueTrace is looking to achieve in 2024?
What are the biggest challenges as you balance serving seafood distributors and providers?
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 BlueTrace you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more seafood operators into the digital age. All seafood connoisseurs applaud your efforts. See you around the New England coastline!
Aaron Whittemore, GM, Mobility @ Humatics
Aaron Whittemore is a business & product leader whose career spans the public & private sector, delivering hardtech solutions that matter for customers, technologists, taxpayers, and busy consumers on the move. He currently serves as the General Manager of Mobility at Humatics, a software startup that leverages precise positioning to enable operational efficiencies for corporate & government clients.
Aaron grew up in the Boston area alongside a brother and a sister. His dad was a college administrator who helped ensure that his undergraduate studies were covered. Aaron’s mom worked from an early age, with an extremely strong work ethic, as a teachers aide and stressed the importance of education. Both taught him how to be kind, approachable, responsive, and most importantly a good person.
He studied Computer Engineering at Wentworth and then was granted a full scholarship to continue his studies at the University of Florida where he pursued a Masters in Electrical Engineering, working as a Teaching Assistant. After receiving his Masters’ he was ready to scratch the itch of learning how companies work.
Raytheon offered a two year rotational program to experience different business units across their various offices. He started in an Engineering role but also had “mini MBA” learning sessions every couple months where he learned about Procurement, Finance, Supply Chain, HR, and how a large corporation works.
During his first rotation, he learned what mentorship meant when a 65 year old Raytheon veteran, Thomas Soderberg, took him under his wing. Under Thomas’ guidance Aaron learned to filter what was important, the quality of the work that was needed to succeed, and how to think about using learning as a career compass to help guide him through his career and to always keep a customer first mentality.
As he moved through the leadership program, working on a small piece (circuit boards) of a huge complex system, he wanted to have a broader impact into learning how the overall system worked from an architectural perspective. Using learning as a compass, he became a Senior Product Manager over his 7+ years at Raytheon, working with leaders like Joe Sobchuk who taught him how to shield teams from failure and delegate success for the well executed output of a team’s work product.
Aaron mastered the design, building, development, and manufacturing sections of the defense product management cycle. And then it was time to look outside of the defense sector. He applied and was accepted to Harvard Business School. At HBS he interned at TripAdvisor, which does not make the Patriot missile defense system but can guide you to some cool vacation experiences, learning how a consumer software company operates.
Through one of his classes, he co-founded a startup called ONEE with Michele Choi & Allison Lyness. They built a wearable bracelet to help prevent sexual assault on campuses. The team built an app, entered pitch competitions, and sought early stage funding opportunities to experience the early stage startup launch process. As the CTO, Aaron was responsible for product development at the intersection of hardware & software.
Aaron also spent time interning for the Tampa Bay Rays in Baseball Operations to experience working in the business of sports. He helped the organization evaluate wearables & software products to gain better insight into athlete performance. As Aaron prepared to leave Harvard, he thought it could be cool and unique to do something now that he might not have the opportunity to do further down the line.
Exploring their Leadership Fellows program, which paired students with a non-profit / government entity at the highest levels of the organization, he found an opportunity with the MBTA. He jumped at the chance to get into the belly of the beast, learning the inner workings of something so important & critical to the local economy and..in need of some improvements.
Aaron partnered with General Manager Brian Shortsleeve, a fellow HBS graduate, who was appointed by the Governor to usher in some change. Aaron became an internal consultant, working cross functionally to fight different fires and help with projects across labor relations, engineering, maintenance, HR, and an overall $2B operating and $7B capital budget. He learned a ton and leveraged his engineering background to specifically help with maintenance & engineering projects and drive impact.
Signal modernization, bus facilities & depot updates, and evaluating longer term EV investments were some of the other initiatives he helped lead. But one of the challenges of working in the public sector was personnel turnover. The MBTA cycled through 3 GMs in almost 2 years and objectives shifted as leadership changed.
Aaron learned that there are multi-billion efforts like the “Green Line extension” that get plenty of press but there is just as large of a need to make the trains run on the existing infrastructure, disconnected from the budget machinations. His MBTA experience reinforced his enjoyment for work that had a visible impact on his community and the world around him. But Aaron was ready to try his hand at a growing private sector startup.
Racing toward an IPO, Toast was in their hyper growth phase. Aaron joined the team as a Hardware Product Manager, owning their POS system at restaurants. But just 6 months later, Aaron was recruited to Humatics who was bidding for a multi-million dollar contract with New York’s MTA (Metropolitan Transportation Authority).
At the MBTA, Aaron had owned the “innovation proposal policy” to solicit proposals from outside technology vendors that would help modernize the agency and came across Humatics while evaluating technologies. Humatics was building an innovative solution to provide innovative train positioning in tunnels without GPS and reached out to Aaron to learn about the transit world and eventually offered him a job. Aaron joined as their Director of Product Management to deploy their technology for the first time with a public agency.
During his 4+ years at Humatics, they have worked with blue chip partners like Siemens, the MTA, Hitachi, Thales, and identified new products that reflected tightening budgets through Covid. Aaron & the Humatics team install IoT sensors for track condition monitoring to help customers audit track infrastructure for quality as the vehicle(s) move to better understand how everything is working. Their software helps predict and prevent incidents that could lead to service disruptions through a combination of sensors and software.
Aaron has enjoyed the journey at Humatics, growing to a senior executive within the organization, maneuvering through its peaks & valleys, to build innovative sensor data into a SaaS platform in a crossover market with a really tight and incredibly smart team. They’re solving an important problem that leverages his private & public sector experience. As an operator, he’s grown by being a key member of the executive team managing their strategy from a prioritization, operations & investment perspective while wearing multiple hats in product, corporate development, marketing, and sales.
Learning As A Mechanism
Throughout his career, Aaron has used learning as a mechanism to make sure he’s on the right path. He recalls that there have been times where he senses that his learning curve has flattened or he’s had to reflect if his role is aligned with problems he wants to be solving.
One example that stands out was when he went to Toast. The company was growing rapidly and he had a really cool role helping them put better hardware products into their restaurants. But he was approached with a unique opportunity to leverage his skillset that let him draw a direct line between the impact he’d had with the MBTA and the impact he could have (and they needed) at Humatics with their upcoming work with the MTA.
Leveraging personal reflection, leaning into his expertise, and evaluating the areas he has historically been most passionate have been a helpful compass to guide him to deep, interesting problems that allow him to learn more about products, prices & markets to continue to grow in new ways.
3 Career Insights / Learnings
Cash is King - “Cash is the bloodline of a startup. You might not realize it when you raise a round, but you have to use it sparingly and know when to grow. Don’t grow too fast without a strategy to offset the operational costs because growth means more expense too!”
Alignment Up & Down - “Making sure we’re aligned on the vision of what we need to do to execute on a specific strategy together is important. Sometimes an investor set might not understand a specific market subset either so, to avoid friction that could cause headaches down the line, make sure proper expectations are being set”
Be Super Focused - “ If you can focus your energy on something specific and minimize distractions, that is critical to nail first before adding new features, exploring new markets, or expanding to new products”
As Aaron reflects on the future, he’s started to think about how he wants to be remembered by those who worked for and with him. He believes it’s about the impact he wants to have on their careers and continuing to emulate the leaders he’s had the pleasure to work alongside. One day, he aspires to lead a business as a CEO, optimizing for maximum impact, growing a company and team with a customer first mentality. Aaron also aspires to collaborate more actively with fellow Boston operators in the quarters ahead, swapping stories on learnings, challenges & failures to collectively grow together.
If you’d like to learn more about Aaron, you can find him in a subway tunnel in New York scaling the Mobility business at Humatics, using learning as a mechanism, or on LinkedIn. Thanks for sharing. We’re excited to see the teams, products, and impact you have at Humatics and startups beyond 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
Fantastic as always, Matt! Cheers and excited for MGMT in 2024!